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But after only 18 months in business, Voltaggio is saying goodbye to the comfort food spot, which shuttered its doors earlier this week in the Inner Harbor.

“It’s unfortunate, nobody ever wants to close a restaurant,” he says. “But on a business level, it just didn’t materialize the way we thought it would.”

The eatery’s location, adjacent to the aquarium in the heart of the Inner Harbor tourism district, was a trait that resonated with the former Top Chef contender on a personal level.

“When we first looked at the space, it got me thinking back to how I spent a lot of time there on weekends as I was growing up,” Voltaggio says. “That was always something we were conscious of, and it was nice to have that as a window into my childhood.”

The Inner Harbor closure comes on the heels of Voltaggio’s decision to close three other Family Meal locations in Hagerstown; Ashburn, Virginia; and Richmond, Virginia. The Family Meal flagship in Frederick—which debuted the brand’s sophisticated takes on soul-satisfying dishes like fried chicken and shrimp and grits in 2011—is still going strong.

“People really love that location, and the goal was to bring it over to other communities,” Voltaggio says. “But things change. We certainly thought it would be a mainstay in Baltimore. It just didn’t work out.”

Though the Family Meal concept has taken a significant hit, Voltaggio is focused on moving forward. Upcoming plans for the chef include unveiling a new Family Meal location at BWI this winter and opening a contemporary steakhouse with his brother Michael, also a Top Chef alum, inside the new MGM National Harbor Casino later this year.

Voltaggio says that some of his best memories of Family Meal’s short-but-sweet run include visits from the Oriole Bird during brunch and hosting fundraisers for charities like No Kid Hungry and Moveable Feast. As for his ties to Baltimore, the chef is excited to focus his energy on Aggio, his modern Italian fine-dining destination in Power Plant Live.

“I love Baltimore,” he says. “There are no plans right now, but there would be no reason why I wouldn’t open up another space in the city one day. We’re not going anywhere.”

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The result was Fork & Cork—a sold-out series of monthly dinners that brought six local chefs and sommeliers together to fuse their styles into one multi-course meal.

Now, Fork & Cork 2.0 is gearing up later this summer, with Riley and chef Chris Becker of Fleet Street, Dalton and chef Zack Mills of Wit & Wisdom, and Chris Coker and chef Bryan Voltaggio of Aggio all back on board to participate. Joining the pack this time around is La Cuchara’s chef Ben Lefenfeld and advanced sommelier Greg Schwab.

“It’s been really nice to get to know a lot of the other chefs in the area over the past two years—these guys especially,” Lefenfeld says. “We’ve all done different events under the same roof, but not necessarily where we executed a meal together. So it will be interesting to work together to come up with food that’s going to knock people’s socks off.”

Each installment will take place at one of the four restaurants and feature a collaborative five-course meal. The chef and pastry chef from the home restaurant will prepare a main course and dessert, the visiting chefs will be responsible for the additional three courses, and the sommeliers will work together to curate a list of pairings from the home restaurant’s cellar. The series kicks off with the first dinner at Aggio on August 16.

“The guest is the true winner here,” Coker says. “You really get to see all of our personalities come to life.”

The launch of Fork & Cork 2.0 comes at a particularly exciting time for Coker, who recently earned the distinction of Advanced Sommelier from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He is one of only three professionals in Baltimore to achieve such a distinction—the other two being his colleagues (and close friends) Dalton and Schwab.

Coker says that he wouldn’t have been able to succeed without the support of the tight-knit community of local sommeliers, which was pioneered by Dalton when she started a peer tasting group in 2012.

He says that the process of taking the three-day exam—which covers service, blind tasting, and theory—was intense, and that he was a bit skeptical when he was summoned to receive the results.

“It takes a village to get that pin,” he says. “Especially for the advanced exam, you want people to challenge you daily and push you forward. When I found out I passed I was totally silent. I said, ‘Can you make sure my name is really on that piece of paper?’”

On the heels of earning the prestigious distinction, Coker is excited to take a break from studying and enjoy teaming up with the other sommeliers for the upcoming events.

“We’re complete nerds when it comes to wine,” he says. “We think about it in terms of structure and flavor profile, and that’s why there will never be a bad pairing at Fork & Cork.”

Following the launch at Aggio, the next installments will take place on September 13 at La Cuchara, October 18 at Fleet Street Kitchen, and November 15 at Wit & Wisdom. Admission for each event is $115, and guests who purchase tickets for all four dinners will receive a $20 gift certificate to each restaurant.

While the Fork & Cork menus are still in the works, Lefenfeld assures that each meal will be one of a kind. He says that, aside from getting the chance to explore the other chef’s kitchens, he’s most excited to play a role in providing such a unique experience to diners.

“I’ve done brief tours of the kitchens at Wit & Wisdom and Fleet Street and they both have a lot of fun toys to play with,” he says with a laugh. “Special events like this are the ones that people should be excited about. We always over-deliver for people who indulge in this type of experience.”

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This four-course dining and drinking experience kicks off next
week on Tuesday, August 18 at Wit & Wisdom.

This series will put a twist on classic competition, in which
the sommeliers will have the extra challenge of not knowing the menu until a
day before the dinner.

While the seasonal menu is under tight wraps, the chefs are
working together to create a memorable meal. “The dishes will showcase our
restaurants and our ideas in food,” says executive chef Zack Mills of Wit &
Wisdom.

The idea for this collaborative event came from Julie Dalton,
sommelier at Wit & Wisdom and Tim Riley, sommelier at Fleet Street Kitchen.
“We want to showcase the strengths of our competitors,” says Dalton. “The fact
is, we’re all friends.”

While Wit is known for its special events, this dinner series
is particularly timely as area restaurants continue to band together to boost
morale in the wake of April’s unrest surrounding the death of Freddie Gray.

“In Baltimore, we feel like we have a lot to offer,” says Dalton,
“and sometimes its better to work as a team.”

The next part of the series will be a four-course meal hosted
at Aggio in September, followed by the final meal at Fleet Street Kitchen in
November. The price for each meal is
$99 plus tax and gratuity. “Our goal is to
make this affordable for what it is,” says Mills.

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We’ll find out when seven of Charm City’s top toques go head-to-head for Chefs Behind Bars, a cocktail competition that gets underway on Wednesday, April 22.

Beginning at 5:30 p.m., the event coincides with the opening of the spectacular harbor-view patio area at Wit & Wisdom at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore.

In addition to Wit & Wisdom’s executive chef Zack Mills, Bryan Voltaggio of Aggio and Family Meal, Tim Dyson of Dooby’s, Mike Ransom of B & O Brasserie, Cyrus Keefer (formerly of Fork & Wrench), Chris Becker of Fleet Street Kitchen, and Sergio Vitale of Aldo’s Ristorante Italiano will shake up a storm (that is, unless you like your drink stirred and not shaken).

Do chefs know how to mix drinks? “We will see how it goes,” says Mills, laughing. “We’ll try to put our culinary spin on cocktails.”

As he gets ready to develop the cocktail that can be a contender, Mills will be hard at work refining his recipe all week. “I can’t speak for the other chefs, but I’ve put together a couple of ideas that are pretty tasty,” he says. “I’m looking at it from a culinary standpoint and trying to figure out what flavors go together. I cook a good bit with alcohol, so I think I’ll be okay.”

So far, Mills’s plan is to include pork as a culinary component in his drink. “I’m thinking along the lines of a pork-infused bourbon paired with the complimentary flavors of spring rhubarb and pink peppercorn,” he reveals.

Light bites, including sliders and tuna tartare, will also be on hand for grazing.

The event is a benefit for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry Campaign, dedicated to ending childhood hunger.

Chefs Behind Bars has been held in Washington, D.C. for two years now. This will be the first event of its kind in Baltimore.

According to Share Our Strength, one in five children in the United States struggles with hunger, including 260,000 children in Maryland.

“The numbers are staggering,” says Mills. “We want to help out in any way we can.” Adds Maryland No Kid Hungry director David Sloan, “Our mantra is every kid, every meal, every day.”

Advance tickets for the event are $40 and $45 at the door.

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But Top Chef runner-up Bryan Voltaggio‘s first solo cookbook, Home, is a tome that you’ll want to refer to regularly when deciding what’s for dinner.

“I wanted to give people a window into what it’s like to be a chef and cook at home,” says Voltaggio, while sitting on a train headed to New York, as he gets ready to promote the book on the Today show this Wednesday. “I don’t want this to be a coffee-table book. I want people to reference it and to cook from it in between making reservations at my restaurants,” he adds laughing.

Unlike his for-experts-only collaboration cookbook Volt ink with younger brother, Michael, this book is for anyone who likes to cook. “I purposely kept the technique low,” says the James Beard Award finalist. “To cook with this book, you don’t need any specialized equipment or training.”

Published by Little, Brown and Company, Voltaggio’s book hits stores (and mailboxes for those who pre-ordered) today.

Between researching, refining, and writing recipes, the cookbook has been more than a year or so in the making. Now that the day is finally here, Voltaggio can’t contain his excitement.

“Yesterday I ran over to our offices and got to see the books as they were coming in,” he says. “It was pretty exciting—it felt like Christmas Day.”

Home includes comfort foods such as spaghetti and meatballs, meatloaf, and waffles and blue crabs with “beernaise” (see recipe below), as well as adaptations of recipes from Family Meal.

The married father of three is very much a family man, and though he’s not home every night to break bread with is high-school sweetheart wife, Jennifer, and their three young children, when he is at his Frederick home, he cooks many of the dishes that are featured in the book.

“This is a chef’s life wrapped up into a book,” says Voltaggio, “though my wife jokes that the book should be called Occasionally Home, because I’m not home for every meal.”

When he is at home, the peripatetic chef, who just opened his ninth restaurant, including Aggio and Family Meal in the Inner Harbor, makes cooking communal. “The kitchen,” he says, “is a place where we not only share in conversation, but work together on creating a delicious meal—I want my family to experience what I do for others at home.”

Fans of Family Meal’s signature fried chicken recipe can try their hand with Home.

“The secret is in the way we brine the chicken for 12 hours,” explains Voltaggio. “The brining process yields this delicious, juicy chicken. But it’s not a rushed recipe that your can cook in 35 minutes times. It involves some forethought and preparation. This is my life as a home cook and chef. I want to show people that this is what it’s like to plan ahead and enjoy time in the kitchen. My advice is to put other people to work and let them help you. Rely on your family as sous chefs.”

Signed copies of Home are available at Family Meal and Aggio, as well as all of Voltaggio’s restaurants.

Ever more reason to rejoice, on April 25 Voltaggio will be signing copies of the book at Camden Yards when the Orioles go up against the Boston Red Sox. “I’ll be throwing out the first pitch,” says Voltaggio.

No time like the present if you want to have breakfast for dinner tonight or try your hand at cooking like Voltaggio. This recipe, excerpted from Home, comes courtesy of Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2015 by Bryan Voltaggio

Crab waffles Chesapeake

Serves 6 To 8, Depending On The Size Of Your Waffle Iron

OUR BAY SEASONING BLEND:

• 1 dried shiitake mushroom
• 1 tablespoon / 7 grams black peppercorns
• 4 bay leaves
• 1 tablespoon / 3.5 grams coriander seeds
• 1/8 teaspoon / 1 gram yellow mustard seeds
• ½ teaspoon / 1 gram red pepper flakes
• ½ teaspoon /1 gram piment d’Espelette
• 2 teaspoons / 2.5 grams onion powder
• 21/4 teapoons / 6 grams paprika
• 2½ teaspoons / 7.5 grams celery seeds
• ½ teaspoon / 1 gram garlic powder
• 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon /
• 42 grams fine sea salt

WAFFLE BATTER:

• ½ cup / 113 grams lukewarm water
• 1 package / 8.75 grams instant yeast
• 1 tablespoon / 12 grams sugar
• 2½ cups / 375 grams all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon / 3 grams fine sea salt
• ¼ teaspoon / 1.25 grams baking soda
• 2 cups / 480 grams buttermilk
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons / 8 grams vanilla extract
• ½ cup / 113 grams unsalted butter, melted and cooled

BEER-NAISE:

• 1½ cups / 350 grams pilsner
• or ale of your choice
• ¼ cup / 55 grams malt vinegar
• 1 medium shallot, thinly sliced
• 4 sprigs tarragon
• 1 cup / 225 grams unsalted butter, sliced
• 3 large egg yolks, room temperature
• 2 teaspoons / 6 grams Our Bay
• Seasoning Blend
• ½ teaspoon / 3 grams fine sea salt
• Juice of 1 lemon

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Just before the start of dinner service on a balmy summer’s night, Bryan Voltaggio sits in a booth among the white calla lilies and stylish neutrals in the dining room at Aggio, his modern Italian restaurant in Power Plant Live! It’s a rare moment of respite for the James Beard Award-nominated chef and Top Chef runner-up. While the accomplished 38-year-old has been on a roll, opening six restaurants in six years, and still continuing to add to his culinary canon, his latest iteration—open since late June—is particularly personal.

“I’ve always looked to Baltimore as a city I grew up in, even though I’ve never lived here,” notes Voltaggio, who appeared on season six of Top Chef in 2009 and its spinoff, Top Chef Masters, in 2013. “We frequented it so much on weekends—I felt like it was part of my childhood and my life. We’d go to Little Italy and the Inner Harbor, and I used to see the Orioles at Memorial Stadium. I love Baltimore—I wanted to be in the spot that was part of where I grew up.”

And although he presides over an ever-expanding empire with establishments throughout the Mid-Atlantic (he is the executive chef and co-owner of Aggio, Lunchbox, and Range—all in D.C.—as well as Frederick’s Volt and Family Meal, which is set to open in Baltimore this year and in Ashburn, VA in 2015), the Frederick-born chef insists that his new Aggio is not just another flash-in-the-pan project. “This did not come on a whim,” says Voltaggio, who commutes almost daily from his home in Frederick. “I want to be a part of the fabric of Baltimore. I’m not Guy Fieri opening up at Horseshoe [Casino]. I’m going to be here. I’m going to cook here. I want people to understand that this is not an aside—this is who I am.”

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Staying true to himself has always worked well for Voltaggio. In fact, it was key to his Top Chef success five years ago, when he went from obscurity to celebrity-chef fame. Though the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) graduate didn’t take top toque on the cooking competition (he famously lost to his younger brother, Michael), the look-alike siblings were the clear stars of the show. Yes, Voltaggio’s boyish good looks, baby-blue eyes, and ability to show ’em the old razzle dazzle while cooking for the cameras helped lead to Emmy gold (Top Chef took a statue for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program that year), but he had something even more rare in the anything-but-authentic universe of reality TV: real talent.

“I didn’t go on TV to be a TV personality. . . . I went on to cook. I was a cook before I went on the show, and I’m a cook now.”

“What you saw on the show was very much who he is,” says Voltaggio’s wife, Jennifer. “He keeps his head down, and he’s very serious about what he does. He thinks about it all day long, every day.”

Voltaggio is driven, though fame isn’t something he seeks. “I didn’t go on TV to be a TV personality,” he says. “And I didn’t get involved in the drama—I went on to cook. I was a cook before I went on the show, and I’m a cook now.” (Still, with more than 235,000 followers on Twitter and almost 14,000 followers on Instagram, there’s no question that the Top Chef has an army of admirers.)

While he’s a talented chef, Voltaggio—who met his wife, Jennifer, in a Frederick high-school cafeteria—is, first and foremost, a devoted family man whose face lights up when he talks about his brood—Thacher, 7; Piper, 3; and Ever, 1. (He also has the ink to prove it: Thacher’s and Piper’s names, along with their corresponding Chinese zodiac animals, are tattooed on his forearms to commemorate their births.) “I try to create a balance between work and play,” explains Voltaggio, who lets loose at the skateboard park with Thacher on Sundays, his sole down day in an otherwise punishing 60-plus-hour work week. “My family sometimes saves me from overdoing it.”

Bryan Voltaggio and his wife Jennifer at Frederick's Big White Barn Produce, where Voltage sources local ingridients.

Old high-school buddies also keep him grounded. “My high-school friends could give a shit about the fact that I was on TV,” says Voltaggio. “They will still tell stories and embarrass the hell out of me, sometimes even in my restaurants, about the time I did this or the time I did that.”

Voltaggio’s own childhood, with parents who divorced by the time he was seven, set the stage for what was to come. He once had hopes of getting a soccer scholarship to University of Maryland, but repeated ankle injuries dashed his dreams. And without the promise of scholarship money, college was not in the cards. With no other obvious options, he entered a vocational program for culinary arts in his junior year.

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At the same time, Voltaggio’s dad, John, a Maryland state trooper who moonlighted as a security guard at the Holiday Inn in the Francis Scott Key Mall, helped his son land a busboy position. “I wasn’t necessarily thinking of cooking as a profession, but I asked the chef, ‘If I get through this program, will you let me cook?,’ because what he was doing was much cooler than busing tables,” recounts Voltaggio, who eventually worked his way up to sous chef, holding down a full-time job six days a week after graduating from high school. For Voltaggio, the kitchen provided the stability and structure he didn’t have at home, as he bounced between his parents’ separate residences. “The chef made me do my homework every night before I got on the line,” he remembers. “At a young age, I learned about running a restaurant.”

After meeting Jennifer, and wooing her with his chicken Chesapeake (chicken with crabmeat, asparagus, and béchamel), he started to think more seriously about the perks of the profession. “I started learning that food was more powerful than just getting a paycheck,” says Voltaggio, smiling. “It could actually lure women. And that’s when I started paying attention to this as being a career.” (Ironically, it was Jennifer who first cooked for him. “He would sit with me at lunch, and I would always give him a half of my sandwich because he never packed one,” recalls Jennifer.)

His mother, Sharon, who cooked simple, homemade fare, was also an early influence. “My mom always made sure we sat down to something prepared,” says Voltaggio. “We had pizza night just like any other American family, but mostly it was from-scratch cooking, and that was instilled in me and shaped my love and passion for food.”

“I KNOW WHOSE PLAYGROUND I’VE STEPPED INTO. . . . STILL, I FEEL LIKE I BELONG HERE, TOO.”

By 1997, at the age of 20, Voltaggio wanted to hone his kitchen skills further. He applied—and was admitted—to the prestigious CIA. With Jennifer’s support, weekend kitchen jobs, and a bank loan, he was able to scrape by and attend. “Jennifer, who was just my girlfriend then, co-signed on a loan,” recalls Voltaggio. “Her parents were really angry.”

His time at the Holiday Inn more than prepared him. At the outset, Voltaggio set himself apart in the culinary classrooms of the storied school. “I was far ahead of the pack,” he says. “In a knife skills class, I had to sit there and chop parsley all day—it was a joke. I was like, ‘Can I just skip this class and get a refund?’ But when they said, ‘No,’ I was like, ‘Fine. If I’m going to be here, I’ll be the best I can be.’”

Toward the end of his second year, Voltaggio interned (or “externed” as it’s known at the CIA) at Aureole, Charlie Palmer’s much-decorated, contemporary New York kitchen. Though Voltaggio had been living about an hour outside of New York City on the CIA’s Hyde Park campus, going into the heart of the Big Apple was another story. “I was a Frederick cow-town boy going to visit the big city,” he recalls. “I thought I was going to cross the bridge and there were going to be burning barrels and I’d get shot or something. The first time I drove across the Queensboro Bridge, I was really nervous.”

Even so, he soared. With his ironclad work ethic, Voltaggio parlayed his internship into a plum job after graduating in 1999. While at Aureole, Voltaggio started to develop his concept about the importance of local sourcing and cooking with the freshest and finest available ingredients. “It’s where I was introduced to the idea of honing in on local products,” he says. “Charlie was a partner in a farm called Egg Farm Dairy and they made their own cheese. I spent a few days there and learned to make cheese. It made me think about what it really meant to cook—it wasn’t just about cooking a great dish, but working with ingredients. I learned you have to pay attention to the materials to make something that’s great.”

Also at Aureole, he learned how to succeed in the fickle restaurant business. “I remember Charlie picking up a mop and mopping his own floor,” recalls Voltaggio, who says the memory sticks with him still. “There were no celebrity chefs back then, but those of us in the industry were like, ‘This is the man. And the man is mopping the floor?’ It made me realize that, as a business owner, he cared about every aspect of the restaurant. I do the same thing in my restaurants. I don’t ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t.”

ABOVE: work in progress—bryan voltaggio makes and prepares the squid-ink pasta for his tonnarelli nero dish with maryland blue crab, jalapeÑo, uni, pepperone, and old bay-style seasonings.

That sense of humility plays out at Aggio as well. “Bryan is very hands-on,” says Aggio’s chef de cuisine, Dan Izzo. “He’s very involved in every aspect of this place and he has a full understanding of what happens inside the kitchen, which makes us better chefs—there’s nothing he doesn’t do here.”

By 2007, Voltaggio, then an executive chef at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C., began thinking about opening his own restaurant in Frederick. Coincidentally, he got a cold call from his now-business partner, Hilda Staples. Staples was also a Frederick-area resident with an interest in opening a place in her hometown. “She wanted to open a champagne bar that served paninis,” says Voltaggio, laughing at the memory. “I was not going to leave Charlie Palmer to open a champagne bar.” But the young chef was open to the idea of having Staples help him realize a concept he had hatched while still a student at the CIA. “For a class project, I had to come up with a restaurant concept,” he says, “and I based the idea on a brownstone in downtown Frederick. It was very progressive American cooking, basically identical to what I opened 10 years later with Volt.”

When Volt opened in July 2008, it was hailed by The Washington Post as “one of the most interesting restaurants in the state,” but the high-end dining establishment with a pricey prix-fixe menu got off to a rough start as the economy slid into a recession.

Then, about seven months after opening Volt, Top Chef came calling. “I told Michael that I wouldn’t do Top Chef without him,” he says of his younger brother, who owns the trendy Ink in Los Angeles. “And he said he wouldn’t do it without me. In the end, we decided to do it.”

In addition to his concerns about leaving his fledgling business for six weeks, he worried about leaving Jennifer and Thacher, who was 18 months old at the time. “I had worked my entire life to open this restaurant,” says Voltaggio, knowing that even if Top Chef co-host Padma Lakshmi told him to “pack his knives and go home” after the first week, he couldn’t really go home until the season wrapped. “We had no cell phones. No Internet. No newspapers. They even filmed our phone calls to make sure we weren’t getting recipes or telling people whether or not we had been kicked off. People who are incarcerated probably get more time talking to the outside world than on Top Chef.”

The gamble paid off. After the show wrapped, Volt became a fine-dining destination and Voltaggio was an instant culinary darling, nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award for Mid-Atlantic Best Chef in 2010 and named Chef of the Year, both by the Washington D.C.-based non-profit Share Our Strength (for which he has helped raised many thousands of dollars, in a fight to end child hunger in America) and the Restaurant Association of Maryland. Some fans were so ardent, they even ascribed him with a higher power. While dining at Volt, one patron asked Voltaggio to bless her unborn child. “I was certainly taken aback,” he says, smiling at the memory. “The entire [cook’s] line was covering their mouths to keep from laughing. I was like, ‘Absolutely, of course.’ I guess she wanted her child to be a chef.”

Voltaggio’s mentor, Charlie Palmer, says he’s not at all surprised by his protégé’s success. “Bryan was similar to a lot of young people who come out of the CIA,” he says. “He was really inspired and passionate about what he was doing and really believed in what he was doing as a career. Bryan epitomized that drive and ambition and was always soaking up knowledge. He was one of those guys who never stopped asking questions and was always trying to be the best.”

Despite the hosannas, the driven chef has never been one to rest on his laurels. “Restaurants are tough businesses,” he says. “Their margins are small, and, to grow a business, there’s only so may diners you can have in any one single location. I’m not opening eight Volts.”

With Aggio, the chef wanted to create a restaurant concept distinctly different from Volt. “I fell in love with the idea of doing Italian food,” he says—and he channeled Palmer with his progressive, unexpected combinations on a plate. “I love the simplicity of the cuisine, even though it’s very complex in some realms.”

Aggio’s modern sans serif menu is a brilliant, deceptively simple, riff on classic Italian fare, and also draws on local ingredients. A kale and collards Caesar salad employs oysters instead of anchovies; a pasta dish is comprised of Maryland blue crab, jalapeño, pepperoni bread crumbs, and squid ink tonnarelli, and a house version of Old Bay. “We’re trying to take inspiration from classic dishes and represent them using ideas from the Mid-Atlantic,” he explains. “You’ve got approachable Italian food, but with a little bit of the whimsy that you get out at Volt—it’s the best of both worlds.”

While Voltaggio is eager to make his mark on Baltimore’s culinary landscape, he admires those who’ve transformed Charm City into a foodie’s paradise. “I know whose playground I’ve stepped into,” he says. “This area is very much Cindy Wolf and Tony Foreman—they established themselves a long time ago in Baltimore and they are iconic to Baltimore cuisine—and [Voltaggio’s friend] Spike Gjerde [who] is a leader in celebrating not only Mid-Atlantic cuisine, but what it means to dine in Baltimore. Still, I feel like I belong here, too.”

And though he’s been invited to open restaurants in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other far-flung spots, his heart remains close to his rural Frederick roots. “I’ve got a little bit of country in me,” says Voltaggio, laughing. “I hunt. I fish. I have a truck. I love driving on two-lane roads to nowhere, and I have an American-made pickup truck. . . . I guess you could say I’m a country song without the dog.”

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Family Meal is slated for opening in mid- to late-December of this year. 

Voltaggio already owns a Family Meal in Frederick and is busy opening additional restaurants in Richmond, VA, and Ashland, VA, but the Baltimore location will be the first to open of the three.

“I had no idea it would happen this fast,” says Voltaggio, who also opened Aggio in Power Plant Live! this summer. “I had spoken with the Cordish Company about new opportunities in Baltimore, but I didn’t know that waterfront property would become available—it happened so fast. The location is fantastic. It’s boot on the ground right now—we are doing construction as we speak.”

While the menu will likely feature some of the spots greatest hits, including a knockout fried chicken dish and three-cheese macaroni and cheese, the menu will also feature some comfort foods specific to Baltimore.

“I’m probably going to add a killer crab-cake sandwich,” says Voltaggio. “As I develop the menu, I’m going to look at the history of Baltimore and include dishes such as stews and braises, and also develop a recipe for a good Maryland crab soup.” 

For all things Voltaggio, check out our profile in the November issue of Baltimore.

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On Thursday night, we caught up with the chef for an upcoming exclusive profile in the November issue of the magazine.

Suffice it to say, the new space (in the former spot occupied by Tatu) is a study in neutral tones and modern décor—a perfect compliment to Voltaggio’s modern interpretation on Italian cuisine.

Much of the menu reflects Chesapeake Bay influences.

If it’s on the menu (which will change with what’s in season), don’t miss the squid-ink pasta with pepperoni breadcrumbs and blue crab and the charred octopus with hazelnuts and smoked raisins.

The James Beard-nominated chef (and Frederick native) is down-to-earth (he greeted the diners at every table), a real family man (gotta love that he married his high-school sweetheart), and is excited about making his mark in Baltimore.

We’ll tell more in the months to come. 

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Expectations run high for the Top Chef contestant (and Culinary Institute grad) as he opens his first venue in Charm City.

At Aggio, diners can expect the same sort of high-end Italian fare as its same-named Washington, D.C. counterpart.

The Frederick County native is also the owner of the highly acclaimed Volt, Family Meal, Range, and Lunchbox.

Fingers crossed that he’s keeping the prawns with buckwheat polenta in fra diavolo sauce on the menu. 

More details to come once we’ve had a chance to check in with this top toque.

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“It’s one I never want to replicate,” said Bryan, who
also operates Family Meal in Frederick and Range and Aggio in D.C. “It
started all the stuff for us, our core values. There can only be one.”

Instead, he thought Aggio, which he opened February 14 inside Range, would be a good fit for Baltimore with its locavore Italian-Mediterranean menu.

“There
are a lot of fantastic people doing cooking in Baltimore,” he said.
“There’s Woodberry Kitchen. Spike [Gjerde, chef/owner] is a good friend.
There’s Little Italy. There’s a lot of rich culinary culture there.”

Aggio—“the
only time I’ve done a second concept,” Bryan said— is scheduled to open
in mid- to late spring in the space now occupied by Tatu Asian
restaurant in Power Plant Live. Tatu will relocate to another spot in
the entertainment complex, according to news reports.

Bryan
settled on Power Plant Live because of a connection to the waterfront
neighborhood. “Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the Harbor area,” he
said. He noted that Power Plant Live is a draw for residents and
tourists alike with valet parking and easy access to I-95.

He also
pointed out that Aggio will be tucked away at 614 Water Street, not
located in the midst of Power Plant Live’s rollicking nightlife scene.

The
menu will be similar to the one at the D.C. Aggio, where offerings
include meatballs and pasta ($17), prawns with polenta ($29),
sweetbreads with gnocchi ($29), and a six-course tasting menu for $95.

The price points will be similar in Baltimore, Bryan said. A chef de cuisine to head the kitchen has not been named yet.

You can meet Bryan at Emporiyum in Fells Point on April 26 and 27, where he’ll be participating in the food festival.

“It’s
a natural fit with the restaurant coming to Baltimore in the spring,”
he said. “I wanted to start participating more in Baltimore.”

—Pasta photo courtesy of Range’s Facebook page

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