From fattoush to falafel the Middle East has given us many culinary delights. The newest fare to come from the region is Dubai chocolate, a stuffed chocolate bar comprised of pistachio cream, tahini, and delicate shredded phyllo (also called knafeh), encased in a crispy chocolate shell.

In Baltimore, there are many riffs on the over-the-top confection, whether melted onto waffles at Little Italy’s Crave or tucked into crepes at Greektown’s Ruya.

“Within the span of a few years, we’ve seen it pop up everywhere from Starbucks to Baskin-Robbins and Harris Teeter,” says Markie Britton, co-founder of Federal Hill’s Ammoora. “It seems like it’s everywhere.”

And that includes Ammoora, where the Dubai Chocolate Crunch Bar has become a best-seller.

When Ammoora was looking to add to its sweets lineup, the pastry team was inspired by the Dubai dessert first created by Sarah Hamouda.

“Of course, Dubai does everything bigger and better,” says Britton. “Like many people, we loved her take on it.”

Hamouda herself was inspired by a childhood memory of knafeh soaked in syrup and topped with sweet cheese. She called her confection “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” and started selling her luxury candy through her online store, FIX Dessert in Dubai. The bar went viral in 2023 with a TikTok video that’s been viewed more than 140 million times.

Ammoora’s Crunch Bar (toasted knafeh, pistachio-tahini butter, white chocolate ganache-like crémeux, caramel espresso, chocolate ganache, crushed pistachios) is in keeping with the restaurant’s Syrian fare.

“All the things used in the bar, including pistachios, tahini, and knafeh, are staples in a Syrian or Arabic kitchen,” says Britton.

Of all the ingredients, the knafeh is of particular note. “Knafeh is traditional in Syrian desserts,” says Britton. “Guests are always asking if we serve it, but the nostalgia of it is something that you wouldn’t compete with—everyone has their own favorite homemade version, but you just can’t win against somebody’s grandmother. When we learned about the Dubai chocolate trend, we jumped on that and came up with our own take instead.”

From the Playboy bunny wallpaper at Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles in Fells Point to the dog-themed WC at The Milton Inn in Sparks, the fairest bathrooms in the land can be found all over Baltimore.

No longer just a utilitarian rest stop, bathrooms have become a bold statement and an extension of brand identity (not to mention the perfect background for that all-important selfie). These days, bathrooms delight patrons as much as the food.

One of the most luxury loos around is at Ammoora on Key Highway. “The design of the bathrooms was very important to us,” says Ammoora co-founder Markie Britton. “We wanted the whole space to feel like a beautiful Levantine home that’s warm, elegant, and filled with intention—and we wanted everything to reflect that. At a lot of high-end restaurants, part of the experience is the bathrooms—it shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought.”

Beginning with the crimson-hued hallway, dim lighting, and canopy of plants swinging from the ceiling as you approach them, Ammoora’s bathrooms make quite the impression.

“We wanted that hallway to feel separate and private. I know part of the reason we thought so much about bathrooms is we’ve traveled overseas where a lot of time you’re wandering around trying to find a restroom the size of a coat closet and wondering if you’re supposed to even be there. We didn’t want that to be the case but we also didn’t want them so blatantly standing out that they were in the way,” says Britton, noting that the prior tenant’s bathroom and open kitchen shared a hallway.

These bathroom interiors include tasteful touches such as gold hardware and hand-painted basins imported from England that float against a bronzed full-length glass mirror sourced in Italy. Each of the four bathrooms features a Syrian tray stand with mother-of-pearl inlay to hold towels for drying hands, plus a wall of stunning mosaic tile that’s reflected in the mirror.

“A lot of folks feel like the restaurant transports them somewhere,” says Britton. “That extends over to the restroom, as well. We have so many guests who tell their friends that even if they don’t need to go, they should stop in to see the restroom. It’s all part of the experience.”

Deep inside the recesses of Magdalena, pastry chef Emily Heleba stands at the restaurant’s kitchen counter pouring chocolate glaze over disks of frozen chocolate mousse. Once enrobed, the desserts, which sit atop layers of crispy cocoa dacquoise, will be decorated with filaments of gold leaf before they’re served to diners at the fine-dining restaurant at the heart of The Ivy Hotel, a circa-1890s Mt. Vernon mansion.

A Molteni stove—a black-enameled, brass-fitted behemoth made in France to Magdalena’s specifications—fills the center of the kitchen, a vat of stock bubbling away on a corner burner. Across from that stove, Heleba has an entire station at her disposal, as well as a designated refrigerator. That set-up is unusual in today’s restaurant kitchens, many of which don’t have a pastry chef, much less a dedicated pastry station.

A pastry chef, or pâtissier, is an integral part of a classic French kitchen brigade, responsible for all desserts as well as breads and baked goods, plus many batters, fillings, and doughs. But increasingly, due to financial constraints, restaurants have done away with many traditional kitchen positions, consolidating them or outsourcing the work.

When money is tight, the pastry chef is often the first to go, as it is a labor-intensive position that doesn’t bring in a lot of money (people often skip desserts). And high-quality desserts can be purchased from bakeries or private kitchens, as can breads and sweets. These days, pastry chefs are often as much of a luxury as the desserts themselves.

THESE DAYS, PASTRY CHEFS ARE OFTEN AS MUCH OF A LUXURY AS THE DESSERTS THEMSELVES.

The restaurants that can afford pastry chefs tend to be those that use them for more than just the desserts of one kitchen. That includes corporate restaurants that have one pastry chef who bakes desserts for a few restaurants out of one central kitchen or larger restaurants that have private dining rooms for events, such as weddings, birthday parties, and business meetings.

And then there are hotel restaurants like Magdalena, where the pastry chef is also responsible for events such as tea service and hotel breakfasts and gatherings.

“I feel very lucky to have found a place that wants a pastry chef,” says Heleba as she slices strawberries and adds them to profiteroles filled with diplomat cream (a mixture of pastry cream and whipped cream), which will join bite-size scones and tiny tea sandwiches presented on a two-tiered tea tray.

“When I was doing my job search out of school, pretty much every job listing was line cook, line cook,” she says. A graduate of Johnson & Wales, a preeminent culinary school in Rhode Island, she grew up in Ellicott City. “A lot of my chefs at school were very clear that it was going to be a struggle for us to find places where we’re needed and that we would most likely have to pick up savory skills as well along the way.”

At Magdalena, she’s part of an eight-member kitchen staff who serve the 65-seat restaurant, as well as doing events, serving high tea to hotel guests in the well-appointed (hand-painted walls, stained glass windows) lounge on the hotel’s second floor, and, as of this spring, outside diners as well.

Many of the teachers at Johnson & Wales, Heleba says, advised looking at hotels for work. “You’re doing bread, you’re doing desserts, you’re doing breakfast in some cases. There’s a need.”

But that advice applied mainly to big chain hotels like the Four Seasons, so she’s especially grateful to have found a position at a boutique hotel, where she can be part of a small kitchen and do more personalized work. “I feel like it’s so much more meaningful,” says Heleba.

Gunther & Co. in Brewers Hill doesn’t have a hotel to help finance the restaurant’s pastry program, but it does have private dining rooms as well as a huge main dining room in the space, the century-old boiler room of the Gunther Brewing Company.

Longtime pastry chef Jessica Banner has been at Gunther for seven and a half of the nine years it’s been operating, and her pastry program encompasses not only desserts, but breads—including the popular Parker House rolls—and hamburger buns, as well as much of the weekend brunch menu and integral parts of the event menus that fuel Gunther’s engines.

“I like the combination of science and comfort,” says Banner, who credits her grandmother, who worked as a dairy farmer in England, as part of the reason she felt drawn to pastry. A musical theater major in college, she went to the French Culinary Institute and trained in restaurants, including Wylie Dufresne’s legendary wd-50 in New York City.

Like Heleba, Banner feels lucky to have found her current position. When her last job ended after the restaurant closed, “I was like, ‘Oh gosh, what’s next?’” she says. “Because there are so few places that employ just a pastry chef.”

In Gunther’s large open kitchen, Banner whips meringue in a lime-green KitchenAid, then pipes it onto a sheet pan lined with parchment paper for the Pavlovas she’ll serve that evening—gorgeous architectural desserts built of meringue, passion fruit coulis, coconut-milk cream, and roasted pineapple compote, crowned with golden disks of dehydrated pineapple.

“You’ll have small restaurants that don’t want to employ pastry chefs,” she continues. “They put some cook on the team in charge of, like crème brûlée or a chocolate thing and call it a day. Sure, you can make that work. But [dessert] is so important, it’s what you remember; you can really round out people’s experiences.”

Banner’s point underscores the difficulty of consolidating desserts and baking into the job of a restaurant staff without a pastry chef.

“They’re really two different animals, right? To be a chef and to be a pastry chef,” she says. “I don’t pretend for a minute that I can hop behind that line and break out the things that those people do. It’s really a science. You need the space and you need the hours.”

Pastry programs not only require specifically trained pastry cooks, but they also require, as Banner points out, space and time. Pastry chefs need prep time and oven space for baked goods, which is often at odds with what happens in the rest of the kitchen. Working with chocolate and other dessert ingredients can require cooler temperatures—the reason why bakeries often have specific colder rooms and marble countertops—while ovens need higher heat or convection settings for breads and pastries. Flour can migrate, which can be a concern for gluten-free guests.

And then there is the cost—not only of the pastry chef’s salary, but of ingredients like chocolate, butter, and eggs, not to mention gold leaf and high-quality fruit.

“IF YOU WANT TO BE A TOP RESTAURANT, YOU NEED HOMEMADE DESSERTS, YOU NEED A PASTRY CHEF.”

“The art of pastry is dying,” says Gunther co-owner Nancy Hart Trice, a former chef herself. She says when she moved back to Baltimore 20 years ago, many restaurants weren’t able to afford to keep pastry chefs. This has only gotten worse with the pandemic and inflation. “It was very important to Jerry [Trice, her husband and co-owner] and me that we figure out how to make it work, like making the bread and ice cream. We wanted everything to be from scratch, like having a brunch program that has homemade doughnuts. I think people can taste that,” Trice continues. “If you want to be a top restaurant, you need homemade desserts, you need a pastry chef.”

Spike Gjerde, the only Baltimore chef to have won the James Beard Foundation’s award for Best Chef Mid-Atlantic, has always had a designated pastry chef at Woodberry Tavern, where he’s both chef and owner. Gjerde, in fact, started his career as a pastry chef; his first job was at Baltimore’s Pâtisserie Poupon.

“Pastry was always part of our mix,” says Gjerde. “For me, it wasn’t a question of whether we should have a pastry chef. Where it really makes sense for me, is if you have baking kind of baked into the kitchen approach.”

For Gjerde’s pastry chefs, this is feasible because they also bake for Artifact, the coffee shop down the road from Woodberry, which has a stellar menu that includes English muffins and biscuits as well as an elaborate breakfast and lunch menu. The pastry team contributes to Woodberry’s events, and is an integral part of the restaurant’s menu, not only for the desserts, like a spectacular baked Alaska (ginger cake, apricot ice cream, flamed at table), and a popular brunch, but elements of the savory side like the smoked oyster pie.

“I think that has a lot to do with me coming up in the pastry kitchen,” says Gjerde. “It’s definitely the scale that helps. If it was just one [restaurant], it would be a real stretch to have a pastry chef. What it comes down to with pastry is that it’s skilled labor that’s costly, as it should be, and so it’s hard to make it work.”

Getting creative is part of the program. At Foraged in Station North, that creativity is on display with pastry chef Josi Stewart’s desserts, but also with her hours: To go full-time, she also works the front of the house. Stewart, who is self-taught, bakes the bread as well as making desserts to pair with chef Chris Amendola’s seasonal menu, but she knew from the start that the restaurant wasn’t big enough to justify a full time pastry chef. She’d worked front-of-house before, though, and enjoys that aspect of the job, which allows her to speak with guests—some- times even about her desserts.

“Getting that one-on-one contact with the guests when they’re actually having the [dessert] is huge. A lot of people want to talk about it.”

Foraged makes its own ice creams and also has a prix-fixe menu that always includes a dessert, as well as a cocktail menu that can include small dessert items, like pairing prosecco with sorbet.

“Because of how seasonal things are and how often the menu changes, there would be no other way to do it,” Stewart says about having an in-house pastry chef, noting Amendola’s emphasis on hyper-seasonal and foraged ingredients.

Like Gjerde, Ammoora’s chef Matthew Milani was originally a pastry chef. The Syrian restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Federal Hill, which was named to The New York Times’ 50 Best Restaurants list in 2024, has a strong pastry program that encompasses a large dessert menu as well as house-made pita bread that is an essential part of the Levantine menu. That Milani started in pastry—he has a degree in pastry from Le Cordon Bleu in Lyon, France—helps maintain both the quality and focus of the dessert menu.

And those desserts are like nothing else in Baltimore. The asha bil asal is “a play on a pastry cream mouselline,” describes Milani, crowned with rose petals, pistachios, and a stunning thatch of delicate Arabic cotton candy; and the ruz bil karaz is a dessert of coconut rice pudding, confit sour cherries, and a coconut-caramel tuile. Then there’s the pastry kitchen’s masterpiece, a version of the TikTok sensation Dubai chocolate bar, with toasted knafeh, pistachio-tahini batter, white chocolate cremeux, chocolate ganache, caramel espresso, and crushed pistachios.

“I love the position; I wish they got more recognition,” says Milani of pastry chefs, as he takes a break in the restaurant’s foyer one weekday mid-afternoon. He just finished Baltimore’s Restaurant Week, when he and his staff made hundreds of Dubai chocolate bars. “It was the greatest and worst decision ever. I think everybody got covered in pistachios at some point, just trying to keep up,” he says.

“It doesn’t have to be a 15-tier wedding cake,” he says of a restaurant’s dessert menu. “A plated dessert can really go a long way.”

Restaurateur Tony Foreman says he values investing in a pastry program because he appreciates “the care, the intentional ‘I’m going to treat you better’ ethos that there is in pastry.”

What allows Foreman to have executive pastry chef Maiya Lonesome on staff, plus a three-person team supporting her, is that they make desserts for all five of his restaurants and do it all from the huge Harbor East production kitchen at Cinghiale. Lonesome has been with Foreman for three and a half years, having graduated from Johnson & Wales in pastry and worked in D.C. hotels before coming to Baltimore.

“Every holiday is always insanity,” says Lonesome of her job. “Five restaurants, easily over 400 covers per restaurant, and everybody gets dessert,” at least during those holidays. Not only is the high cost of ingredients an issue, says Lonesome, but even finding people trained to work in pastry is difficult these days.

“The pastry kitchen is the first to get cut,” says Lonesome. “I have friends who got out of the industry. Their biggest thing was feeling like they weren’t getting paid enough. The hours are grueling. The work can be really hard on your body. It’s not conducive to having a family. So that left us with a big gap going into the pandemic, and then that happened, and then the gap just widened more.”

Another issue, she says, is the availability of outsourced desserts. “The introduction of a lot of convenience products dug a little bit of a grave for some of the pastry chefs out there,” says Lonesome. It’s a common concern.

“In a lot of restaurants, the desserts are coming from elsewhere,” says Woodberry’s Gjerde. “You can get it from Sysco, like everything else. Take it out of the freezer, and who’s gonna be the wiser?”

“THE HOURS ARE GRUELING. THE WORK CAN BE REALLY HARD ON YOUR BODY. IT’S NOT CONDUCIVE TO HAVING A FAMILY.”

In Cinghiale’s kitchen, Lonesome places a tray of 40 individual chocolate cakes filled with chocolate Bavarian cream in the freezer. Once frozen, they’ll get topped with chocolate mirror glaze, then driven to Sparks for The Milton Inn, where they’ll be decorated with white-and black sesame tuilles for the chocolate gâteaux.

Lonesome, who usually comes into the kitchen in the early morning to make her desserts long before the dinner team arrives, expertly spreads an Earl Grey sponge cake onto parchment-lined trays. Nearby are sheet racks of cherry crostatas for Cinghiale and cookies for Johnny’s, Foreman’s Roland Park restaurant; one tray is stacked with blocks of butter like an architect’s stash of bricks. Taped to the side of the freezer is a series of production schedules as well as photos of wedding cakes: Lonesome and her team also bake for weddings and events.

She first got interested in cooking in her eighth-grade home-ec class and decided to be a pastry chef while still in high school. “I wanted to do wedding cakes; I wanted to do chocolates and sugar.”

Back in Magdalena’s kitchen, Heleba turns her attention to a tray of banana slices, which she brûlées with a Home Depot-sized torch before tweezing them alongside rectangles of banana cake.

Under her expert touch, the cakes are outfitted with toffee ice cream, espresso crumbles, and shards of house-made toffee, then showered with Maldon salt for the finished banoffee desserts.

“I feel sad when I go to a restaurant and they have this beautiful menu with all these fresh ingredients and techniques, and then at the end there’s these same four desserts that you could get anywhere,” she says, spooning the ice cream into perfect oval-shaped quenelles. “I think you should end a meal with a reflection of what you’ve just enjoyed.”

From Afghanistan to Venezuela to Peru to Ethiopia, Baltimore’s dining landscape has become increasingly international. With the January opening of Ammoora, the newest country to join Charm City’s global gastronomy scene is Syria.

Even if you think you’ve never eaten Syrian cuisine, it will feel instantly familiar if you’ve ever sampled fare from the Middle East. Syrian food falls under the umbrella of Levantine cuisine. The Levant, historically along the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean (also known as “the fertile crescent”), includes the regions of Syria, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Cyprus. There are slight variations of spices (mostly combinations of sumac, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, and coriander) across the region, but the fare, dating back centuries, is similar from one country to the next. It’s colorful and aromatic, combining sweet and spice, texture and tang—and the plates are almost always shared.

Ammoora, set inside the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Federal Hill, celebrates the birthplace of tech entrepreneur-owner Jay Salkini. These are the dishes that he and his Damascus-born chef, Dima Al-Chaar, grew up eating. Influenced by old-school family recipes, Al-Chaar, who has opened restaurants from Dubai to Damascus, uses traditional ingredients and adds her own modern twist. The overall menu mission, says Salkini, is for Marylanders “to taste this amazing food that my mom and grandma made for us with style and with love.”

When you sit down to study the menu, you’ll likely crane your neck to see what others are eating. Go with a big party and order the recommended two to three small plates per person. We actually ordered more than that—and some of us left the table still hungry. (Be forewarned, the tab can grow shockingly high for what amounts to a lot of very small starters.)

That said, the oversized menu is filled with culinary treasures, including eight dips and a dozen or so hot and cold mezzes, plus flatbreads, soups, and salads. Vegetarians will rejoice that more than half the menu is plant-based. There are four entrees featured, but on each of my visits, my companions and I were too enamored with the appetizers to move on to the bigger plates.

 

SYRIAN FARE IS COLORFUL AND AROMATIC, COMBINING SWEET AND SPICE, TEXTURE AND TANG.

 

The dishes rotate every few months, so no two visits will be the same. On the dip side, among our favorites was the shrimp hummus, a creamy spread that adds a generous pile of crustaceans, as well as cilantro, lemon juice, and garlic, to the traditional chickpea dish—it’s the very best version of hummus you’ll ever have. The keshké—a thick labneh yogurt bolstered by bulgur, scallions, and walnuts and flecked with dried rose petals, is tangy and rich and offers a cooling component to drizzle onto almost anything else you order.

Another spread, the muhammara—roasted red peppers, walnuts, pomegranate molasses, tahini, and olive oil—is equal parts smokey and sweet and gets its zing from a hit of red chile paste. With its deep red and orange hue, it reminded me of a beautiful sunset. The kebbeh orfaliyeh—think Syria’s answer to beef tartare—was subtly seasoned with minced onions, bell peppers, marjoram, and red chile paste. A few of us at the table thought that it was slightly under-seasoned, while another dining companion deemed it “perfect.”

On the hot mezze side, everyone agreed that the beyti sujuk rolls—char-gilled beef folded into doughy lavash bread resting in a pool of piquant tomato sauce and dressed with a dollop of labneh—was a menu highlight, as was the clever knafeh shrimp deep-fried to perfection in kataifi dough (a shredded and spun phyllo dough usually used for Middle Eastern pastries), which provided an extra-crispy crust.

The shrimp, served with a tahini tajen swirled with chile oil for dipping, resembled mini corndogs. The Aleppo-style kebbet karaz hot mezze—lamb meatballs with bulgur, cinnamon, and mini meatballs floating in a sweet-and-sour cherry sauce—was terrifically tart and led to much negotiation over who would scrape the last bits from the bowl.

All the dishes are prettily presented. Many get dressed up with a sprinkling of nuts or a scattering of pomegranate seeds that glisten like jewels across the surface and make everything look elevated and extra elegant. The dips arrive with house-made pita served inside a Syrian mokhoul basket.

The space, all pink, rust, and cinnamon, with exquisite inlaid Mother of Pearl furniture and coffee carts imported from Syria, is as alluring as the food, though the front of the house is sexier than the back, which definitely channels more of a hotel restaurant vibe. The well-heeled crowd is diverse. Across various visits, we saw a table of Johns Hopkins professors, a Syrian family who drove in from Annapolis, as well as people who live at the Ritz Residences, all adding to the convivial vibe.

This is exactly what Salkini was after.

“Syria isn’t what you hear about in the news. We want to deliver the message that we have a lot of love, and we need to be loved,” says Salkini, referencing the recent earthquake in his country. “We wanted to bring the love and hospitality of the region.”

Ammoora—meaning “loving, beautiful, and captivating” in Arabic—truly embodies its name.  It’s a round-the-world flavor journey worth taking—just know that this kind of travel doesn’t come cheap.

AMMOORA 751 Key Highway, 410-872-6610. HOURS: Daily 5-10 p.m. PRICES: Salads and soup: $10-16; mezze: $14-24; entrees: $36-55; desserts: $9-12. AMBIANCE: Elegant.