Baltimore – Baltimore Magazine https://www.baltimoremagazine.com The Best of Baltimore Since 1907 Thu, 14 May 2026 15:51:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Baltimore – Baltimore Magazine https://www.baltimoremagazine.com 32 32 Baltimore Farmers Market Guide https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/events/baltimore-farmers-market-guide/ Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0000 http://server2.local/BIT-SPRING/baltimoremagazine.com/html/?post_type=article&p=328
—Baltimore Farmers Market via Facebook

Baltimore’s unique farmers market culture is one of the many reasons we’re lucky to call the area home. Not only do the seasonal pop-up events make Maryland-grown goods accessible to all (many, including the big Baltimore Farmers Market beneath the JFX, accept SNAP and WIC benefits), they’re also a means of fostering community.

A mid-morning stroll around the tents is the perfect opportunity to meet your neighbors, find your new favorite weekend treat, and chat with the purveyors who are directly responsible for filling your fridge. Perhaps the best part? You walk away—full totes in hand, ready for the week ahead—knowing that you supported local.

As the weather gets warmer, consult our ultimate roundup of the region’s best farmers markets—complete with dates, times, and vendor details—to plan out your next haul.

32nd Street Farmers Market

Saturdays, year-round. Corner of E. 32nd & Barclay Sts. 7 a.m.–12 p.m.

This fan-favorite Saturday morning gathering in Waverly is one of few markets that operates year-round, but it always welcomes a few new faces just in time for the spring season. Be sure to pick up staples from the region’s best growers and makers, like treats from La Bohemia Bakery, kombucha from Hex Ferments, meats from Liberty Delight Farms, and produce from the Farm Alliance of Baltimore. 

Baltimore Farmers Market

Sundays through Dec. 20. Corner of Holliday and Saratoga Sts. 7 a.m.-12 p.m. 

The city’s massive farmers market under I-83 returns for its 49th season with a full lineup of farmers, food businesses, and artisans (think: local clothing line Love More Bmore and homegrown sticker queen Erin Dayhaw) booked every weekend through December. Come for market classics such as fruit from Agriberry Farm, funghi from The Mushroom Stand, and Migues Mini donuts. (Be sure to line up early for that last one!)

Back again this year, the market is offering quiet shopping hours from 7-9:30 a.m. to provide a sensory-friendly environment for those preferring a laid-back shopping experience. Then, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, expect the regular hustle and bustle to resume rain or shine.

—Baltimore Farmers Market via Facebook

BMI Farmers Market

Saturdays, May 16-Nov 21. 1415 Key Hwy. 9 a.m.-1 p.m.

A stroll around the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s open-air market in South Baltimore, with its iconic view of the Domino Sugar sign, is an ideal way to start the weekend. The vendor list for this year is still being finalized, but expect plenty of Maryland-grown produce, oven-fresh bread, bright flowers, ready-to-eat treats, and artisan creations.

Catonsville Farmers Market

Every Wednesday starting 5/6: 9 a.m.-12 p.m. (Check Facebook for weekly updates.) 5820 Edmondson Ave., Catonsville.

This community get-together has been a staple in Catonsville since 2002. Stop by the Christian Temple on Edmondson Avenue for eggs, meats, vegetables, perennial flowers, and handmade breads and pastries. Participating purveyors rotate frequently (check Facebook for weekly lineups) but have included well-knowns like Broom’s Bloom Dairy and Andy’s Eggs and Poultry.

Fells Point Farmers Market

Saturdays through April 25: 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. May 2-Dec. 19.: 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Corner of Broadway & Thames Sts.

Grabbing a Zeke’s Coffee to sip while you wander around this Broadway Square fixture is a Saturday morning well-spent, if you ask us. Local farmers and regional vendors fill the brick plaza, touting everything from produce and pickles to local honey and smoked fish. Expect favorite faces like Albright Farms, Cane Collective, and Soul Smoked BBQ.

Govans Farmers Market

Wednesdays, June-November. 5104 York Rd. 3-6 p.m. 

This vibrant Northeast Baltimore market serves a number of surrounding neighborhoods—which lack access to community grocery stores—with its mid-week gatherings in the safety department parking lot of Loyola University’s Evergreen Campus. Make it a destination for fresh produce and herbs from local growers such as Parkton’s Oxbow Farm and White Hall’s Stoecker Farms. Other treats include fresh-pressed juices and lemonades, baked goods, and food truck fare.

—Govans Farmers Market via Facebook

Hereford Farmers Market

Saturdays, May 9-November 21. 17301 York Road, Parkton. 9 a.m.-12 p.m.

Head north to Hereford High School in the rolling hills of Monkton for finds such as fresh produce from Tommy’s Peppers and artisan bread from Bowbread. There are also guest vendors, grab-and-go eats, and local bands to look forward to every weekend.

Mt. Washington Farmers Market

Sundays through Nov. 23. 2101 West Rogers Ave. 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

This market’s mission is to bring together producers and artists from within a 100-mile radius of Baltimore City. Spend your Sundays mingling with small businesses in the historic area, browsing everything from fresh coffee and honey to handmade pasta and artisanal breads. Previous participants have included Dear Globe Coffee Roasters, Bmore Poultry and Plants, and BMore Pasta.

Overlea Farmers Market

Every other Saturday, June 6-October 24. (See specific dates, here.) St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church. 8 W. Overlea Ave. 8:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Celebrating its 11-year anniversary this season, this small market in Northeast Baltimore provides its tight-knit community with fresh produce and protein throughout the warm-weather months. Every other Saturday, support local growers with the purchase of baked goods, coffee, local honey, jams, and olive oils. There’s also special activity table for kiddos to get in on the fun, too.

Pikesville Farmers Market

Tuesdays, May 5-November 24. Pikesville Armory. 640 Reisterstown Rd. 2-6 p.m.

Now settled at its new home at the Pikesville Armory, this annual market organized by the Greater Baltimore Chamber of Commerce sells everything from fruits and veggies to meat, eggs, dairy, bread, and hot prepared foods. Extra goodies include jams, jellies, honey, and pastries. The new setting is perfect for picnics, so bring a blanket and stay a while to enjoy your finds on the lawn.

—Reisterstown Farmers Market via Facebook

Pratt Street Market

Thursdays, May-October. Corner of Pratt & Light Sts. 11 a.m.-2 p.m. 

Downtown Partnership’s weekly lunch market at Pratt & Light Street Plaza is a great way for commuters (and remote workers!) to spend their break outside, taking in the skyline views. Expect a rotating lineup of food trucks, plus farm-fresh stands and artisans hawking their scratch-made goods.

Reisterstown Farmers Market

Sundays, June 7-September 27. 120 Main Street, Reisterstown. 9 a.m.-1 p.m.

Head to Franklin Middle School to support sustainable agriculture by stocking up on local fruits, veggies, and flowers at this weekly pop-up shop. Plus, look out for new additions to your beer and wine fridge, handcrafted jewelry from local makers, and natural wellness products.

Towson Farmers Market

Thursdays, June 4-Nov. 19. Allegheny & Washington Aves. 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Located in the heart of downtown Towson, this veteran market is a county favorite for its host of local farmers and food trucks throughout the summer and fall. Shoppers can expect fresh produce, scratch-made goods, and plenty of tasty lunch-break options.

Additional reporting by Mia Resnicow and Brenny Tichy

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]]> Baltimore’s Best Restaurants 2026 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/best-restaurants-baltimore-2026/ Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:00:11 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=180347
Food & Drink
March 2026


NE NIGHT LAST FALL, while I was taste-testing for this story, a server from a seafood house in Fells Point arrived at our table to talk about the daily specials. That evening they included an octopus ceviche spiked with Hatch chile aioli and bouillabaisse with thick ribbons of pappardelle pasta soaked in seafood broth and tossed with braised clams. “There’s just so much good stuff tonight,” the server said. “I don’t know how you decide.”

This is precisely the task at hand for our annual Best Restaurants issue—to pick from an embarrassment of riches in a city that has arrived as a dining destination. The decision of who makes the list weighs on us all year long, especially as our food scene continues to expand exponentially, offering more enticing options than ever. Finalizing the list is a daunting job. Thanks to ever-widening multi-cultural options that circle the globe and menus that mirror Maryland’s vibrant seasons, the competition is stiffer than ever—there is, indeed, so much good stuff it can be hard to make up our minds. But somehow, after many months of dining out, we winnow our list down—and we do decide.

Restaurants that have made the cut in the past might be missing, while new spots, or places we’ve only just discovered, stand in their stead. In addition to appearing on our pages, many of these restaurants have received recognition outside Baltimore, from acclaim in major publications to James Beard nods.

Last September The Wren had a particularly banner week, landing on The New York Times list of 50 Best Places to Eat in the country and Bon Appétit’s roundup of Best New Restaurants of 2025. Just down the road in Harbor East, the white-tableclothed Charleston earned a long-awaited James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program, while Matthew Oetting’s Italian-inflected Marta in Butchers Hill became a first-time Beard nominee. And further north, up I-83 in Hampden, The Duchess’s delectable shrimp and corn patties were named one of the 23 best dishes in the U.S. by The New York Times.

The places that land on this list have something to say. That includes the well-appointed rooms of Federal Hill’s Ammoora, Baltimore’s first Syrian fine-dining spot; Rooted Rotisserie, a celebration of faith, family, and Parisian-style roast chicken in historic Hollins Market; and Frederick’s Wye Oak Tavern, a Mid-Atlantic steakhouse from celebrity chef brothers Michael and Bryan Voltaggio.

The restaurants we chose offer fresh concepts, service with a smile, a great vibe, and good value. Above all, they have a “why” imbuing their establishments with passion and purpose. We also highlight a handful of chefs who are the engines and auteurs of their respective kitchens, including Carlos Raba of Clavel, who shares the tacos of his Sinaloan childhood, and Magdalena’s Scott Bacon, whose multi-cultural background informs and inspires his cooking. And in this day of seasonal menu shifts, we speak with chefs about the one evergreen dish that will never leave their menus.

With this issue, we invite you to revisit an old favorite or try a new spot. Picking a place from this group will not be easy, but rest assured, there’s no such thing as a bad decision here.

Above: The roasted duck breast with guava jelly on Calasparra rice at Alma Cocina Latina in Station North; The dining room at Alma.
Harbor East
Harbor East
Clockwise: Dinner service is in swing; co-owner Irena Stein in a rare moment of relaxation in the entryway at Alma; dry-aged Spanish mackerel with margarita chile mojo, green mango slaw, and tostones; Mango Manaca, Salsa Is Greener, and Calenton cocktails

alk through Alma’s welcoming doors, on this Station North corner just south of the Charles Theatre, and you’re transported, if not to Venezuela itself then certainly to a palace that honors co-owner Irena Stein’s homeland and its magnificent cuisine. Executive chef Héctor Romero orchestrates a Michelin-worthy menu featuring stunning creations that showcase ingredients and recipes from his country. The dishes are exemplary, both in technique and presentation: spiced roasted duck with Calasparra sofrito criollo, foie gras mousseline, and guava jelly; grilled, dry-aged Spanish mackerel with Margarita chile mojo, daikon, green-mango slaw, and tostones; or an ethereal scallop and coconut crudo with citrusají-dulce dressing and coconut sorbet. And don’t sleep on desserts—like a chocolate gâteau with orange foam, candied orange peel, dried strawberries, cocoa nibs, and sarrapia crème anglaise—as Romero also has serious pastry-chef skills.

MEET THE CHEF
 Héctor Romero
 Héctor Romero was a fine-arts visual artist before he was a chef, and you can see the artistry on his plates: breathtaking arrangements of crisped rice, seafood, and herbs; pools of sauce lapping edible architecture; concentric circles forming flavor-bomb desserts. He was a teacher, too, having founded the Culinary Institute of Caracas in 2003, and as such is a pioneer of Venezuelan gastronomy.

Ammoora

FEDERAL HILL

For those who think of hummus and tabouleh only as casual food, Ammoora, the Levantine fine-dining restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Residences, is revelatory. With arching ceilings, Islamic art-inspired mosaics, and mother-of-pearl furniture imported from Damascus, Syria, the homeland of owner Jay Salkini and chef Dima Al-Chaar, the place resembles a palace as much as a dining room. The show continues with an Arabic coffee service in sand-heated metal pots. And then there’s the food: spreads presented on silver trays with just-made pitas, haloumi cigars thatched with nigella seeds, lamb shanks atop saffron rice and pomegranate seeds glistening like jewels, and Dubai chocolate for dessert.

Ananda

FULTON

This Northern Indian restaurant is a destination spot, an oasis of fine dining in a location sporting outdoor patios, indoor fireplaces, and superb service, with a nearby farm from which owners and brothers Keir and Binda Singh source so much of what translates to their plates. (How many white-tablecloth restaurants offer farm eggs for sale at their front desk?) There are flatscreens at the bar, cozy fireplace dining options, and a kitchen that excels in vegetable- forward dishes: a palak chat of crispy spinach, house herbed yogurt, and pomegranate and tamarind chutney; and kaddu, a marriage of the farm’s delicata squash, onions, tandoori spices, goat-milk yogurt, and pomegranate seeds.

Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles

FELLS POINT

There are certainly fancier restaurants than Jesse Sandlin’s homey spot specializing in Southern-inspired cooking. Consider the cocktail menu that has drinks like the Folicello Paloma: tequila with pink grapefruit juice, cream soda syrup, and sparkling orange wine. Want a wild appetizer? Champagne can be paired with caviar. If that’s too fancy, hush puppies or pimento cheese dip offer a more down-home start to your meal. Fried chicken is a cornerstone, and the biscuit and sides (try the green beans with ham hocks) that come with the plate are almost as good as the star. Ever thought about making a crab cake but substituting chicken? Sandlin has, and the result, like the rest of her foray down south, is a blast.

Cece’s of Roland Park

ROLAND PARK

With its neutral palette and gold porcelain plates, Cece’s boasts one of the best-dressed dining rooms in Baltimore. A menu of prettily plated continental classics, including house-made pastas and well-executed fish dishes and steaks, is equally stylish. With recently installed chef Chris Audia (his chef C.V. includes stints at Magdalena and D.C.’s Michelin-starred Tail Up Goat) at the helm, there are plenty of new menu additions—a roasted shellfish dish featuring oceanic treasures shellacked in lemonbutter sauce, for example—to keep repeated visits feeling fresh. In season, the verdant patio is a little slice of Eden. It’s the ideal spot to toast to the sunset with one of their beautifully balanced negronis.

Charleston

HARBOR EAST

For 29 years now, Cindy Wolf, owner-chef of this whitetablecloth titan, keeps outdoing herself. The main dining room, the colors of an Impressionist painting, somehow sparkles more than ever; and Wolf’s phalanx of staffers stand at your beck and call, whether you need a pashmina shawl or a second piece of her signature cornbread (which you undoubtedly will). You’re here because you’re hungry, so carefully consider the menu of painterly plates that follow the rhythm of the seasons. When available, lobster bisque, cornmeal-fried oysters, and shrimp and grits are obligatory orders. Last year the restaurant earned the ultimate imprimatur, a medal from the James Beard Foundation for its beverage program, so partake in those pairings.

Cinghiale

HARBOR EAST

Open since 2007, this Italian-accented gem recently returned to its OG roots, featuring two different menus in two distinct dining rooms: an enoteca with pizza and half-priced wine nights on Tuesdays to the left; an osteria for more formal fare and a tasting menu to the right. Both offer a phenomenal wine list, toothsome plates of house-made pastas, and an outstanding salumeria selection—adorned with pansies, pomegranates, fresh figs—that resembles a Caravaggio still life when it arrives at your table. If the magret of duck is on offer—one fall preparation included a rich red wine reduction, farro, plus green beans swaddled in prosciutto—place your order before the kitchen runs out. Opera nights (some Sundays) will further transport you. The whole experience feels like eating in a palazzo.

Clockwise: Showtime at Clavel; salmon crudo with salsa de tortilla tatemada, wasabi mayonesa, a stack of house-made flour tortillas and tostaditas; a trio of tacos with a side of frijoles negros

hen it first opened 11 years ago, Clavel was an inviting hideaway, one of Baltimore’s best-kept secrets. But that secret has been out for some time now, thanks to press from Bon Appétit, The New York Times, and Saveur, not to mention the James Beard Foundation, which nominated Carlos Raba as Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic and routinely nominates their outstanding bar program—Maryland’s first to focus on mezcal.

It’s a local rite of passage to line up early to secure your spot, then order from the taquería’s marvelous menu where everything, beginning with the nixtamalized corn tortillas, is made from scratch. Start with the crowd-pleasing queso fundido, then move on to one of their fantastic ceviches, before digging into an open-faced taco—or five—whether topped with tongue, lamb, pork, sirloin, or shrimp.

In addition to the signature dishes, try the knockout pescado culichi: pan-seared mahi-mahi in a velvety roasted poblano pepper cream sauce. Add to that heartfelt service and potent margaritas and you’ll understand why this place has scores of faithful followers whose devotion is a form of religion in Charm City.

MEET THE CHEF
Carlos Raba
 Memory and family are at the fore of James Beard-nominated chef Carlos Raba’s cooking. At Clavel, tacos are the canvas against which Raba shares the story of his Sinaloan childhood. The flour tortilla recipe is from his great-grandmother, Maria; the barbacoa and cochinta pibil tacos were passed down by his aunts; the carne asada was imagined in his uncles’ restaurants; the torpedo-sized burritos were inspired by roadside stands in Mexico.

Cookhouse

BOLTON HILL

The cocktails and dishes at chef-owner George Dailey’s small but oh-so-stylish restaurant, housed in a 19th-century brownstone, are almost too beautiful to touch. Almost. The vodka-based AP&B is garnished with a slice of apple topped with three dollops of peanut butter and herbs. It could be an appetizer on its own. But then you’d miss out on the prawn Caesar, an assemble-it-yourself plate of lettuce cups and grilled shrimp skewers in a rich, classic dressing. Along with the ever-popular steak frites, there’s always a thoughtful vegan dish among the entrees. Dailey is particularly adept at cooking mushrooms, and the chanterelles that accompany the pan-seared John Dory and the porcini that complements the pillowy gnocchi have been known to steal the show.

Costiera

LITTLE ITALY

Dinner is always outstanding at this wonderful, Mediterranean-influenced bistro on the edge of Little Italy. Fresh pasta dishes, like rigatoni with grilled eggplant, tomatoes, herbs, and stracciatella, consistently deliver, as do the plump swordfish meatballs served over house-milled polenta. But for a truly memorable experience, pre-order a half or whole octopus. The dish, which includes a substantial salad, is plated with red potatoes and vegetables and serves four to six people. It’s a visually impressive presentation that draws the attention of diners throughout the restaurant. Perfectly charred with just the right amount of chew, the octopus is the brightest star at a restaurant that boasts many.

Forever Dishes

Seasonal dishes that are here to stay.

Swordfish Meatballs at Costiera
"Swordfish meatballs will be around forever. The sword is from Long Island. We mill the polenta in-house. Freshly milled polenta adds to the dish—ours tastes like corn. The meat is super fatty and works well for a meatball. The ingredients are simple—onion, fennel, garlic, breadcrumbs, and chile flakes. We top it with puttanesca and ground pistachios.

"We sold 2,100 orders the first year when we weren’t even busy here. Now, we sell 60 to 70 orders a week; that’s 30 pounds a week of swordfish. We use every part of the swordfish. I was inspired by Marc Vetri in Philadelphia. Years ago, chefs were doing whole pigs, whole cows—he’d use the whole fish. That got me interested. I love eating seafood and being from Maryland. It’s a way to incorporate it onto our menu and do something fun." —Owner-chef Brian Lavin

The Dara

FELLS POINT

Tucked into a historic Fells rowhouse that has long been a tavern and was once upon a time a brothel, The Dara is now a splendid Thai restaurant. Opened, co-owned, and cheffed by Bangkok native Putthipat “Jeff” Wannapithipat, the place presents more like a woodsy cabin than a curry joint, with lofty ceilings and an actual wood stove. And the food is fantastic: spice-charged curries, bowls of khao soi—the Northern Thai yellow curry-coconut-noodle stew—Hatyai fried chicken with cornflower-blue butterfly-pea-powder rice, and Maryland-y dishes like crab fried rice and crab curry. And there’s an inventive, flavor-driven cocktail list to wash it all down.

Harbor East
Harbor East
Clockwise: An array of dishes including the shrimp kelaguen and tatiyas, the famous shrimp and corn patties, and ahi tuna poke; bartender Jake Kinnier shakes up a tropical storm; knives out at the server station; chai apple cider shave ice

estaurateur Tony Foreman’s latest concept presents like a mash-up of Pacific Island food and elevated English pub/sports bar. Kiko Fejarang runs a forward-thinking Hampden kitchen spotlighting the food of her native Guam. Think SPAM musubi, pork lumpia, grilled duck donburi, and a fish n’ chips dish that is remarkable in both flavor and technique, with tempura-fried fish, furikake fries, and yuzu tartar sauce. Other standouts include short-rib kare kare and, on weekends, the most magical deep-purple ube pancakes. The Duchess brings a creative new space, both homey and refined, to The Avenue, and it’s fun to see how they’re twisting the old aesthetic, with dishes that expand our collective palate.

MEET THE CHEF
Kiko Fejarang
 As a kid in Guam, Kiko Fejarang wanted to be the first Marine in her military family, but when asthma derailed that dream, she switched gears and went to culinary school while still a teenager. She got her first gig at a Seattle hotel at 18, then moved to Baltimore to work at Foreman’s Pazo. Save for a few years with Michael Mina, Fejarang, now 40, has worked with Foreman ever since.

Dylan’s Oyster Cellar

HAMPDEN

This always-bustling oyster bar with a small dining room got a jolt of attention when it was featured in the film The Baltimorons. But writer and star Michael Strassner knows what Baltimoreans have known for a while: Dylan’s is a pearl for oysters, cocktails, coddies, and conversation. There’s an ever-changing selection of raw oysters, but the grilled variety—topped with butter and breadcrumbs—remains blissfully unchanged. Among the menu staples, the butterflied rainbow trout and charred burger are consistent winners, but so are dishes that make sporadic appearances, like the fish pot pie—red drum mixed with carrots, fennel, onions, and potatoes beneath a flaky exterior.

BY THE NUMBERS

350

pounds of chicken ordered weekly at Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles

500

pounds of pasta sold weekly at Cinghiale

24,000

oysters sold monthly at True Chesapeake

400

lobster rolls served weekly at Thames Street Oyster House

4,000

limes juiced weekly for margaritas at Clavel

Foraged

STATION NORTH

A visit to this sweet neighborhood farm-to-table spot owned by chef Chris Amendola is like taking a delicious walk in the woods. The James Beard-nominated chef takes his cues from Mother Nature with a focus on hyper-seasonal and, yes, often foraged, ingredients. The vegetable-forward menu of vibrant small plates leans heavily into mushrooms of all sorts, from Chicken of the Woods woven into threads of house-made bucatini to a Maryland-style “crab cake” built from Lion’s Mane mushrooms. The one-page menu is both eclectic—behold the section of pig parts—and enticing in its seeming simplicity. Consider the five-course chef’s tasting menu and always order at least one of the divine desserts.

Forever Dishes

Seasonal dishes that are here to stay.

Mushroom Stew at Foraged
"The mushroom stew is the one dish that’s been on the menu since day one and I’m pretty sure there would be riots in the streets if we took it off the menu. Our diners just love it and it’s also one of my favorite dishes that I have on the menu. What I love is that, depending on the time of the year, it changes so much without changing. It really just depends on what mushrooms we have from foraging, whether it’s Chicken of the Woods in the fall or Bolete mushrooms in the spring. Mushrooms are just such a huge part of what we do. They’re part of our brand." —Owner-chef Chris Amendola

Gertrude’s

HOPKINS-HOMEWOOD

It doesn’t get more Maryland than this longtime fixture inside the Baltimore Museum of Art. Owner-chef John Shields—the man who put Chesapeake cooking on the map—is a state treasure. His well-honed Chesapeake classics, straightforward and simple, let local ingredients do the talking. Oysters arrive raw or fried in cornmeal; crab stars in salads, soups, and quiche; and catfish gets a Creole treatment. There’s also a nod to his Grandma Gertie, whose crab cake, a broiled beaut with lovely lump from Cambridge-based J.M. Clayton (in season), earns top billing. Generous portions and reasonable pricing are of note at a time when rising food costs might mean you leave the table still feeling hungry.

Gunther & Co.

CANTON

Jerry Trice never stops challenging himself. The head of the kitchen at this Brewers Hill landmark, who runs the restaurant with his wife, Nancy, is a wildly creative chef, as evidenced by Gunther’s ever-changing menu. A compressed watermelon salad with feta, red onion, toasted pistachio, dill, and basil is incredibly juicy and readies the palate for what comes next. It’s no surprise that fried oyster tacos hit home; oysters in myriad forms are treated with reverence here nightly. Standards like the Thai seafood hot pot and a dry-aged burger are joined by creations like fried Indonesian pork belly. There’s not a bad seat in the house—the front bar, main dining room, and outdoor patio are all lovely—and it’s never a bad time to order something new.

Hersh’s

RIVERSIDE

Pizza put this bro-and-sis (that is, sibling owners Josh and Stephanie Hershkovitz) neighborhood restaurant on the map, but while the Neapolitan-style pies, with their delectable, charred crusts, are indeed excellent, it’s the host of other little things that have kept this gem on this list. Start with the service. Everyone who walks through the front door is greeted as a treasured guest, and once the meal starts, the pacing is perfect. Want to add cheese to a vegan pizza? No problem. Homemade pastas, like squid ink spaghetti with clams, are as good as any in the city, and an array of interesting appetizers, including expertly fried squash tempura, signal from the start that Hersh’s is anything but a one-trick pony.

La Cuchara

HAMPDEN-WOODBERRY

We eagerly await the return of this Basque Country restaurant helmed by brothers Ben and Jake Lefenfeld, temporarily closed due to a fire, as a visit to La Cuchara engages all the senses. There’s the sound of wood crackling from the asador loaded with succulent shrimp that will later get tossed with piquillo peppers, capers, and fennel pollen; there’s the smell of the strip steak glistening with smoked-tomato butter; there’s the sight of delighted diners in need of nothing as they commune over plates of pintxos, tapas, conservas, and whatever inspires chef Ben in any given season. There’s also a beguiling list of Spanish wines that enhances anything you eat. In case you’ve forgotten, this is what a good time looks like.

Le Comptoir du Vin

STATION NORTH

Walk through this nondescript Station North door and you’ll be whisked away to a dining room in some Southern French town, replete with chalkboard menu, an insouciant vibe, and magnificent country French cooking. Find a chair, order a glass or a bottle of natural wine from the wine shop, and take your pick from co-owner Rosemary Liss’ menu: maybe cassoulet, maybe chicken liver pâté with red wine shallots and rye crackers. Don’t overlook desserts, like a pot de crème or a plate of Camembert with Medjool dates and crackers. The plates might be mismatched china, but the food delivered on them is unmatched.

Linwoods

OWINGS MILLS

The restaurant’s namesake, Linwood Dame, and his wife, Ellen, may have retired after a 36-year run, but the spirit of the spot remains. The fine-dining stalwart continues to specialize in New American fare and polished service under new co-owner and longtime chef Tom Devine, who, way back when, presided over the very first dinner service. Linwood’s classic standards stand the test of time—pepper-encrusted, grilled tenderloin salad, bronzino with crab imperial, thin-crusted scampi pizza, and a pecan pie that’s the best we’ve ever had. There’s something to be said for sticking to the rule: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

Little Donna’s

FELLS POINT

With its granny-chic décor and a chef who visits the dining room then excuses himself to head to his apartment upstairs to put his babies to bed, Little Donna’s total lack of pretension is what makes it so utterly charming. Owner-chef Robbie Tutlewski is one of the least assuming—and most gifted—chefs in town. His menu honors his Polish and Midwestern tavern roots. Here, you’ll find cheffed-up takes on Polish dishes like crab palacinkes with hot pepper jam or crisp-crusted pizzas strewn with clams and even fixins from a taco as a topping. Another part of the allure is that you never know what you’ll find—go back often so you don’t have to guess.

Forever Dishes

Seasonal dishes that are here to stay.

Pierogies at Little Donna’s
"The pierogies will never, ever leave our menu—they will follow me forever. My grandmother Donna always made these pierogies—that’s the one dish that has followed me my whole career. When I met my wife years ago, she lived in a co-op and we would do family dinner once a week. The first time we cooked together, we made pierogies. It was just important for me—that’s the reason we serve them.

"We are glad now that it’s a niche thing, because not that many people make them. I make them because it reminds me constantly of my family and I want to share that with people. My family is small, my sister passed away at an early age, but making these helps keep the memory of my family alive. We make about 275 a day and usually sell out. —Owner-chef Robbie Tutlewski

Love, Pomelo

CANTON

This dining darling from the owners of Café Dear Leon is the under-the-radar restaurant you wish was in your hood. So even if you don’t live near O’Donnell Square, make the pilgrimage for Roman-inspired dishes from a small seasonal menu that differentiates itself in what can sometimes feel like a sea of sameness. On a recent visit that meant a splendid Gem salad with anchovy dressing and English peas; spools of spaghetti with bottarga and anchovy butter; and white Bolognese rigatoni slicked with Parmigiano-Reggiano sauce. Apertivo hour (with excellent negronis, house-made stracciatella, grilled sourdough) is a great introduction if you don’t want to commit to a whole meal, though we highly suggest that you do.

Clockwise: The crispy duck leg with red miso carrot purée, grilled baby carrots, and freekeh; assistant sommelier Randall Mentzos gets ready for dinner service; the seasonal canape board is presented

ith its gold accents, white marble, and subdued shades, Magdalena—set inside the historic Ivy Hotel—is a study in quiet luxury. The understated dining rooms serve as a backdrop for chef Scott Bacon’s sophisticated, often-changing menu that’s guided by the seasons. Bacon moved on from Magdalena in 2024 only to return some 12 months later. And his second act—with a focus on the Mid- Atlantic with global notes—is stronger than ever.

The new menu brims with many moments of culinary virtuosity: A lamb loin is glazed with harissa and served with pistachio tapenade; a duck leg gets the barbecue treatment; East Coast snapper is grilled to a crackle, then glazed with shellfish butter. The pièce de résistance is a changing cavalcade of canapes that includes items like a ramekin of sweet-corn panna cotta scattered with lavender buds. There are other draws, too: Service is unerring, the wine list is award-winning, and in season, the ivy-covered courtyard is positively sublime.

MEET THE CHEF
Scott Bacon
 Executive chef Scott Bacon is a true artist-chef. Every plate is presented with panache and is as unique as his British/Southern heritage. His cooking is inventive, boldly spiced, and a balance of classic and exotic, whether he’s pickling persimmon and whipping Brie for an appetizer or pan-roasting salmon with cauliflower Grenobloise sauce.

Marta

BUTCHERS HILL

It’s loud in this bustling small bistro near Patterson Park—and for good reason. The menu and atmosphere in chef-owner Matthew Oetting’s James Beard-nominated nouveau Italian restaurant are worth shouting about. Meticulously made cocktails and a thoughtfully curated wine list hint at the attention to detail to come. A loaf of Stone Mill Bakery bread is accompanied by housemade basil-oil butter. Seared scallops are expertly prepared and served with a lobster zabaglione. The pastas are always excellent, but don’t miss entrees like the porterhouse lamb chop, served atop creamy polenta, grilled broccolini, huckleberry lamb jus, toasted pistachio, shaved ricotta salata, and mint. It is, like the whole of Marta, an exquisite sum of its parts.

The Milton Inn

SPARKS-GLENCOE

Two of the main dining rooms in this restaurant, set in a storybook, circa-1740s fieldstone building in Sparks, have turned into CIA-trained chef Chris Scanga’s personal playground. It’s there that he showcases the full range of his talents with an ambitious nightly tasting menu whose foundation is French and ever-shifting with the seasons. Scanga’s precision preparations—be that a plate of yellowfin tuna crudo with compressed peaches, tomato oil, and green olives in late summer, or butternut squash ravioli lacquered with rosemary brown butter come fall—mirror the elegance of the candlelit dining rooms. For more casual visits, there’s a vibe to match your mood: a charming pocket-sized bar area, a cozy tavern-style room with an oversized hearth, or a pretty patio to enjoy the bucolic setting.

NiHao

CANTON

Six years after NiHao opened, the Sichuan restaurant has become a part of the neighborhood, turning out splendid renditions of Peking duck, popcorn chicken, dry pots, water-boiled fish, and the soup dumplings called xiaolongbao, among many other things. James Beard Award-winning chef Peter Chang—born in Hubei, graduate of culinary school in Wuhan, former chef at Washington, D.C.’s Chinese embassy—now runs a DMV empire of restaurants, including two in Baltimore. We are lucky to have him, especially now that his weekend all-you-can-eat dim sum brunch parties have become a mainstay. Scallion bubble pancakes, chile-oil wontons, and bottomless pink mimosas. Enough said.

From top: Housemade lasagna with tofu ricotta; Oleum sign; the mezze platter features Lebanese flatbread and vegetables; tiramisu martini; a seasonal risotto topped with grated Parmesan and parsley

or those who still think of vegan food as limiting or gimmicky, a trip to Oleum will come as a revelation. What began as a kitchen experiment in Okinawa, Japan, where chef-owner Alisha Adibe’s husband was stationed, morphed into this 64-seat beauty that opened last June. Adibe’s menu is worldly, creative, and wildly flavorful, driven by spices and herbs and nut-based cheeses and charcuterie and, well, a lot of plants. Picture ricotta-stuffed, spiced Medjool dates; white-miso, mushroom bucatini; over a dozen pizzas; even sticky toffee pudding and chocolate chip cookies. Baltimore hasn’t had a high-end vegan restaurant since Matthew Kenney’s short-lived Liora shuttered and, judging by the typical crowds on a weekend night, the city is more than appreciative.

MEET THE CHEF
Alisha Adibe
 Oleum’s chef-owner Alisha Adibe is an unlikely vegan restaurateur, having spent most of her career not as a chef but as a personal trainer, and whose restaurant experience was limited to a stint at Applebee’s in her Kansas hometown. But after she became a vegan, she went all-in, cooking not only food for herself, but for her clients and her Army husband’s co-workers. Soon she had a home business, then a pop-up kitchen, and now Oleum.

Peerce’s

PHOENIX

The word fairytale comes to mind when describing the setting at this Indian fine-dining restaurant, situated down a winding road, past towering pines, and smack dab in the bucolic Dulaney Valley reservoir. Here, amidst vines heaving with cherry tomatoes and basil plants as tall as Jack’s beanstalk, you’ll find coowner Keir Singh infusing the spot with warmth, hospitality, and pride of place for his Mother India. Expect boldly flavored fare—kissed with curry and cardamom, tinged with turmeric, accented with chile—that always ignites the palate. Also of note: All the vegetables are sourced from area farms, including the family’s Howard County garden.

Peter’s Inn

FELLS POINT

You can be certain that whatever is scribbled on the sheet of paper that serves as the menu at this upscale restaurant disguised as a rowhouse bar is going to be delicious. Offerings change weekly based on what ingredients owners Karin and Bud Tiffany secure and where their inspiration lies. Standards like the New York strip and the tagliatelle with pistachios and shrimp are reliably outstanding, but so are creations like lobster risotto. For dessert, we sipped what might be the best espresso martini in the city. The last time she had one, the woman sitting next to us told us, she revealed family secrets to her daughter. We have nothing earthshattering to divulge; a staple on this list for years, it’s no secret how much we love Peter’s Inn.

Harbor East
Harbor East

Petit Louis Bistro

ROLAND PARK

From the moment you pass through the 19th-century stained-glass paneled doors and enter the foyer where the famed French cheese cart is parked, Petit Louis Bistro whisks you to Gay Paree. Expect classic offerings like the whole roasted chicken polished with duck fat or the butter-bathed trout amandine, plus seasonal items that make the most of whatever month it happens to be. The French wine list runs deep, the dining rooms are lively, and the service strikes just the right balance between friendly and formal. Best of all, Louis never takes itself too seriously. As the menu promises: “It’s fun! It’s French!” In other words, joie de vivre happens here.

Preserve

ANNAPOLIS

At Preserve on Annapolis’ Main Street, owners Jeremy and Michelle Hoffman have created an original, intensely flavorful, and deeply creative menu organized and inspired by both local produce and what happens when talented folks ferment it. So you get dishes of seasonal pickles, bowls of crispy kale with cumin yogurt and pepper jelly, sausage-stuffed lamb roulades paired with za’atar and pickled fennel, and cherry-chocolate bread pudding with sorghum caramel. There is a loaded cocktail bar, a catfish-and-chips lunch with malt-vinegar aioli—and even a kids’ menu where mini burgers come out in three-dimensional dishes shaped like dinosaurs.

The Prime Rib

MOUNT VERNON

It’s an immutable truth that you go to The Prime Rib on the first floor of the Horizon House apartment building for terrific steaks, classic cocktails, and a 1940s supper club vibe thanks to a legendary jazz trio, some of whose musicians have played with famed bandleader George Clinton. A lesser-known fact? If you grab a white linen-dressed table, you might have a chance to commune with 52-year veteran server Aaron Day, who started at the steakhouse when he was 15. He’ll regale you with tales of the storied patrons who stopped by, including Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, and Maya Angelou. And if you’re lucky, he’ll share a few stock tips. A visit here is like stepping into a piece of Baltimore history.

Red Pepper Sichuan Bistro

TOWSON

After running Orient Express in Charles Village for years, owner Ping Wu opened this elegant restaurant in 2019, bringing us more of executive chef ZeXin Zheng’s excellent Sichuan cuisine. Zheng is from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan and the engine of some of China’s very best regional cooking. The glossy menu reads like a fashion magazine, featuring classics like Peking duck, mapo tofu, and soup dumplings, but also specialties such as Sister Rabbit (rabbit with fermented soybeans), cumin lamb, and a spectacular rendition of mei cai kou rao, a party dish from Guangdong that involves rashers of pork belly draped in a latticed dome over preserved mustard greens.

Harbor East
Harbor East

Rooted Rotisserie

HOLLINS MARKET

There is something transporting about Amanda and Joseph Burton’s Hollins Market restaurant. Family photos make the walls an art exhibition; a friendly barkeep helps you feel like you’re in your favorite tavern; and the tables in the back dining room view the open kitchen where that magic happens. The Burtons formed the idea for their restaurant while on honeymoon in Paris. The rotisserie chicken that was the catalyst informed the restaurant’s name—and its stellar cooking. There are the famous birds, glazed with rosemary oil, but there is also duck-confit gumbo, wine-braised short-ribs, and a smoked mushroom dish that will leave vegetarians feeling extraordinarily happy.

The Ruxton

HARBOR EAST

At this swanky establishment, prime steak is the main event—and, as at any proper steakhouse, you can gild it with truffle butter or king crab. But there’s plenty beyond the beef. Start with house-made tater tots crowned with caviar, followed by a stellar shellfish salad—shrimp, crab, and lobster in blood-orange vinaigrette—before moving on to buttery Jail Island salmon with seasonal sides like wild ramps and beech mushrooms or silky parsnip purée. Finish with the Grand Ruxton Martini, served with a sidecar. Like everything here, it’s a blue-ribbon experience.

Sangam Indian Cuisine

ELLICOTT CITY

The best way to eat at Sangam, the Southern Indian restaurant in an Ellicott City shopping complex (with a second Cockeysville spot), is not so much to eat lunch or dinner but to feast. This is because, as you get to chatting with folks at the next table about their preferred spice level or keep finding exciting new things on the menu to order, a meal at owner Shan Chaudhry’s restaurant, opened in 2024, can feel like a party. The kitchen, helmed by chef Sathish Veeraperumal, turns out 15 kinds of dosas, biryanis, thali specials, appams, curries, and more, all engineered with terrific flavor and care.

Tagliata

HARBOR EAST

This splashy Harbor East hangout (and an Atlas Restaurant Group jewel in their fleet of 54 spots) is an ode to Italian cuisine and one of the best places in Baltimore to enjoy high-quality, hand-cut steaks, exceptional seafood, and hand-made pasta. Order from chef-partner Julian Marucci’s oversized menu and consider the options (from nonna classics like eggplant Parm to more modern riffs like polenta with duck ragu) while sipping on a spritz or ordering a bottle from the largest wine list in Charm City. One menu must, whether you’re a first-timer or a restaurant regular, is the black squid ink campanelle with blue crab, rich uni cream, breadcrumbs, basil, and a hit of chile. In season, the alfresco patio is primo for people-watching.

From top: An Eastern Shore crab cake feast; vintage oyster cans add to the décor; the bustling brick-walled dining room featuring A. Aubrey Bodine photographs

his seafood-centric spot—a Fells Point institution—highlights the cuisine of coastal New England and the Chesapeake Bay, featuring old-school and new-school preparations. As you sit among the glug jugs and A. Aubrey Bodine photographs, know that when the menu arrives, you’ll have trouble making up your mind. The good news is that whatever you order—Baltimore’s only fried clam belly roll, an Eastern Shore-style crab cake, or a selection from the expansive raw bar (with fresh grated horseradish, no less)—it’s all stupendous. Ask for table 30 overlooking the Patapsco, the crowds, and cobblestoned streets—it’s the best table in Charm City.

MEET THE CHEF
Eric Houseknecht
 Thames Street’s staying power—15 years and still going strong—can, in part, be credited to executive chef Eric Houseknecht, who has run the kitchen since day one. Houseknecht’s superior sourcing means real-deal blue crab from MD and oysters from coast to coast. And the chef has real range—he’s able to riff on seafood standards, while doing the classics just right.

True Chesapeake

HAMPDEN

The name and the menu mission are one and the same at True Chesapeake. Most of chef Zack Mills’ fare is inspired by, or from, the Chesapeake Bay watershed, including a selection of sustainably sourced bivalves from the restaurant’s own Jerome Creek oyster farm and a jumbo lump crab cake made with bona-fide Maryland meat, plus seasonal preparations of snakehead and catfish. The décor, including the nautical Jay Fleming photos and the bar made of crushed oyster shells, adds to the Mid-Atlantic vibe, as does a kickass happy hour with clam dip and $2 roasted oysters. Martinis and Old-Fashioneds for $6 round out the experience in the best way possible.

Woodberry Tavern

HAMPDEN-WOODBERRY

Who needs a calendar when you have a paper menu from Woodberry Tavern? The offerings speak to the seasons: Rockfish with succotash, sweet corn, and tomatoes ushers in summer; hearty stuffed cabbage with buckwheat groats, cremini mushrooms, braised peppers, and polenta means fall has come; winter brings Chesapeake oysters fried, roasted, or raw; spring ushers in celestial softshell pancakes. James Beard Award-winning chef Spike Gjerde is monastic about procuring ingredients that show case his relationships formed with the farmers and watermen of our region, always reminding us of what a gift it is to live in the DMV.

The Wren

FELLS POINT

There are few things as much fun as finding a seat at the narrow, cramped bar at The Wren, getting a masterfully pulled pint of Guinness, and watching as chef and co-owner Will Mester creates your dinner over a hot plate jigsawed into the corner of the old rowhouse whiskey bar. Mester, his wife and co-owner Millie Powell, and veteran barkeep Adam Estes have fashioned a lightning-in-a-bottle restaurant out of, well, a lot of whiskey bottles. Mester’s line-up, scrawled on a chalkboard (nettle soup, cassoulet) is a mash-up of his farmhouse cooking and Powell’s Irish upbringing, all lubricated by Estes’ pints.

Wye Oak Tavern

FREDERICK

Set inside a desanctified chapel, Wye Oak could easily fall into gimmickry rather than gastronomy. But the cooking here is as serious as the saints who peer down from the altar-turnedbar. That doesn’t mean that celebrity chef restaurateurs Bryan and Michael Voltaggio haven’t kept things fun. Case in point: the coddies appetizer served on a popsicle stick. Make no mistake, Wye Oak is a steakhouse—prime rib arrives thick as a Bible, crusted in garlic and mustard—but it’s also very much a nod, make that a wink, to the duo’s Maryland roots. For years, the Top Chef alums pursued their individual projects—Wye Oak proves that two Voltaggios in the kitchen are better than one.

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]]> Our Favorite Places to Go Antiquing in the Baltimore Area https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/homegarden/best-baltimore-area-antique-malls/ Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:15:32 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=180085
—Illustration by Alice Pattullo

The great fun of antique shopping is in the unknown. Every booth, table, and display is an opportunity for discovery. (Or even riches if you watch enough Antiques Roadshow.) It takes patience, luck, and a lot of digging to unearth a special find. And if you’re really in the mood to browse? Enter the antique mall.

Antique malls emerged as a popular retail format in the late 20th century, evolving from individual antique shops to centralized, multi-vendor spaces where dealers lease booths to sell vintage items. They became prevalent as a way to consolidate, offering diverse, sometimes high-quality, and often curated finds all in one place.

They have proven to be the perfect place to go on a leisurely, solitary shopping trip, but there’s an exhibitionist element to them as well. Seeing what others are finding. Hearing gasps and delighted chatter, sometimes a hearty laugh. Was the day’s find a treasure or trash? Curious or bizarre? Opulent or meager?

We spent time at several antique malls in the area—or collectives for a more modern verbiage—and here’s what we found.

THE DISTILLERY COLLECTIVE
Cockeysville
Tucked down Beaver Run Lane in Cockeysville, The Distillery Collective started as a warehouse for Gore Dean, the high-end interior design furniture and accessories store. When customers would come to pick up a custom order they would want to “shop” other items (none of which were for sale) and so Deborah Gore Dean had the idea to add other curated booths as an antique collective.

Now about 12 local antique and vintage dealers share the space, occupying the second floor of the Sherwood Rye warehouse. The collective keeps pretty regular hours (they are open Wednesday to Sunday), offers custom curation services by appointment, and can pretty much ship anywhere. Booths are well organized and everyone working is warm and helpful—especially Andrea Nugent (“most of us started as collectors,” she explains) who loves mid-century and keeps a well-appointed booth of beautiful bowls, artwork, and trinkets.

Other standouts include Elise Rulan’s The Sourceress and her handsome vintage furniture, Strega Sano’s tabletops and kitchen accessories, and of course Gore Dean herself, who often pops up on the collective’s up-to-date Instagram account. Some of our favorite finds include vintage postcards, a replica diving helmet, a vintage-y orange graduated bead necklace, and a set of eight hand-painted casserole dishes shaped like turtles from prominent American designer Carole Stupell.

THE ANTIQUE CENTER
Savage Mill
It’s a super rainy Saturday morning, and Savage Mill is mobbed. This historic, re-purposed 19th-century cotton manufacturing complex (now listed on the National Register of Historic Places) houses the Antique Center on the ground floor of the Old Weave Building. It’s a little overwhelming with more than 100 “dealers” (as they call them) and 20,000 square feet of antiques and collectibles. It feels like entering a labyrinth with every turn looking a bit like the one before. (“Have I been here before,” I wondered more than once.) But the selection is impressive—artwork, accessories, furniture, militaria, glass, ceramics, jewelry, and toys. The website also mentions “gas station memorabilia,” although I didn’t see any the day I visited.

The Antique Center is clean and well-lit (despite being in the basement) with a central information desk where you can ask question and pay for all the merchandise. (The Antique Center also provides scheduled appraisals.) We found an impressive selection of glasses (especially gold rimmed coupes), vinyl, a vintage 1970s Mickey Mouse push button phone, sports memorabilia, and plenty of colorful Fiesta dinnerware, old guitars, and stained glass that looked like it came from somewhere important. And The Antique Center had an impressive number of dolls. From Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids to a vintage Shirley Temple doll, a “Teeny Tiny Tears” babydoll, and fancy French antique dolls with the eyes that sort of follow you around (if you’re into that sort of thing).

THE ANTIQUE DEPOT
Ellicott City
If you like to find your antiques in a space a bit more antiquey, The Antique Depot is pretty perfect. This charming 1873 livery stable—just across the street from the B&O Ellicott City Station Museum on Maryland Avenue—houses more than 60 booths selling antiques and vintage items across several floors. Quick history lesson: The Dorsey Livery Stable provided services, primarily offering horses, carriages, and wagons for rent, along with stabling (housing, feeding, watering) for travelers’ own horses, and also delivered ice and coal for 51 years. It became Clark Hardware Store in 1924 and finally the Antique Depot in 1989.

There’s a certain charm here—creaky floors, quiet basement, and a kind of sweet chaos. Some of our favorite finds included a chicken-shaped cookie jar, old campaign buttons (“Mondale Ferraro for America”), copper Jello molds, and Royal Navy rum rations (the daily amount of rum given to sailors aboard naval ships). Here you can discover lots of Lionel train sets, Beanie Babies, license plates, and an eight-piece antique German Lusterware spice jar set. There were loads of books, comics and vintage magazines. Plus, tons of old McCormick spice containers and pharmacy bottles, ecru linens, “wedding hankies,” and patterned napkins. One area even had an assortment of old-school Fisher-Price toys (still in the boxes) and an Easy-Bake Oven. And the Antique Depot has one of the best selections of vintage clothes too.

THE ARTFUL FLEA
Catonsville
In a sweet little house in Catonsville (just a few blocks off Frederick Road), you’ll find The Artful Flea, owned by antique maven Reggie Sajauskas. Objects Found, her bigger antique store, has been closed since May 2025 because of a fire. But this spot and the (other) Objects Found in Arbutus remain open. The Artful Flea tends towards art, antiques, fashion, flora, and furniture, with a healthy nod to local artists. If you like your antiques mixed in with new pieces, this will be right up your alley.

We found timeworn Nancy Drew books, a vintage deviled egg plate, old globes, hand-made (new) birdhouses, and antique glasses turned into pincushions. There’s a room packed with vintage-style clothes on racks. We loved the framed crewel floral bouquet, and the odd assortment of lawn ornaments (R2-D2, Buddah, gargoyle, flamingo). The Arbutus space is small and very, very full of stacks of dishes, glasses, mixing bowls, serving platters, mugs, juicers, and Corningware. There’s tons of costume jewelry including chunky bracelets and clip-on earrings and a gorgeous set of vintage Anchor Hocking floral drinking glasses. (Maybe my favorite find of the day.)

If there’s one thing antique enthusiasts love to talk about, it’s their favorite places to find collectibles. So, here are 11 more shops (nearby or worthy of a road trip—including one with a soda fountain inside) that were suggested for more antique hunting.

—Illustration by Alice Pattullo

MARYLAND

  • Beaver Creek Antique Market, Hagerstown
  • East Main Antiques, Westminster
  • Emmittsburg Antique Mall, Emmitsburg
  • Emporium Antiques, Frederick
  • Englanders Antiques Grill and Soda
  • Fountain, Oakland
  • Foxwell’s Antiques & Collectibles, Easton
  • Seneca Cannery Antiques, Havre de Grace

PENNSYLVANIA

  • The Antique Marketplace of Lemoyne, Lemoyne
  • Cackleberry Farm Antique Mall, Paradise
  • Renninger’s Antique Market, Adamstown
  • Shrewsbury Antique Center, Shrewsbury

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]]> Baltimore’s Best Bars https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/best-bars-in-baltimore/ Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:00:09 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=177720

Edited by Lydia Woolever

Written with Ana Bak, Lauren Cohen, Amy Scattergood, and Mike Unger
Photography by Scott Suchman
Illustrations by Molly McCammon
Food & Drink

Edited by Lydia Woolever

Written with Ana Bak, Lauren Cohen, Amy Scattergood, and Mike Unger.
Photography by Scott Suchman
Illustrations by Molly McCammon
December 2025


Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods, and luckily, in turn, Baltimore is a city of great neighborhood bars. Often, they’re on a corner and, even more likely, they’re in a renovated rowhome. Back in the day, they were go-tos for an ice-cold National Bohemian with a shot of Pikesville rye. But these days, they come in all shapes and sizes. You might also find an ideal martini there. Maybe a late-night dance party, too. Whatever their style, then and now, they’ve somehow managed to foster an authentic sense of community, featuring a regular crew behind the bar and a crowd of locals routinely gathering with friends or getting to know neighbors, likely having their order in mind without needing a look at the menu (which might just be their bartender’s choice).

Believe it or not, it’s been a decade since Baltimore did our last true roundup of the city’s “best bars,” and a lot has changed on the local drinking scene. Old faithfuls have closed. New hot spots have opened. And more than ever—in these digital, divided, dystopian times, as hospitality establishments become more homogenized and hollowed out by trends—it feels like we need these genuine “third spaces” for gathering outside of work or home. Where we can take a load off and shed our daily stresses. Where we can be both ourselves and part of a collective. And yes, at their best, where everyone knows your name (or at the very least, how the Orioles are playing).

Below, we raise a glass to the newly established bars that are doing their neighborhoods proud, and also give love to some of the stalwarts that have already set the standard.

Above: Co-owner Meg Snyder shaking things up at Vision House; the house sour and Flamboyán at The Coral Wig.

29th Street Tavern

Remington

The Formstone façade and neon sign hanging out front of this corner bar—in classic fashion, not all letters always illuminated—are the perfect indicators of what you’ll find inside. When Baltimore native Aaron Reinhart bought Long John’s Pub in 2018 (after similarly saving Swallow at the Hollow near the Towson line), he merely cleaned up the place, keeping it a casual, everyman staple in an ever-gentrifying neighborhood. Stools at the lacquered bartop are occupied by locals of all ages, mainly drinking beer—more than 50 on offer—or basic mixed drinks, aka don’t expect a cocktail menu. Many also come for the solid bar food. Get the wings. Have a whiskey. Stay awhile. Then, with the old packaged-goods license still intact, take a six-pack for the road.

The Back Yard

Hollins Market

A history of hospitality permeates the very foundation of this hidden gem by the B&O Railroad Museum. Previously Patrick’s of Pratt Street, one of the oldest Irish pubs in America, The Back Yard’s tiny rowhome has been a bar since the 19th century. Since opening in 2018, owner Michael Cavanagh has honored that lineage by creating a quintessential meeting-house, where libations and conversation flow freely between friends and strangers, thus wearing its name well. With meticulous cocktails, cellared beers, Detroit-style pizza, and a time-worn interior, there are modern sensibilities with a nod to the past. Ask for the clever El División Del Norte, featuring mezcal, ancho chile, pomegranate, and a dash of blackwalnut bitters.

Above: A party of four, the menu, the alley entrance on Read Street, and the ambience at The Coral Wig.

The Coral Wig

Mt. Vernon

On first visit, Baltimore’s hottest new cocktail bar is easy to miss, tucked into a subterranean lair beneath the Ulysses hotel on Read Street. And yet, it always draws a crowd, in part because the smallisle- inspired room is stunning (at least what you can see of it—it’s seductively low-lit). Hospitality connoisseur Lane Harlan has a brilliant eye for design to accompany her deep appreciation for the bacchanal; she’s the pied piper of Baltimore’s pioneering booze palaces W.C. Harlan, Clavel, and Fadensonnen. And now this drinking den—pulsing with unsuspecting hotel guests, postwork happy hours of the city’s hippest, and late-night dates in the back corners since 2023—has earned its own rightful buzz. Transport to the South Pacific with its tiki-forward menu (i.e. the luxurious house sour or over-the-top Flamboyán) and be mesmerized by your master-class bartenders—smoking wood under glasses, stuffing garnishes into pebble ice, shaking drinks into frothy submission.

The Club Car

Station North

What began two winters ago as a pop-up LGBTQ+ venue, cocktail bar, and art gallery has, thankfully, become permanent. When a team of creative friends took over the former Windup Space on North Avenue, they brought its arts-centric legacy into this dynamic and ever-welcoming neighborhood lounge. Even the most buttoned-up types are embraced with open arms; after all, “When you’re here, you’re queer—get used to it,” as the tongue-in-cheek menu reminds. Thursday through Saturday, you might find drag queens, burlesque performances, artists, gallery curators, or just locals needing a well-poured cocktail. The Swann Song was a fall favorite—a pre-Prohibition potion of gin, créme de violette, vermouth, absinthe, and orange bitters—named after the first self-proclaimed drag queen. A Maryland native, no less.

The Dive

Canton

There are lots of folks trying to make new dive bars these days—a sort of oxymoron. In that vein, and in Jesse Sandlin style (see Sally O’s in Highlandtown), this colorful corner clubhouse is full of nostalgia. Fittingly located in the former Jack’s Bistro, its pizzas are playfully topped with pickles and Doritos dust, and the cocktails (like the standout cucumbergin Pinball Wizard) arrive in cartoon glasses with silly straws. But it’s more than gimmicks. Cantonites flock for its low-key party vibe. And we can always get behind boxes of Jenga up for grabs, throwback movies on loop, and frequent fundraiser nights for neighbors in need or national causes like wildfire relief.

Dutch Courage

Old Goucher

As the sun begins to set, look inside the front windows of this historic Charles Street rowhome and expect to find a glowing scene that beckons you inside: warm light, a working fireplace, a wide-ranging crowd snuggled up in vintage furniture with the bar’s leatherbound menu. Gin is the main attraction, with more than 100 varieties whisked into gimlets and goblets, showing off the wonders of this juniper infused spirit. In spring, we’re partial to the Eleanor, with Baltimore Spirits Company’s Shot Tower gin, cocchi rosa, rosewater, grapefruit, and bubbly, topped with dried flowers. This time of year, the house “toasties” are also worth a visit, aka spiked and spiced teas for warming up through winter. No wonder this Old Goucher parlor has been good at gauging the neighborhood’s imbibing needs—co-owner Brendan Dorr (who runs the place with fellow industry veteran Eric Fooy) lives just up the street.

Above: The courtyard sign; natural wine, beer, and cocktails at Fadensonnen.

Fadensonnen

Old Goucher

Walk into this communal complex from Lane Harlan and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in, well, not Baltimore. Brooklyn maybe, or Tokyo, or Berlin. Still, this deeply cool mecca for spirits and socialization has become a go-to for locals. Through its secluded courtyard, the ground-floor bar is a moody scene, where small parties hang by the medieval tower of melting candles and 16 taps, including one for orange wine. Upstairs, groups gather on the serene second-floor, sipping sake and sherry over live poetry and DJ sets. The courtyard biergarten is always bustling, too—even in the dead of winter, thanks to a heated tent (where you can split a splendid rotisserie chicken from Chachi’s). In a perfect world, there’d also be an Airbnb, so you could just stay the night.

Above: Vinyl, chatting, pouring a Pharoah Dance, and the bar at Mama Koko's.

Mama Koko’s

Barclay

Despite only celebrating its first year this summer, Mama Koko’s already feels like it’s been part of Baltimore forever. Located inside the historic Hooper House arts hub, it’s inspired by owner Angola Selassie’s mother, Kokahvah—a writer, world traveler, and community matriarch, who regularly frequents the space—and has quickly become an essential center for creative exchange. By day, you’ll find students, artists, and a stylish clientele tapping away on laptops or having chats over matcha lattes. By evening, the lights dim, candles flicker, and the room fills up again—this time, for the bar, helmed by Jake Eyer, who dreams up some of the city’s most beautiful bespoke beverages. Take the Coastin’, for instance —a swirl of nori-infused tequila with citrusy sake and honey-mango shrub beneath a seaweed garnish. The mai tais and clarified options rule, too.

Meander

Upper Fells

Imagine a corner bar crossed with a vintage shop, kindergarten art class, and your wacky aunt’s living room, then you’ll have Meander on Lombard Street near Washington Hill. Last winter, local artist Martha Robichaud joined forces with talented barkeep Matthew Steinberg (previously of Kenwood Tavern) in this leafy location that has seen various incarnations, most recently as Bar 1801. Now, neighbors convene for not only properly creative concoctions—like the stirred Umami, combining gin, vodka, dashi, yuzu, and chile oil—but also to peruse the $1 vinyl bin, play a Ouija board, or purchase watercolor kits for painting while pinting.

Melanie’s at Griffith’s Tavern

Hampden

For a long time, this fading brick façade on Hickory Avenue was home to a blue-collar bar called Griffith’s Tavern. When co-owners Allison Crowley and Hannah Spangler took over in 2022, they wanted to make it their own, playfully updating its name in homage to the leading lady of John Waters’ cult-classic, Cecil B. Demented. Inside, this woman-owned watering hole still genuinely looks and feels like a dive—think long bar, wood-paneled walls, bags of Utz—but now with unexpectedly modern drinks and an all-embracing attitude. A Thai chile rendition of Death & Co.’s iconic Naked and Famous cocktail was a recent delight. On any given night, the 16-stool bar might feature a mix of Gen Z and millennial hipsters sharing shots of Malört, neighborhood moms nursing Spaghetts (maybe with babies in tow), and barfly regulars posted up for Ravens games and $3 Bohs.

Old Major

Pigtown

Just a stone’s throw from Carroll Park sits this little corner bar that could—and does. Open on weekends since 2018, the former cop haunt has been transformed by owner Candice Bruno into an open-armed community cornerstone. A panoply of neighbors packs in for flavorful tropical cocktails inspired by her Caribbean heritage, as well as a fridge of unlikely beers and beverages of similar origins. But that’s just the beginning; she also hosts yoga classes, open mics, film screenings, and grocery giveaways, fostering a culture of care on Carey Street. A back nook sells books by local authors like D. Watkins, too. And then there’s the kitchen, turning out whole fish, house curries, and jerk chicken that only cement that taste of home.

Above: The front door, pouring a Whirlybird, and a view down the bar at The Pink Flamingo.

The Pink Flamingo

Remington

For devotees of The Dizz, seeing this 30th Street corner dive transformed into a tiki bar might’ve been a tough pill to swallow. But the Dutch Courage team has made it a point to preserve that local tavern feel since opening this spring. Yes, the menu now favors rum over shots of rye whiskey, while the old jukebox and oddball art of the Elaine Stevens-owned days have been replaced by tropical tchotchkes. But it’s still the spot for game days, casual catch-ups, and burger nights. (Longtime regulars will also appreciate the return of pitchered beers and an upstairs ode to the pinball machines of past eras.) For the better, we can confirm that the cocktails are a real treat. A riff on the famous Jungle Bird (followed by a Fire Island blood-orange margarita) pulled us out of a recent midweek slump.

Above: The outdoor patio, a frozen piña colada, and the retro side room near the disco pit at The Royal Blue.

The Royal Blue

Station North

Randy Coffren and Rich Pugh just get it, man. From their flagship Johnny Rad’s in Upper Fells to their follow-up Snake Hill in Highlandtown, the hospitality power-duo has shown they know how to make a truly Baltimore bar, with The Royal Blue in Station North proving a third time really is the charm. From lunch through happy hour, it’s a no-fuss, friendly hangout, slinging shot-and-abeer specials and killer smashburgers on Maryland Avenue. Then at night, when partner Jimmy Crawford runs the place, the digs truly come to life. One of the most inclusive bars in town, everyone and their grandmother congregate here for fun-loving cocktails, from frozen piña coladas to espresso martinis on draft, and a downright good time. Honestly, we didn’t know how much we needed the back “disco pit,” where local DJs spin and dance parties break out every weekend, often into the wee hours.

Sisu Bar & Bottles

Little Italy

Since their spring opening on South High Street, this chic and easy wine bar in the former Joe Benny’s has quickly become the spot for aperitivo in Little Italy. Owners Chris Peters and Kate Hufton offer an ever-rotating roster of natural vinos and small-batch spirits, with half pours to full bottles indulging your inner sommelier. Nearby restaurants send diners here for drinks until their table’s ready, where they can mingle with neighborhood locals, industry folks, and sometimes, serving gelato, the owners’ 10-year-old son, Axl. The family calls Sisu their “living room,” and it certainly feels that way—especially since they live upstairs.

Above: Row 1: Table talk at The Royal Blue, an Old Sport cocktail at Southpaw; Row 2: Draft cocktails at The Royal Blue, a shot and a beer on the jukebox at Southpaw, bartender Doug Atwell pouring an order; Row 3: Guests mix Miller High Life, amaretto, and overproof rum into a fan-favorite Dr. Pepper shooter at Southpaw.

Southpaw

Fells Point

Other than Camden Yards, there might be no better place to watch baseball in this city than at this Cheers-like corner bar. There’s no grand TV set-up, but with songs like “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” on the jukebox and a suds section on the menu titled Ain’t the Beer Cold, every O's fan will feel right at home. If you’re lucky, on a winning night, there might even be a round of shots on the house from owner Doug Atwell—a local cocktail legend, neighborhood resident, and die-hard Birds fan. That kind of hospitality speaks to this circa-2022 stalwart’s character: always a pleasure, nothin’ fancy, steadfastly Baltimore, which is why it’s garnered such a loyal following. And, of course, because it has some of the most top-notch cocktails in town, including arguably the very best Old- Fashioned.

Above: Playing chess, the hotdogs, and the scene at Vision House.

Vision House

Charles Village

It’s hard to find a good bar these days that hasn’t already been discovered (and then inundated) by the internet. But walking into this 25th Street hole-in-the-wall is like stumbling upon a best-kept secret—and a Baltimore of yore. Residents of a certain age will remember this as the old Rendezvous Lounge, and some of that dive-y magic still lingers. Run by local friends since 2023, Vision House’s DIY vibe gets lifted by a fresh dose of classic cocktails (from negronis and daiquiris to paper planes), plus Old Westminster wines and local beer. It’s a cozy hangout with an eclectic, all-ages, more-the-merrier crowd: young hipsters, neighborhood old-timers, late-night industry folks, a posse of chess players participating in the side room’s weekly matches. Follow the checkerboard floor to the back for damn-good hot dogs by Mr. Roast Beast. For now, they’re only open on Fridays. But that only adds to the allure.

Above: Bartender and cover model Adam Estes, the dartboard, and pouring fresh lemon juice at The Wren.

The Wren

Fells Point

Last but certainly not least, The Wren is probably both Baltimore’s best bar and best restaurant right now. In this sturdy Aliceanna Street rowhouse, long home to the whiskey-heavy Birds of a Feather, husband-and-wife team Will Mester and Millie Powell now run the place like the Irish pubs Powell grew up on in her native Dublin. While he cooks sublime country fare in the ad-hoc kitchen, she and veteran bartender Adam Estes mind the bar, expertly pulling Guinnesses from the new copper taps. Though only opened this past winter, with its tin ceiling, single dartboard, slew of inherited regulars, and occasional well-behaved neighborhood dog by the front door, The Wren presents like a humble, time-worn, almost-forgotten bar. Which is its superpower. (Even with the onslaught of new visitors, thanks to recent national accolades.) Find a stool, order one of Estes’ lovely Blood and Sand cocktails, grab a snack from the chalkboard menu, and listen. You’ll hear far better stories than whatever’s on your phone.

Tipple Trends

FINALLY, MOCKTAILS ARE EVERYWHERE, AND THEY’RE BETTER THAN EVER.

IN AN ERA OF BRANDED MERCH, HOUSE MATCHBOOKS ARE NOW A MUST-HAVE SOUVENIR.

FROM PILSNERS TO LAGERS, LIGHTER BEERS ARE HAVING A MOMENT AS THE GO-TO BREWS.

IT’S TIKI TIME. TROPICAL COCKTAILS CONTINUE TO PROVE THEIR STAYING POWER.

MOVE OVER LEDS, AND LET THERE BE LIGHT. REAL CANDLES ARE SETTING THE MOOD.

ETIQUETTE 101

LOCALS ONLY

Tips and tricks for becoming a regular at your favorite bar, as gleaned from our local go-to bartenders.


Mind your phone.
You can’t get to know anyone, let alone make new friends, if you’re only looking at a screen. (That said, no shade if you just need to take a mental load off.)

Strike up a conversation.
Don’t be shy. Or, at the very least, give it a try. For starters, safe-bet topics are always the Ravens and O's in this sports town.

Come in with consistency.
Like a place? Go there. Then go there again. And again. Show your support. Become a recognizable face.

Be kind and patient.
It’s a two-way street, of course, but most everyone is doing their best these days. (And a sense of humor also goes a long way.)

Tip your bartender.
A monetary token of appreciation never hurts, especially in this economy. And it’s always noticed.

CLINK CLINK

CHEERS TO BEERS

Local breweries bubble up into vital and versatile third spaces.


It’s not news that Baltimore is home to a bevy of excellent breweries. But over the past few years, many of these beloved beer halls have become so much more than just stops for locally made suds. In fact, an evolution seems to be underway. The smell of toasted grain now mingles with an all-ages crowd who increasingly gathers in these neighborhood hangouts for a home-away-from-home, sure, but also their regular roster of feel-good happenings.

Wet City has vinyl and DJ nights. Monument City is a hub for bluegrass concerts. Union Craft is now a bona fide rock venue. Waverly Brewing is home to the monthly Honky Tonk dance party. Take the family to Nepenthe for dart league, drawing club, or themed trivia. Or roll deep with your buds to Peabody Heights—perhaps the fullest social calendar of all—for a near-nightly gathering. (We heart the bi-monthly Baltimore Record Bazaar.) And the list goes on and on. To which we say: Keep up the good work.

MAKE IT A DOUBLE

THE SIDE BAR

Local businesses with drinks not to miss.


Atomic Books:
Find a stocked selection of local craft beer at this Hampden bookseller’s back Eightbar, with readings to boot.

Current Space:
See hip happenings with high-concept cocktails (like the Japanese whisky Jujube Highball) in this Bromo gallery’s seasonal garden bar.

Hex Superette:
Don’t sleep on this York Road market’s cute counter, mixing vegetal cocktails and mocktails with house ferments (HEXy Mary for the win).

Le Comptoir du Vin:
We love many a restaurant bar, but especially this Station North bistro’s back patio, which is its own buzzy scene in warm months.

Mobtown Ballroom:
Between dips on this Station North dancefloor, sidle up to its L-shaped bar for liquid courage like Black Acres espresso martinis.

No Land Beyond:
Have fun and board games at this North Avenue activity mecca, with themed cocktails for drinking during Monopoly or Catan.

Ottobar:
Post-concert, rock on in this storied venue’s upstairs bar for more music, cheap boilermakers, and the best motley crowd.

FOR THE ROAD

BARTENDER WISDOM

City drink-slingers share life lessons learned from behind the bar.


“Be curious. Try new things. Ask questions.”

—PAM HANER, W.C. HARLAN

“When he was running Please Don’t Tell in New York, Jim Meehan said, ‘The older I get, the more I realize my job is mixing people, not just drinks.’”

—DOUG ATWELL, SOUTHPAW

“Build a bar as if it’s going to last for 100 years. Not something you have to change constantly in order to keep up.”

—RANDY COFFREN, THE ROYAL BLUE

“This job has taught me how to see people, from all walks of life, on the same level, and that’s given me a patience and compassion for which I’m extremely grateful.’”

—CHLOË VAUGHAN, MOUNT ROYAL TAVERN

“Never trust a Guinness that’s poured in one go.”

—ADAM ESTES, THE WREN

“A little bit of salt in almost any cocktail makes it better.”

—HANNAH SPANGLER AND ALLISON CROWLEY, MELANIE'S AT GRIFFITH'S TAVERN

Source

]]> The List: December 2025 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/events/baltimore-events-calendar-december-2025-holiday-festivals-lights-performances-markets-exhibits-concerts/ Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:13:58 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=177335
—Courtesy of Mount Vernon Place Conservancy

12/4. MONUMENT LIGHTING
Festivals. Did you know that there are some 10,000 bulbs that illuminate the Baltimore’s annual Monument Lighting? Taking place each year on the first Thursday of December, this now-beloved tradition—55 years this year and counting—lights up Mount Vernon’s 178-foot-tall monument in festive display of holiday cheer. “It’s like our Rockefeller Center Christmas tree,” Lance Humphries, executive director of the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy, which oversees the tradition, told us last year. For one night only, per usual, expect its impressive fireworks display, as well as a host of special offerings from local business, museums, and pop-ups throughout this historic city neighborhood.

12/2. JOSHUA CLARK DAVIS
Classes & Lectures. This local author-professor debunks the harmful myth that the Civil Rights Movement endured police violence without fighting back in his latest book. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. 7 p.m. Free.

12/2. CHRISTMAS WITH CHORAL ARTS
Music. A tradition for more than 40 years, the Baltimore Basilica chorus is joined by a brass ensemble to fill the room with holiday tunes. Baltimore Basilica, 409 Cathedral St. 7:30 p.m. Free-$79.04.

12/2-3. MIDWEEK: THE NUTCRACKER
Music. Dancers from the Baltimore School of Arts accompany the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to reinvent Tchaikovsky’s holiday classic. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. Tues.-Wed. 10 & 11:30 a.m. $7. 

12/3. WARREN WOLF CHRISTMAS VIBES  [Editor’s Pick]
Music. This local vibraphone virtuoso gives holiday cheer a jazzy twist alongside the powerful vocals of D.C.’s Imani-Grace Cooper. Keystone Korner, 1350 Lancaster St. 7-9 p.m. $30-35.

12/3. JINGLE Y’ALL
Music. WPOC presents a night of country music to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, including artists like LOCASH, which has Baltimore roots. The Recher, 512 York Rd., Towson. 7 p.m. $25.69.  

TO 12/4. DECEIVED
Theater. An adaptation of the thriller “Gaslight,” this play follows Bella, who is questioning her sanity as a mystery of manipulation unfolds. Everyman Theatre, 315 W. Fayette St. 7 p.m. $5-66. 

12/4. MONUMENT LIGHTING NIGHT AT THE WALTERS 
Festivals. Before the lighting, swing by the art museum for free, family-friendly activities. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. 5-8 p.m. Free. 

12/4. MCHC MONUMENT LIGHTING OPEN HOUSE
Festivals. Before the lighting, warm up with a self-serve hot cocoa bar and live holiday tunes, with early birds receiving a free hand-carved silhouette portrait by local artist Lauren Muney. Maryland Center for History & Culture, 610 Park Ave. 6-8 p.m. Free.

12/4. SUZANNE CIANI
Music. This trailblazing synthesizer artist brings decades of talent to this iconic show. Le Mondo, 406 N. Howard St. 7:30-10 p.m. $30. 

TO 12/5. NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU … 
Exhibitions. This solo art exhibition by Baltimore visual artist Nora Howell makes the invisible visible. Gallery CA, 440 E. Oliver St. Mon.-Fri. 12-4 p.m. Free.

12/5. THE HEAVY HEAVY
Music. Sip on local beers with taproom performances from The Heavy Heavy and Laney Jones & the Spirits. Union Craft Brewing, 1700 W. 41 St. 7 p.m. $34.16. 

12/5. LOVE NUT 30TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW
Music. This local ’90s indie pop quarter returns to their old stomping grounds to celebrate 30 years as a band with a special appearance. The Recher, 512 York Rd., Towson. 7 p.m. $32.37. 

12/5. FRIDAY NIGHT SWING & LINDY HOP
Dance. Drop in for an all-skill-level dancing lesson and practice your new old-school moves on the dancefloor. Mobtown Ballroom, 30 W. North Ave. 7 p.m. $10-20.

12/5. HOT IN HERRE: 2000S DANCE PARTY
Music. Pull out your lowest low-rise jeans and bedazzled bling for a night full of Rihanna, Eminem, Britney Spears, and other post-Y2K icons. Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St. 8 p.m. $21.17.  

12/5. ART AFTER HOURS: STEP INTO THE SUBLIME [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. Wander through the BMA galleries after regular museum hours with live music and art-making activities inspired by Amy Sherald’s new exhibition, American Sublime. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. 8-11 p.m. $35-45. 

12/5-7. BJC HOLIDAY SALE
Exhibitions. Shop handmade jewelry from Baltimore Jewelry Center students, instructors, and local artisans, then browse their yearly community exhibition, titled “Making Spaces.” Baltimore Jewelry Center, 10 E. North Ave. Fri. 5-8 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 12-6 p.m. Free. 

12/5-21. POE CHRISTMAS CAROL [Editor’s Pick]
Theater. The National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre performs “A Christmas Carol” in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, aka full of eerie suspense and terror. Motor House, 120 W. North Ave. Sat. 2 p.m., Sun. 8 p.m. Prices vary.

12/5-21. A TUNA CHRISTMAS
Theater. In the fictional town of Tuna, Texas, residents juggle the chaos of the holidays as the annual Christmas Yard Display contest is vandalized by an unidentified “Christmas Phantom.” Spotlighters Theatre, 817 St. Paul St. Times vary. $24. 

12/5-21. THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME
Theater. Stories of the past, present, and future intertwine for a family of five on Christmas Eve with humor and powerful emotion. Strand Theater Co., 5426 Harford Rd. Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. $15-22. 

12/5-31. GODDESSES, MYTHS, & MONSTERS
Exhibitions. Examine the nuances of misogyny through the dual perspectives of trans women and cis pregnancy with works by local artistic duo DanaidX. Maryland Art Place, 218 W. Saratoga St. Times vary. Free. 

12/6. HOLIDAY GREENS SALE
Fundraisers & Galas. Shop handcrafted wreaths, winter vase displays, Cylburn-themed gifts, and poinsettias to decorate for the season. Cylburn Arboretum, 4915 Greenspring Ave. 9 a.m.-12 p.m. Free.  

12/6. SOCK CREATURE SATURDAY
Classes & Lectures. Just in time for holiday gift-giving, turn a pair of fun socks into your very own sock animal at AVAM. American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy. 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Free. 

12/6. OLD TYME CHRISTMAS
Festivals. After Santa arrives by tugboat, enjoy photo ops, hot cocoa, and activities for kids around the Broadway Square. Fells Point Main Street, 1632 Aliceanna St. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Free. 

12/6. HOLIDAYS WITH HOOT
Family. Get up close and personal with animal ambassador owls, enjoy games and crafts, and sip hot chocolate during this festive morning. Irvine Nature Center, 11201 Garrison Forest Rd., Owings Mills. 10 a.m.-12 p.m. $10-15. 

12/6. AN ENCHANTED EVERGREEN
Exhibitions. Explore the Evergreen Museum twinkling in its holiday best, make your own ornament, enjoy gift shop discounts, and munch on festive snacks. Evergreen Museum & Library, 4545 N. Charles St. 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Free-$7.

12/6. NUTCRACKER! MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS BALLET
Dance. Tchaikovsky’s masterful score sets the stage with dazzling costumes and sets, exciting puppetry, and astounding ballet. Hippodrome Theatre, 12 N. Eutaw St. 3 & 7 p.m. $33-158.  

12/6. PARADE OF LIGHTED BOATS
Festivals. During this annual tradition, watch a dazzlingly decorated boats cruise ripple along the waterfront between Canton, Fells Point, and the Inner Harbor. Locations vary. 6 p.m. Free.

12/6. INTERACTIVE MOVIE NIGHT: DIE HARD
Film. Shout the lines, play games, test your Die Hard knowledge, and beware of squirt gun casualties, with prizes awarded for themed outfits. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave. 8 p.m. $29. 

12/6. CULTURALLY CURATED – SNEAKER CHIC EDITION
Festivals. This spin-off event is inspired by the museum’s annual gala, featuring live music, food, and art on display, all in the comfort of your favorite kicks. Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St. Times & prices vary. 

12/6-7. ELF IN CONCERT
Music. A screening of the cherished Christmas comedy is accompanied by a full orchestra performance of the film’s score. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. Sat. 7:30 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. $31-109.

12/6-7. HOLIDAY MAKERS MARKET
Market. Dozens of local artists and vendors are setting up shop for a smorgasbord of holiday gift options along the warerfront. Harborplace, 200 E. Pratt St. Times vary. Free. 

12/6-7. KICKIN IT WITH SANTA
Fundraisers & Galas. Compete in kickball and pickleball games during Volo’s annual fundraising tournament, followed by an ugly sweater after-party at One Star. 300 E. Cromwell St. 11 a.m. $30-484. 

12/6-7. MICA ART MARKET [Editor’s Pick]
Market. This three-floor holiday market features original artwork by MICA students, alumni, faculty, and staff. MICA Brown Center, 1301 W. Mount Royal Ave. Times vary. Free. 

12/11-20. THE NUTCRACKER [Editor’s Pick]
Dance. Dancers from Baltimore School for the Arts high school and younger TWIGS programs perform this magical holiday classic with a spin. Baltimore School for the Arts, 712 Cathedral St. Thurs.-Fri. 6 p.m., Sat. 2 & 6 p.m. Free.

12/6-23. THE POLAR EXPRESS TRAIN RIDE
Festivals. Be transported into the beloved holiday classic with a real train ride, visits from Santa, your very own silver sleigh bell, and more. B&O Railroad Museum, 901 W. Pratt St. Times vary. $55-115. 

12/6-31. HOLLY-DAYS
Family. December weekends will be filled with holiday crafts, photo ops, festive story time, and special appearances from Santa and animals at the Zoo. Maryland Zoo, 1 Safari Pl. Times & prices vary.

12/7. JINGLE ALL THE WAY FAMILY RUN
Sports. Join Charm City Run in this 5K race or one-mile walk, beginning and ending at Angel Park playground and amphitheater in Perry Hall. Angel Park, 9685 Honeygo Blvd., Perry Hall. 8:30 a.m. $28-40. 

12/7. CLAIRE ROUSAY
Music. This multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer performs her new album, A Little Death, inspired by the lack of sounds lurking at twilight, in this DIY venue in Charles Village. 2640 Space, 2640 St. Paul St. 6 p.m. $18.10-28.37. 

12/7. U.S. ARMY BLUES
Music. The U.S. Army’s talented jazz ensemble performs Duke Ellington’s “Nutcracker” and other classic Yuletide numbers. Keystone Korner, 1350 Lancaster St. 7 p.m. Free.

12/9. TREE TIME: WINTER SOLSTICE I
Classes & Lectures. Ahead of the winter solstice, learn about nature through stories, crafts, and exploration. Cylburn Arboretum, 4915 Greenspring Ave. 10:30 a.m. $7.18. c

12/9. CLASSICS & CONVERSATION
Theater. Scenes and songs collide to inspire dialogue about two beloved musicals, Hairspray and Real Women Have Curves,, featuring Chester Gregory who played the role of the former’s Seaweed on Broadway. Baltimore Center Stage, 7000 N. Calvert St. 5:30 p.m. $40. 

12/9. OH JOHNNY
Theater. Molly M. Shannon performs this one-woman clown show as Gildana Desdemona, a mystic medium who communicates with the spirit realm. Black Cherry Puppet Theater, 115 Hollins St. 7 p.m. $15-25. 

12/9-13. A LADEW CHRISTMAS [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. Enjoy a woodland garden light display, a tree lighting, caroling, gifts, and a tour the historic Manor House. Ladew Topiary Gardens, 3535 Jarrettsville Pke., Monkton. Times vary. $4-25. 

—Courtesy of Ladew Topiary Gardens

TO 12/10. FREDERICK CORNELIUS ALSTON
Exhibitions. In commemoration of the life and work of this African-American artist and educator, view paintings by Alston and others from the early 20th century. James E. Lewis Museum of Art, 2201 Argonne Dr. Tues.-Fri. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free.

12/10. STUFF THE TRAIN DANCE PARTY
Galas & Fundraisers. Bring new, unwrapped toys for kids of all ages and join DJ Kopec on the Roundhouse dancefloor. B&O Railroad Museum, 901 W. Pratt St. 6-8 p.m. $12-10,000.

12/10. BIRD IN HAND WINTER CRAFT & MUSIC NIGHT
Family. Enjoy holiday crafting and live music with Common Tone with some of the coffee and book shop’s seasonal treats available. Bird in Hand, 11 E. 33rd St. 6-8 p.m. Free.

12/10. SOCKS
Music. The talented JD McPherson presents all-original, rock-and-roll-themed Christmas songs from his debut holiday album with special guest Melissa Carper. Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St. 7 p.m. $35.56.

12/11. A VERY STOOP HOLIDAY AT THE SENATOR [Editor’s Pick]
Theater. Local storytellers share their truest holiday tales with a performance by musical guest Nelly’s Echo. The Senator Theatre, 5904 York Rd. 7 p.m. $25.  

12/12. STATION NORTH HOLIDAY MARKET
Market. Dozens of artists, makers, food and drink vendors, and musicians gather for this festive indoor and outdoor market. North Avenue Market, 12 W. North Ave. Times TBD. Free.

12/12. BETTER OFF DEAD 
Music. This premier local Deadhead band performs after a dozen years on the road together. The Recher, 512 York Rd., Towson. 7 p.m. $25.69. 

12/12. CIRQUE NUTCRACKER
Music. See Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker like you’ve never seen before, with Troupe Vertigo’s first-class cirque performance. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. 7:30 p.m. $37-107.  

12/12. GZA
Music. In celebration of 30 years of “Liquid Swords,” this founding member of Wu-Tang Clan performs with Phunky Nomads and Ill Conscious. Baltimore Sound Stage, 124 Market Pl. 8 p.m. $42. 

12/12. MUSIC UNDER THE DOME: PINK FLOYD
Music. This immersive visual planetarium experience tat zips you through space to Pink Floyd’s seminal album, “The Dark Side of the Moon.” Maryland Science Center, 601 Light St. 8 & 9 p.m. $35.

12/12-13. ANDREW DICE CLAY
Comedy. This outrageously successful and hilarious comedic legend brings his hysterical satire to this local stage. Magooby’s Joke House, 9603 Deereco Rd., Timonium. Fri. 7 p.m., Sat. 6:30 & 9 p.m. $64.99-420.  

12/13. CHARM CITY CRAFT MAFIA HOLIDAY HEAP [Editor’s Pick]
Market. Purchase local, handmade, original gifts from over 40 vendors during this beloved annual holiday market. 2640 Space, 2640 St. Paul St. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 

12/13. PINTS & PANIC HOLIDAY VENDOR MARKET
Market. Sip on beer and shop more than 25 local vendors in this annual holiday market at the Heavy Seas brewery. Heavy Seas Beer, 4615 Hollins Ferry Rd. 12-5 p.m. Free.

12/13-14. HANDEL, EXEMPLIFIED
Music. The Handel Choir helps listeners get in the holiday spirit with the angelic choral singing of works by the famed composer. Locations vary. Sat. 7:30 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. $11.37-57.95. 

12/14. MAYOR’S CHRISTMAS PARADE [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. Massive floats, local personalities, live bands, and Santa Claus travel through north Baltimore during this annual tradition of holiday cheer. Hampden and Medfield. 1-4 p.m. Free.

—Courtesy of The Mayor's Christmas Parade via Facebook

12/14. IN THE SHADOWS
Music. Manor Mill presents an afternoon performance by pianist Wan-Chi Su and baritone Rob McGinness in a beautiful exploration of harmony. The Loft, 2029 Monkton Rd., Monkton. 2-4 p.m. $27.50. 

12/14. BALTIMORE CLASSICAL GUITAR SOCIETY HOLIDAY CONCERT
Music. See the region’s best classical guitarists pick away at this timeless holiday tunes. University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1028 Hilltop Cl. 3-5 p.m. $15-20. 

12/14. A BAROQUE CHRISTMAS & CAROLS 
Music. Bach In Baltimore presents this Christmas concert with iconic works by composers like Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, with sing-alongs to boot. Church of the Redeemer, 5603 N. Charles St. 4 p.m. Free-$39. 

12/14. OTTOBAR MAKER’S MARKET [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. This belove rock venue’s indoor-outdoor bazaar spreads holiday cheer with handmade goods, hot drinks, food, and, of course, music. Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St. 5-9 p.m. Free.

12/17. BMI HOLIDAY MARKET
Market. Shop for last-minute gifts from over 30 vendors along the BMI waterfront, with special vouches for hot cocoa at the harbor’s Christmas Village. Baltimore Museum of Industry, 1415 Key Hwy. 4-8 p.m. Free. 

12/17-1/11. WICKED
Theater. This Broadway masterpiece tells the untold story of the witches of Oz, long before a certain girl from Kansas stumbled upon the yellow brick road. Hippodrome Theatre, 12 N. Eutaw St. Times vary. $68-336. 

—Photography by Joan Marcus

12/18-19. BOISTER WINTER SOLSTICE [Editor’s Pick]
Music. During this beloved annual tradition, these local icons of chamber pop perform their takes on holiday classics, featuring everything from Joni Mitchell to Tchaikovsky. An die Musik Live!, 409 N. Charles St. 8 p.m. $10-25. 

12/19. MUSEUM BY CANDLELIGHT
Exhibitions. Visit the historic home of Mary Pickersgill, maker of the Star-Spangled Banner over Fort McHenry during the War 1812, with seasonal activities, treats, and music of that era. Star-Spangled Banner Flag Museum, 844 E. Pratt St. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Free-$9. 

12/20. HELICON’S WINTER SOLSTICE CONCERT [Editor’s Pick]
Music. In this long-held annual tradition, renowned musicians Ken Kolodner, Robin Bullock, and Chris Norman unite for international sounds and seasonal tunes. Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd. 3:30 & 7:30 p.m. $25-45.

12/20. ANNUAL HANNUKAH CONCERT
Music. The Baltimore Klezmer All-Stars flood the seventh night of Hanukkah with the grooves and smooth moves of jazz. An die Musik Live!, 409 N. Charles St. 7:30 p.m. $10-20.

12/20. JONAS BROTHERS
Music. These pop-rock idols are set to “burn up” the CFG stage on their latest tour. CFG Bank Arena, 201 W. Baltimore St. 7:30 p.m. $53-258. 

12/20 & 29. HAMPDEN HOLIDAY MARKET
Market. Find the perfect holiday gifts from more than 40 local vendors with live music, poetry, hot drinks, and more on The Avenue. St. Luke’s Church, 800 W. 36th St. 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Free.

12/21. IVY BOOKSHOP WINTER SOLSTICE
Family. Gather for an outdoor evening of singing, storytelling, themed crafts, and a candlelit walk at dusk on the winter solstice. The Ivy Bookshop, 5928 Falls Rd. 4:30 p.m. $10. 

TO 12/22. BALTIMORE FARMERS MARKET
Market. Maryland’s largest farmers market brings the community together with local farms, food vendors, and live performances. Saratoga & Holliday St. Sun. 7 a.m.-12 p.m. Free.

12/22-23. BAH HUMBUG
Theater. Michael Harris and a team of the area’s best improvisers turn audience suggestions into a one-of-a-kind twist of a Dickens’ classic. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave. 7 p.m. $19-35. 

TO 12/23. WINTERFEST & HOLIDAY SALE 
Market. Find the perfect gift in this collection of hand-crafted ceramics created by Baltimore Clayworks artists. Baltimore Clayworks, 5707 Smith Ave. Times vary. Free.

TO 12/23. A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Theater. The Dickens holiday classic is adapted to take place in 19th-century Baltimore. Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, 7 S. Calvert St. Showtimes vary. $35-82.  

12/23. MODERN NUTCRACKER BALLET
Dance. This revamped Nutcracker replaces outdated scenes with a gender-neutral approach, female leads, and more. Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. 7:30 p.m. $32. 

12/23. A JOHN WATERS CHRISTMAS [Editor’s Pick]
Comedy. For an unconventional, raunchy, and downright alarming jab at Christmas, the city’s iconic auteur performs his annual holiday special that leaves audiences in stitches of laughter year after year. Baltimore Soundstage, 124 Market Pl. 8 p.m. $55-79. 

TO 12/24. CHRISTMAS VILLAGE
Markets. This annual holiday market of holiday goodies featuring a carousel, Ferris wheel, heated tents, craft vendors, and a beer garden. 501 Light St. 12-5 p.m. Free. 

12/28. NEW YEAR’S TEA
Food & Drink. Travel aboard the Mile One Express before indulging in a selection of fine teas, freshly baked scones, treats, and a champagne toast. B&O Railroad Museum, 901 W. Pratt St. 12:15 p.m. $50-70.

12/30. JOHN OLIVER LIVE
Comedy. This late-night talk show personality and award-winning writer returns to his roots as a stand-up comedian. The Lyric, 140 W. Mt. Royal Ave. 7 & 9:30 p.m. $88.15-175.15. 

TO 12/31. COLLECTIVE ACTION 
Explore the effort to improve organized labor throughout the 21st century through the stories and experiences of working Baltimoreans. Baltimore Museum of Industry, 1415 Key Hwy. Wed.- Sun., 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Free.

TO 12/31. CROSSCURRENTS
Exhibitions. The Contemporary Wing galleries contain works reflecting everything from environment and ecology to social protest, recuperation, and migration. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free.

12/31. NOON TIME NEW YEAR
Festivals. Ring in 2026 with fun activities for the family, like confetti cannon crafts, wish-tree resolutions, comedy shows, and more. Port Discovery, 35 Market Pl. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. $24.95.

12/31. NEW YEAR’S EVE FIREWORKS
Festivals. Ring in the New Year with a spectacular fireworks show along the waterfront at the. Inner Harbor. Locations & times vary. Free.

TO 1/1. MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET 
Festivals. The most festive block in Hampden is decked out in over-the-top holiday cheer. 700 block of W. 34th St. Sun.-Thurs. 6-10 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 6 p.m.-12 a.m. Free.

TO 1/4. SANTA CLAUS IS COMIN’
Music. This Motown Christmas revue features holiday tunes reimagined by the talented Nygel D. Robinson. Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St. Times vary. $10-60. 

TO 1/4. DECONSTRUCTING NATURE
Exhibitions. This collection of over 50 19th-century works on paper explores artist roles in transforming the environment into an industrial resource. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free.

TO 1/11. SOULFUL CREATURES
Exhibitions. View nearly 100 ancient animals from the Egyptian collection of the Brooklyn Museum and 10 works from our very own Walters Art Museum. Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 1-8 p.m. Free.

TO 1/19. INNER HARBOR ICE RINK
Family. Ring in the holiday season with the return of the Inner Harbor’s family-friendly ice rink. Inner Harbor Amphitheater, 200 E. Pratt St. Times & prices vary. 

TO 1/10. SUSAN GOLDMAN: THE ORIGIN OF SELF 
Exhibitions. This collection celebrates the 25-year artistic evolution and work of this esteemed printmaker, artist, curator, and filmmaker. Galerie Myrtis, 2224 N. Charles St. Thurs.-Sat. 2-6 p.m. Free.

TO 1/23. AMALIE ROTHSCHILD’S MODERNIST EYE [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. View Goya’s first major solo exhibition of this iconic local artist’s work since the gallery was named the exclusive representative of the Rothschild Estate in 2024. Goya Contemporary Gallery, 3000 Chestnut Ave. Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat. 12-4 p.m. Free.

TO 2/1. DAILY HUSTLE: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF I. HENRY PHILLIPS , SR.
Exhibits. This collection of images by iconic photographer I. Henry Phillips Sr. depicts Black Baltimoreans at work, curated by his grandson, Webster Phillips. Baltimore Museum of Industry, 1415 Key Hwy. Tues.-Sun. 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Free-$15. 

TO 2/1. JOHN AKOMFRAH
Exhibitions. View an immersive video installation from this London-based featuring perspectives of young Civil Rights activists of the 1960s. The Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free.

TO 2/15. MODERNISMS
Exhibitions. Explore modernist works of 14 Jewish artists, many from Baltimore, including Florence H. Austrian, Gladys Goldstein, and more. Jewish Museum of Maryland, 15 Lloyd St. Sun. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Mon.-Wed. 12-4 p.m. Free. 

TO 2/15. PAWS ON PARCHMENT
Exhibitions. See how cats were depicted in medieval manuscripts as beloved pets, hunters, and important symbols in the period’s culture. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 1-8 p.m. Free.

TO 3/8. ENGAGING THE ELEMENTS: POETRY IN NATURE
Exhibitions. View photographs, prints, drawings, and textiles illustrating air, water, earth, and fire against broader themes of ecological awareness and preservation. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free.

TO 3/8. THE WAY OF NATURE
Exhibitions. A collection of more than 40 Japanese, Chinese, and Korean artworks explore the many intersections of nature. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free.

TO 4/5. AMERICAN SUBLIME
Exhibitions. Don’t miss this powerful and poignant retrospective of works by one-time Baltimorean and artist Amy Sherald, from her portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama to the late Breonna Taylor and more. The Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free-$18. 

TO 4/27. TITAN
Exhibitions. Through rare photos and artifacts, take an in-depth look into the life of Maryland native Reginald F. Lewis, the first African American to lead a billion-dollar company. Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St. Mon., Thurs.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 12-5 p.m. Free

TO 8/31. FANTASTIC REALITIES
Exhibits. In this otherworldly exhibition, these surreal artworks challenge what’s real and navigate time and space. American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Free-$15.95. 

ONGOING. LATIN AMERICAN ART/ARTE LATINOAMERICANO
Exhibitions. For the first time, see over 200 artworks from the museum’s collection from South, Central, and North America and the Caribbean in one space. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thurs. 1-8 p.m. Free.

Source

]]> The Bmore Community Fridge Network Fights Food Insecurity, One Refrigerator at a Time https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/bmore-community-fridge-network-free-food-pantries-baltimore-city-fighting-food-insecurity/ Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:48:45 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=176390
Julie Kichline, Lila Perilloux, Marci Yankelov, and Liz Miller in front of the community fridge in Curtis Bay. —Photography by J.M. Giordano

The refrigerators are stationed all over the city. They come in varying sizes, some built into public shelving for canned goods, others standalone, many painted or decorated and looking more like art installations than food banks. They’re often remarkably beautiful, fitting into a Baltimore landscape already enhanced with salt boxes and murals and Little Free Library huts.

Just north of Patterson Park, there’s a mini-fridge, painted turquoise with the face of a cat. In Curtis Bay, another one is built into burgundy shelves stacked with canned goods and books in front of a community garden. In Hamilton, another, tucked inside a white-picket shed the size of a doghouse. And in Station North, next to another community garden, a full-size fridge is adorned with a stunning orange-headed bird, its wings spanning the breadth of the door.

Though the grassroots network started in February, by late summer the Bmore Community Fridge Network (BCFN) had 17 fridges installed around the city, plus 11 food pantries and three pet pantries, with more in the works.

Started by four women to address growing food insecurity around Baltimore, BCFN is not a nonprofit, nor does it rely on city or government funding of any kind. Rather, it was founded by a group of volunteers who coordinate free food, meals, and other resources across the Baltimore area.

Many of them met for the first time at their first community meeting, held the first weekend of August. Canton resident Julie Kichline, who owns Kik-line Design; Liz Miller, a Baltimore County Public Schools art teacher; retired consultant Lila Perilloux, from Anne Arundel County; and Marci Yankelov, a REALTOR® from Bolton Hill, each came to the project for varying reasons, but all share the same goal: to do something about the growing issue of hunger in Baltimore.

Until recently, the fridge network was an ad hoc system that people—both those who needed food and those who supplied it—discovered through word of mouth or accident. Most fridges are donated by either individuals or businesses, set up on someone’s front yard, and filled and refilled when needed. A loaf of bread, homemade soup in Tupperware, takeout Chinese food, a stack of sandwiches.

“That’s not good enough, in our day and age,” Miller says of that haphazard approach.

“I just kept thinking, there are a lot of resources, but it doesn’t seem like they’re connected,” says Yankelov, a longtime food pantry volunteer who co-founded the Baltimore Supper Club, a cooking group with thousands of members.

She was increasingly frustrated by food waste and disorganization. People wanting food would ask her to deliver a pizza or call her up at one in the morning to see if she could bring dinner. Meanwhile, food insecurity was growing, people were being laid off in droves, and funding was being cut.

So the BCFN was born, given a name and a home on Facebook, where volunteers post messages and news, as well as a map of locations, links to donation and sponsorship forms, and other helpful information. It’s still a grassroots network, a system of community organizers and volunteers, and it receives no funding but relies on generosity and donations—of food and resources, of the refrigerators themselves, and of time and spirit.

And the need is greater than ever. A 2024 Johns Hopkins study found that 28 percent of Baltimore-area residents reported experiencing food insecurity, defined as not having consistent access to quality food on any given day. Only 15 percent of those experiencing food insecurity are also unhoused, and, according to the Maryland Food Bank, nearly 39 percent of food-insecure Marylanders have too high an income to qualify for government assistance.

Recently, the issue has gotten even more acute, given soaring grocery prices and federal cuts to food-assistance programs. A 2023 USDA study put the number of food-insecure households that have children at more than 82 percent.

A 2024 JOHNS HOPKINS STUDY FOUND THAT 28 PERCENT OF BALTIMORE-AREA RESIDENTS REPORTED EXPERIENCING FOOD INSECURITY.

Community fridges gained popularity during the COVID pandemic, when grocery shelves emptied, food insecurity rates rose, and many people found themselves either out of work, stuck at home, or both. Many cities, from New York to Chicago, began fridge networks. Both Miller and Perilloux point to New Orleans—where Perilloux has lived and volunteered—as a successful model.

How many community fridges or community fridge networks exist isn’t clear, although the database Freedge, which tracks them and offers support and even templates for building a “fridge hut,” lists close to 400 in the U.S. with more worldwide. (The UK, which also has a food system in crisis, has an estimated 700 community fridges.)

A fridge hut is a necessary component, a way not only to protect the appliance itself but to buttress it, often literally, with shelves or cabinets for other items like canned goods, books, even pet supplies. In Hamilton, one volunteer built a housing unit, of sorts, to store the fridge. Miller arranged for a donated refrigerator, dropped it off, “And everybody in the neighborhood was like, ‘Is this a rabbit hutch?’”

The BCFN Facebook page reads like the local grassroots organization it is. “Major discounts on meat this morning at Safeway and I’ve been cooking all day!!” one volunteer posts. “If anyone is inspired to cook a bunch of eggplants, I’d be happy to get them to you tomorrow or this weekend. I also have some summer squash, basil, cucumbers, and jalapeños,” posts another. “I spent a few hours with some of the Youth Works young people re-portioning large trays of rescued Chinese food into containers. We have 30+ meals,” Yankelov writes. “Help! I’m at the rec center at Bentalou and Baker Sts. Which fridges should I drop to? These are like bagged lunches…a lot of them,” another voice chimes in.

It’s an informal web of generosity, commitment, effort, and time, with volunteers working together to stock the fridges and pantries across the city when and however they can. Various businesses and organizations donate some of the food; volunteers buy ingredients on sale or harvest produce from their own or community gardens. One day it might be a few hundred bagels, another a weekly donation from Panera. Still another, a box of pastries, a sale at Aldi, an Amazon ingredient wish list that translated into a box of homemade sandwiches.

Volunteers source containers and shelf-stable items, post messages to coordinate efforts, and regularly monitor the fridges. Someone cleans out wilted vegetables; another makes sure that bags of donated baked items are distributed among many fridges rather than dropped off at one.

“We’re encouraging people to label foods, to date the foods, to note if there are any allergens,” says Perilloux, who adds that she’s been adding vegetarian meals to her repertoire since she realized the need for them.

“The demographics of the fridges are all different,” she explains, noting that they’ll leave flatware at some sites for those without kitchens.

“We’re not responsible for starting from the ground up,” says Miller, “but we do house the map, and anytime we learn of a fridge or a pantry, we add it to the map.”

Some of the fridges were already extant, either set up by someone with an extra unit on their property, as part of a pre-existing organization—as with the Govans fridge, set up by a partnership between Loyola University and Calming Leaf Foundation—or moved by BCFN from another site. There’s also signage now, as well as QR codes that link the sites so that those who need food and those who want to help can connect.

“You can find the other locations, and you can learn that it’s just part of a larger movement,” says Miller. “You’re not alone.”

Dallas Fitzsimmons, an auto mechanic who’s lived in Poplar Grove for the last four years, still visits the fridge on Ashburton Street. After a catastrophic car accident, he was hospitalized for two years and lost everything he owned.

“Nothing but the clothes on my back and some wrenches and a suitcase,” he says. “When I moved in here, I ate out of that refrigerator about three days a week.”

Now back on his feet, Fitzsimmons has restarted his business and gives back to the community. “It brings me to tears,” he says now. “That refrigerator kept me from starving.”

The BCFN hopes to organize a system without giving up its grassroots community to help those in need. They don’t have a website; they’ve resisted becoming a nonprofit.

“We do everything without money,” says Miller, who admits she doesn’t know how much food makes its way through the system. But she prefers it that way. BCFN functions more like a barter system than an organization with paid employees, record keeping—and bureaucratic red tape.

“We had a guy, he lost his house, and he was like, ‘I have a full-size freezer and a full-size fridge, and it’s full of food, and we gotta be out in three days. So anybody who wants to come by, DM me.’”

Not only did the food get used, but volunteers came together to help him find a truck, a storage unit. “People were coming through for him. And at the same time, he’s busy coming through for others.”

As BCFN co-founder Kichline puts it: “Sometimes we help, sometimes we need help, and sometimes it’s both.”

“SOMETIMES WE HELP, SOMETIMES WE NEED HELP, AND SOMETIMES IT’S BOTH.”

In the back of Red Emma’s, the Waverly worker-cooperative bookstore and cafe, past rows of tables with folks on laptops with oat-milk lattes and tempeh BLTs, a large white fridge sits next to loaded bookshelves and a rack of clothes, all free for anyone who needs them, as are the contents of the refrigerator.

It’s a Waverly Community Fridge that started in January, a month before the BCFN was formed, and isn’t run by Red Emma’s so much as overseen by the bookstore and cafe staff.

“It’s here, it’s part of the network insofar as it helps people get access and know where they are,” says Red Emma’s Taylor Morgan. “The handy thing about having a restaurant and not wanting to have food waste is that whenever we have leftover food, we can package it up and put it in the fridge.”

As Red Emma’s already had a resource center for food, clothing, and hygiene and health supplies, it made sense to put the community fridge inside there, too. It was also, well, inside.

“Outside is difficult because it’s harder to monitor the cleanliness of it. The elements affect the fridge,” says Morgan.

There can also be issues with property ownership and electricity bills. Another plus with Red Emma’s is that it already functions as a community center, so it’s easy for folks to walk past the brick walls and Edison-bulb lighting and either drop food off or collect it.

“There’s no stipulations on who can put the stuff in the fridge and who can take the stuff out,” says Morgan. “And that’s our concept around mutual aid.”

On any given day, Red Emma’s might package up soup or chili or pastries that haven’t sold by closing time. If there’s a catered event at the restaurant, leftover platters might be donated. Other restaurants also have the option of bringing by leftover food, knowing that Red Emma’s can handle the items.

“There is such a demand,” Morgan says. “People of all ages—people with kids, elderly people—come here every day. We have regulars.”

“Food tends to not sit in any of the refrigerators. I mean, we can’t keep them filled,” says Perilloux. “I put 23 meals in a fridge yesterday morning, and they were gone in less than 30 minutes. I feel like, you know, we can’t do enough. We just cannot keep these fridges stocked. I went to the Govans fridge once, and there was a mom just sitting on the curb with her two kids, and she said, ‘Oh, I was wondering if somebody was going to come today.’”

“Everybody comes, the community, the church, so many people come,” says Val Clark, of the Filbert Street fridge in Curtis Bay. “I’ve been putting in, taking out, putting in, taking out. I probably do more putting in than taking out,” says Clark, a New Orleans native who moved to Baltimore in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and lives across the street from the Filbert Street site, which includes not only a community garden but an apiary and both chickens and goats.

“WHEN I MOVED IN HERE, I ATE OUT OF THAT REFRIGERATOR ABOUT THREE DAYS A WEEK.”

Jim Metz, a Fallston retiree, got involved with the BCFN after doing work for decades with both animal rescue and food donation. Between the shopping, making sandwiches and meals at home, and dropping off food, he spends about 30 hours a week volunteering.

“I saw [Perilloux’s Facebook] post and I thought, ‘Here’s something that I can do,’” he says. “My wife has been a social worker in the city forever, and I hear her stories about all the stuff that’s happening now, so I do whatever I can.”

Metz goes to various sites throughout the city, sometimes stopping at a few on each trip. “The fridge I go to first is empty, and I’ll fill it, and keep track on Facebook,” he says.

Metz juggles occasional donations but mostly pays for everything himself, combining grocery-store sale items plus vegetables and eggs he might get from friends with gardens and chickens. “And sometimes, you know, I barely get back into the car and fix my pictures to post, and there’s a couple people walking [to the fridge] from different directions. So yeah, we’re trying to help where we can.”

The BCFN volunteers wear many hats (metaphorical hats, often sun hats), as they coordinate food distribution through a web of partnerships, from private citizens to businesses to food banks.

“We’re not a nonprofit and I don’t know that we’ll ever be,” says Perilloux, who also moderates the Facebook group Feeding Baltimore, “but a lot of our donations get funneled through Leftover Love to the fridges.”

Omar Tarabishi co-founded the nonprofit Leftover Love at the beginning of 2024 to rescue leftover food from local businesses, working to collect donations and transport them to those in need. To date, the organization has rescued more than 98,000 pounds of food. But while this works well with larger donations, it becomes problematic with smaller ones.

So Tarabishi began filling the Linwood Community Fridge, which is near his Highlandtown home. “It’s been really great, because sometimes we get more of those smaller donations, and it doesn’t make sense for us to drop off at a large institution like Helping Up Mission or Charm City Care Connection or The Baltimore Station for veterans. Bringing a small bag of Jamaican patties to feed 500 men doesn’t make sense, right? So we would donate to a lot of these community fridges.”

Tarabishi, in turn, spread the word of the community fridges to his larger network. “We’ve put some of our donors and volunteers in touch with these closer fridges, to stock Ashburn, to stock Reisterstown, to stock Curtis Bay, as well as others all over Baltimore.”

He gives a lot of credit to the volunteers at BCFN for linking up the system. “People come to us because they’ve heard of BCFN, and they want to rescue the food to put in other BCFN fridges. We’re addressing food insecurity and food waste in Baltimore together, as well as just connecting neighbors.

“They can operate in the gray spaces or in the loopholes,” Tarabishi says of the grassroots network’s ability to maneuver outside the restrictions of larger operations that are tied to strict regulations. “They kind of saved us.”

Fridge by fridge, they’re saving a lot of us.

Source

]]> The List: September 2025 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/events/baltimore-events-calendar-september-2025-festivals-concerts-exhibits/ Tue, 02 Sep 2025 17:15:02 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=174728
—Courtesy of Purple Dot Public Relations/Micah E. Wood

9/13: LOVE GROOVE FESTIVAL
John Tyler is a name to know on the local music scene. The Baltimore-native producer not only puts out his own albums, but is an all-out champion for the city’s diversity of talent, whether he’s running his own record label for local artists, offering educational youth programming, or curating concert lineups for the likes of Camden Yards and our very own Best of Baltimore Party. And, of course, for the past nine years, he’s been hosting his beloved Love Groove Festival, bringing that same ethos of connection and community to this ever-growing annual tradition.

This month, don’t miss out on the festivities at Robert C. Marshall Park on Pennsylvania Avenue, with free entrance for performances by dozens of both local and national artists, including TT The Artist and Serpentwithfeet. While you’re there, peruse the expanded art gallery, pop into stalls featuring local restaurants and boutique shops, and partake in multiple wellness activities, including a group run, yoga session, and special Love Groove-themed Bike Party to kick things off. Entrance is free, with the good vibes lasting from noon to 8 p.m.—and likely long after the last encore. Robert C. Marshall Park. Pennsylvania Ave. Upton. 12-8 p.m. Free. 

9/3: PRAYER AND PEN
Lectures & Classes. AFRO publisher Frances Murphy Draper speaks on her grandfather’s legacy with a collection of 50 of his original prayers. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. 7 p.m. Free. 

9/5: MARSHALL TUCKER BAND
Music. Legendary country rock group Marshall Tucker Band headlines the Maryland State Fair’s infield show with special guest Orianthi. Maryland State Fairgrounds, 2200 York Rd., Lutherville-Timonium. 7 p.m. $42.50. 

9/5: ROBIN WALL KIMMERER
Lectures & Classes. This Braiding Sweetgrass author discusses her new children’s book, Bud Finds Her Gift, about a grandchild and grandmother on a search for meaning through nature. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. 7 p.m. Free. 

9/5: INTERACTIVE MOVIE NIGHT: JAWS [Editor’s Pick]
Film. To celebrate the classic thriller’s 50th, watch Jaws while taking part in silly games, Amity Island drink specials, deep-cut trivia, and prizes. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave. 8 p.m. $20-24. 

9/3-10/3: MUTATION
Exhibitions. Zo Gallery presents a collection of photographs by artist Jonathan Logan centered on decay and transformation. Mount Vernon Records, 231 W. Read St. Tues.-Sun. 12-6 p.m. Free. 

9/6: OYSTERS, BLUES, & BREWS
Festivals. Help preserve the Chesapeake Bay with a shoreline clean-up, demos on home conservation practices, an oyster stroll on the Tidewater Pier, live music, and more. Baltimore Peninsula, 321 E. Cromwell St. 12 p.m. Free.

9/6: MARYLAND CYCLING CLASSIC
Sports. World-class professional cyclists from across the globe on a new 17.9-mile circuit course sweeping through the city. Inner Harbor, Pratt St. & Market Pl. 8:30 a.m. Free.

9/6: CRACK THE SKY [Editor’s Pick]
Music. Celebrating their 50th anniversary, these iconic ’70s rockers are back on the road and once again “Living With The Lights On.” The Recher, 512 York Rd., Towson. 6 p.m. $49.10-64.55. 

9/6: BENSON BOONE
Music. This pop star will be flipping across the downtown stage on his American Heart World Tour. CFG Bank Arena, 201 W. Baltimore St. 8 p.m. $140-700.

9/6-7: AULA DE FLAMENCO
Theater. Learn about the social and historical culture of flamenco followed by an artistic performance and demonstration. Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Sat. 7:30 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. $20.

9/6-10/12: CEILIDH
Theater. This musical is full of Scottish dance culture and celebrates storytelling passed down through generations. M&T Bank Exchange, 401 W. Fayette St. Times vary. $89-146. 

—Courtesy of 'Ceilidh'/France-Merrick Performing Arts Center

9/6-20: PRESERVATION
Exhibitions. Trevor Shimizu creates artwork from things like scraps of plastic wrap and leftover paint, giving what would otherwise be discarded a new meaning. Art Hall, 101 E. 21st St. Sat. 1-4 p.m. Free. 

9/6-10/4: BACK TO THE REAL WORLD [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. A solo show by local street and mural artist Mike Byson, with a workshop (9/14) and artist talk (9/28). Atrium Artspace, 2029 Maryland Ave. Wed. & Thurs. 1-4 p.m. Free.

TO 9/7: MARYLAND STATE FAIR
Festivals. Close out the summer with thrilling rides, performances, farm animals, fried food, and more. Maryland State Fairgrounds, 2200 York Rd. Thurs. 5-9 p.m., Fri-Mon. 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Free-$15. 

9/7: GRATEFUL DEAD & PHISH FOR KIDS INFIELD PARTY
Music. This year’s State Fair infield show includes Ed Hough’s Dead Collective and PHOAM: A Tribute to Phish. Maryland State Fairgrounds, 2200 York Rd., Lutherville-Timonium. 11:30 a.m. $16-80.

9/7: LEON BRIDGES & CHARLEY CROCKETT
Music. These two Texas country stars celebrate their shared roots and long friendship in Columbia. Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. 6:30 p.m. $58-146. 

TO 9/8: NEW PERSPECTIVES OF HISTORIC EVERGREEN
Exhibitions. See the work of three Baltimore School for the Arts seniors who explored the museum through the lens of traditional 4×5 land cameras. Evergreen Museum & Library, 4545 N. Charles St. Available via guided tour. Free-$12.

9/8-13: GOOD NEIGHBOR DESIGN CAMP [Editor’s Pick]
Lectures & Classes. A series of designer talks and networking events aimed at continuing local education of design. Good Neighbor, 3827 Falls Rd. 

9/7-11/9: EXTREME HEAT
Exhibitions. See the work of fellows Rowan Bathhurst, Kei Ito, and Rachel Stein, who are working with Johns Hopkins University and local public health officials about the growing threat of increasing temperatures. Crow’s Nest, 116 W. Mulberry St. Sun. 1-5 p.m. Free. 

9/9: BECOMING THURGOOD
Film. Enjoy a premiere screening of this MPT documentary about Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall. Maryland Center for History and Culture, 610 Park Ave. 6-8 p.m. Free.

9/10: HAIM
Music. These soft-rock sisters grace the Columbia stage on their I Quit Tour. Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. 7:30 p.m. $68-290.

9/11: VISUAL ARTS FALL JURIED EXHIBITION OPENING
Exhibitions. Meet the talented young artists behind the juried show’s collection of furniture design, textiles, and more. Baltimore School for the Arts, 712 Cathedral St. 4-6 p.m. Free.

9/11: BROMO ART WALK [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. Stroll through the funky Bromo Arts District for an evening of open studios, exhibits, live performances, and installations. Bromo Arts District. 5-9 p.m. Free.

9/11: NOURISHED BY TIME [Editor’s Pick]
Music. This Baltimore-based synth-pop virtuoso performs with special guest Zsela. Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St. 8 p.m. 

9/11-13: MAE WEST: THE COMEBACK TOUR
Theater. Sex symbol, gay icon, and the O.G. prophet of Camp Mae West makes a tremendous comeback in this immersive comedy show. Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Thurs.-Fri. 7:30 p.m., Sat. 2 p.m. $15-25. 

TO 9/12: EROSCAPE
Exhibitions. This group show explores sensuality, desire, and the many forms of erotic connection. Night Owl Gallery, 1735 Maryland Ave. Thurs.-Fri. 4-8 p.m., Sat. 12-5 p.m. Free.

9/12: KITCHEN SINK STORIES [Editor’s Pick]
Theater. Join Stoop Storytellers for tales about the messes, magic, and memories of cooking. Our Time Kitchen, 117 W. 24th St. 7 p.m. $25. 

9/12: PUPPETS FIGHT BACK!
Theater. Mutual Obsession Circus presents a whimsical fundraiser featuring music, burlesque, drag, puppetry, and more. Le Mondo, 406 N. Howard St. 7:30 p.m. $20. 

9/12: SWEATY EYEBALLS ANIMATION FESTIVAL [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. During this beloved annual festival, see the latest in animation, with a special international shorts program and Baltimore showcase at Falvey Hall Theatre, with a corresponding group art exhibition at the nearby Area 405 Gallery. Falvey Hall Theatre, 1301 W. Mt. Royal Ave. Times vary. Free.

9/12-14: FELLS POINT OYSTER FEST
Festivals. Slurp up a variety of oysters with local beers, cocktails, live music, and kids’ activities. 733 S. Broadway. Fri. 2-10 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Free.

9/12-2/26: THE DAILY HUSTLE [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. A work-focused collection of photography from the archives of I. Henry Phillips Sr. stewarded by his grandson, Webster Phillips. The Baltimore Museum of Industry, 1415 Key Hwy. Tues.-Sun 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Free-$15.

—Courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Industry/Webster Phillips

TO 9/13: SUMMER 25
Exhibitions. This annual summer group show includes works by local legends like Grace Hartigan, John Waters, Keith Martin, and emerging artists like Heejo Kim and Amelie Wang. C. Grimaldis Gallery, 523 N. Charles St. Wed.-Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Free. 

9/13: KOREAN FESTIVAL
Festivals. Become immersed in local Korean culture with tastes of traditional Korean flavors, K-pop music, skincare and makeup, and more. Howard High School, 8700 Old Annapolis Rd., Ellicott City. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Free. 

9/13: LOCUST POINT FESTIVAL
Festivals. Check out local food, music, artisans, and other vendors like Cappy’s Pickles, Barton Art, and Gene’s Greens. Latrobe Park, 1627 E. Fort Ave. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free. 

9/13: CRAB FEASTIVAL
Festivals. Get crackin’ for a cause and enjoy all-you-can-eat crabs in support of programs for West Baltimore families. St. Francis Neighborhood Center, 2405 Linden Ave. 12-2 p.m. & 3-5 p.m. $60+

9/13: BALTIMORE RHYTHM FESTIVAL
Festivals. Enjoy two stages of live-music performances, open-mic sessions, children’s activities, vendors, and drum jams. 1600 Guilford Ave. 12-6 p.m. Free. 

9/13: ONE MARYLAND ONE BOOK
Lectures & Classes. Author Carole Boston Weatherford and son Jeffery Boston Weatherford share their book, Kin: Rooted in Hope, about their ancestors who helped found Maryland. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 158 N. Linwood Ave. 1:30 p.m. Free.

9/13: BMORE VEGAN BLOCK PARTY
Festivals. Celebrate sustainable living with local plant-based food, live music, vendors, and a bold commitment to zero waste. 100 N. Charles St. 3-8 p.m. Free. 

9/13: FATAL FAUNA: TIL DEATH DO US PART
Food & Drink. A wedding-themed murder mystery party complete with a decadent buffet-style meal and visits from animal ambassadors. Maryland Zoo, 1 Safari Pl. 6-9 p.m. $110-130. 

9/13: BALTIMORE SQUARE DANCE
Dance. Dancers of all skill levels are invited to try out some new moves with guided dance caller instruction. Mobtown Ballroom, 30 W. North Ave. 6:30-10:30 p.m. Free-$20. 

9/13: ADAM SANDLER
Music. This iconic comedian brings a mix of standup and singsong comedy on his new tour. CFG Bank Arena, 201 W. Baltimore St. 7:30 p.m. $54-504. 

9/13: BEETHOVEN X BEYONCÉ
Music. Queen Bey’s greatest hits meet Beethoven’s Symphony No.7 for an epic mashup. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. 8 p.m. Prices vary. 

9/13: SOCCER MOMMY
Music. Get into your feels with live music by this rising indie-rock star. Baltimore Soundstage, 124 Market Pl. 8 p.m. $25-35. 

9/13-14: QUEENS & KINGS & KNIGHTS & THINGS
Family. Let the kids don some armor for an enchanting weekend of jousting, royal-court encounters, a cardboard weapons forge, and a mighty quest. Port Discovery, 35 Market Pl. Sun.-Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Free-$24.95. 

9/13-14: BALTIMORE BOOK FESTIVAL [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. This year’s literary lineup features over 80 authors, six stages, literary panels, youth events, and a kickoff reception on September 12 at Peabody Heights Brewery. Waverly, locations vary. Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Free. 

TO 9/14: JEFFREY KENT
Exhibitions. View a collection of powerful artworks by this local artist and curator. Current Space, 421 N. Howard St. Sat. 1-5 p.m. Free.

TO 9/14: THE TENTH 10X10X10
Theater. This aptly named short-play showcase features 10 short plays written by 10 local playwrights, performed by 10 actors. Fells Point Corner Theatre, 251 S. Ann St. Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. $24. 

9/14: SOCK HOP WITH DJ ERIK
Music. Twist and shout to classic doo-wop jams from the likes of Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry in this weekend dance night. Manor Mill, 2029 Monkton Rd. 2-4:30 p.m. $22. 

9/14: OUTLAW MUSIC FESTIVAL
Music. This star-studded lineup features major talent like Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Sheryl Crow. Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. 4 p.m. $63.

9/14: PLEASE DON’T DESTROY: LIVE!
Comedy. Saturday Night Live’s own bawdy comedy trio presents two shows full of outrageous laughs. Baltimore Soundstage, 124 Market Pl. 6 & 8:30 p.m. $45.

9/16: ZIGGY MARLEY
Music. Bounce along to the sounds of reggae masters outside along the waterfront. Pier Six Pavilion, 731 Eastern Ave. 7 p.m. $42-147+. 

9/17: SONIA SOTOMAYOR: JUST SHINE!
Classes & Lectures. This Supreme Court Justice discusses her book, Just Shine!, which shows how helping others shine can bring out your own inner glow. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. 5:30 p.m. Free. 

9/17-3/8/26: ENGAGING THE ELEMENTS: POETRY IN NATURE [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. View photographs, prints, drawings, and textiles illustrating air, water, earth, and fire against broader themes of ecological awareness and preservation. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free. 

9/18-21: HIGH ZERO FESTIVAL [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. Musicians from around the world come together to perform in the East Coast’s premier showcase of experimental music and a long weekend of audible elation for the musically curious and open-minded. Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. 8:30 p.m. $10-60. 

—Courtesy of High Zero

TO 9/19: SUMMER SOUNDS AT THE SQUARE
Music. Belvedere Square’s parking lot transforms into an open-air market every Friday through fall with local live music, food and drink, and more. Belvedere Square, 529 E. Belvedere Ave. Fri. 6-9 p.m. Free. 

9/19: TODD MARCUS QUINTET [Editor’s Pick]
Music. This local bass clarinetist performs with his jazz quintet and Toronto clarinetist Virginia MacDonald in Mount Vernon. An die Musik Live!, 409 N. Charles St. 7 & 9 p.m. $10-36.50. 

9/19: AL GREEN
Music. One of the defining voices of soul music, this Grammy Award winner threads gospel roots with the smooth sounds of emotion-packed rhythm. The HALL at Live!, 7002 Arundel Mills Cl., Hanover. 8 p.m. $95-252.06. 

9/19-21: OKTOBIERFEST
Festivals. Fill up das boot with dozens of German and German-style biers all weekend long in Fells Point. Max’s Taphouse, 737 S. Broadway. 11:30 a.m.-11:45 p.m. Free.

9/19-10/12: TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Theater. This Pulitzer Prize-winning play tells the story of two Black brothers, Lincoln and Booth, surviving together amidst poverty and sibling rivalry. Spotlighters Theatre, 817 St. Paul St. Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. $24. 

9/20: TRIFECTA FESTIVAL
Festivals. Don’t miss this mecca of live cover bands, local eats, and artisans in Baltimore County. Maryland State Fairgrounds, 2200 York Rd., Lutherville-Timonium. 11 a.m. $35.99.

9/20: SCIENCE ARCADE
Family. During this family-friendly day, get hands-on with game creation with interactive activities like making a cardboard pinball machine and transforming into a video-game character. Maryland Science Center, 601 Light St. 12-4 p.m. Free-$29.95. 

9/20: CHARM CITY LIVE [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. Celebrate the city with local food, art vendors, kids’ activities, live-music acts, and more across from City Hall. War Memorial Plaza, Market Pl. & E. Pratt St. 12-9 p.m. Free. 

9/20: SUPER CITY
Music. Listen to a blend of genres with live performances by local artists like headliner Super City, Bodega, The Lunar Year, and Talking Points. Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St. 6:30 p.m. $21.17. 

9/20: BSO GALA
Music. Violinist Joshua Bell and maestro Jonathon Heyward open the symphony’s new season with its annual gala concert. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. 8 p.m. 

9/20: REBIRTH BRASS BAND
Music. In celebration of the New Orleans brass band tradition, this Grammy award-winning ensemble fuses jazz, funk, soul, and R&B. The Gordon Center, 3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills. 8 p.m. $45-50. 

9/20: PUPPET SLAMWICH
Theater. Enjoy an evening of live puppet performances for grown-ups with Hollins Market’s own Black Cherry Puppet Theater. Current Space, 421 Tyson St. 5 & 8 p.m. $12-20. 

TO 9/21: ONE CHILIAD
Exhibitions. Jann Rosen-Queralt presents three photographic series on environmental loss and potential for change in arctic and marine environments. The Peale, 225 Holliday St. Thurs.-Fri. 3-7 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 

TO 9/21: BLACK EARTH RISING
Exhibitions. This showcase contains paintings, sculptures, films, and other creative works by artists of color and Native identity that explore our complex connection to nature. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free-$10. 

9/21-3/8/26: THE WAY OF NATURE: ART FROM JAPAN, CHINA, AND KOREA
Exhibitions. A collection of more than 40 Japanese, Chinese, and Korean artworks explore the many intersections of nature. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free. 

9/22-12/10: FREDERICK CORNELIUS ALSTON
Exhibitions. In commemoration of the life and work of this African-American artist and educator, view paintings by Alston and others from the early 20th century. James E. Lewis Museum of Art, 2201 Argonne Dr. Tues.-Fri. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 

9/23: TALKING PAWPAWS WITH TREEBALTIMORE
Classes & Lectures. Pawpaws are one of the largest native edible fruit trees. Learn about picking and preparing them, then try them for yourself. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. 6 p.m. 

9/25: BALTIMORE HONKY TONK [Editor’s Pick]
Music. At this monthly dance party, learn how to two-step or just hear good tunes of the U.S. Navy’s Country Current band, with a full bar, lawn games, and firepits on-site. B&O Railroad Museum, 901 W. Pratt St. 6-9 p.m.

9/25: IAN MCEWAN: WHAT WE CAN KNOW
Classes & Lectures. This award-winning author discusses his new book, following a literary detective chasing the lost words of a love poem from over a century ago. Enoch Prat Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. 7 p.m. Free. 

TO 9/26: BALTIMORE JEWLERY CENTER GRADUATE EXHIBITION [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. See the work of emerging jewelers and metalsmiths nearing the end of their education. Baltimore Jewelry Center, 10 E. North Ave. Mon.-Tues. 1-10 p.m., Wed.-Thurs. 10 a.m.-10 p.m., Fri. 10 a.m.-3 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 12-6 p.m. Free. 

9/26: WINE & DINOS
Food & Drink. Sip on Linganore Cellars wines as you take a stroll through prehistoric history. Maryland Science Center, 601 Light St. 7-9 p.m. $40.

9/26: MICAH E. WOOD RECORD RELEASE SHOW [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. Celebrate new music from this beloved musician-photographer during this debut of his album, “You, Me, The Reign.” Current Space, 421 N. Howard St. 7 p.m. Prices vary.

9/26-27: CHARM CITY BURLESQUE & VARIETY FESTIVAL [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. Enjoy local burlesque performances, a mischief-filled masquerade, and classes and panels on all things burlesque during this weekend-long festival. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave. Times vary. $46-186.

9/26 & 28: HEYWARD’S TRIUMPHANT BEETHOVEN
Music. Music Director Jonathan Heyward presents Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and Symphony No. 7. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. Fri. 8 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. Prices vary.

9/26-28: ALL THINGS GO
Music. More than 40 top artists take the stage during this weekend-long festival, including Noah Kahan, Doechii, Kesha, and more. Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. Fri. 3:50 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 12 p.m. $178-396.75.

9/26-28: MARYLAND ITALIAN FESTIVAL
Festivals. The festival includes local artists and vendors, live music, bocce ball, carnival rides, and authentic Italian cuisine in Harford County. Ripken Stadium Parking Lot, 873 Long Dr., Aberdeen. Fri. 5-11 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-11 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Free-$12. 

9/26-10/19: JANE AUSTEN’S PERSUASION [Editor’s Pick]
Theater. This adaptation by Sarah Rose Kearns’s follows the resilient Anne Elliot in Regency-era England, complete with Austen’s signature sharp humor. Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, 7 S. Calvert St. Times vary. $31-69. 

9/27: RACE TO EMBRACE INDEPENDENCE 5K
Fundraisers & Galas. Race in support of Marian House, a holistic healing community for women and children in need of housing and services. The Marian House, 949 Gorsuch Ave. 7:30 a.m.-12 p.m. Free-$40. 

9/27: JOHNS HOPKINS CHILDREN’S CENTER MIRACLES IN MOTION 5K
Fundraisers & Galas. In support of the incredible work at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, run the 5K or walk a mile through the zoo, followed by a Critter Crawl Kids Dash. Maryland Zoo, 1 Safari Pl. 8:30 a.m. Free-$44.30.

9/27: BRUSH MURAL FEST
Festivals. A team of local artists come together to beautify the community with the help of volunteer painters. Station North Arts & Entertainment District. 12-3 p.m. Free. 

9/27: SWEET TOOTH SATURDAY
Food & Drink. Satisfy your sugar cravings with tastes of local handcrafted desserts from gourmet chocolates to wacky ice cream flavors. Harborplace, 301 Light St. 12-7 p.m. Free. 

9/27: PIGTOWN FESTIVAL [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. During this annual neighborhood festival, enjoy Baltimore’s only pig races, live music, local bites and brews, and more throughout Pigtown. Washington Blvd. 12-7 p.m. Free.

9/27-28: CHARM CITY CROSS [Editor’s Pick]
Sports. Partake in or watch a series of amateur and elite bike races for children and adults. Druid Hill Park, 900 Druid Park Lake Dr. 7:45 a.m. Free-$70.48. 

9/27-10/4: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS
Theater. This dazzling musical based on a bestselling novel tells the story of a man who reinvents his life against the colorful backdrop of a traveling circus. Hippodrome Theatre, 12 N. Eutaw St. Showtimes vary. $57-195. 

9/27-11/15: RICHARD AYODEJI IKHIDE
Exhibitions. A collection of new works by this Nigerian-born, London-based artist are on view in Bolton Hill. CPM Gallery, 1512 Bolton St. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. by appt. Free. 

9/27-1/11: SOULFUL CREATURES: ANIMAL MUMMIES IN ANCIENT EGYPT [Editor’s Pick]
Exhibitions. View nearly 100 ancient animals from the Egyptian collection of the Brooklyn Museum and 10 works from our very own Walters Art Museum. Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 1-8 p.m. Free. 

—Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum

TO 9/28: AUGUST WILSON’S THE PIANO LESSON
Theater. This Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows a pair of siblings with a cherished family heirloom: a piano carved with images of their ancestors previously owned by the family’s former enslavers. Everyman Theatre, 315 W. Fayette St. Times & prices vary. 

9/28.: ABELL COMMUNITY STREET FAIR [Editor’s Pick]
Festivals. See what makes Abell so special with food trucks, live bands, arts, crafts, games, a silent auction, and great local vendors. Abell Avenue, 30th and 32nd St. 12-5 p.m. Free. 

TO 9/29: HIGH SCHOOL JURIED ART SHOW
Exhibitions. This collection honors the legacies of local leaders and entrepreneurs by student artists from all 25 school districts across the state. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St. Mon. & Thurs.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 12-5 p.m. Free-$12.

TO 9/29: IT’S A SNAP
Exhibitions. View contest photographs depicting the beauty and diversity of the city and those who live in it. The Peale, 225 Holliday St. Thurs.-Fri. 3-7 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 

TO 10/3: ROTUNDA ROCKS CONCERT SERIES
Music. On Friday nights, catch performances from local bands along with food, drink, and family-friendly games. The Rotunda, 711 W. 40th St. Fri. 6-9 p.m. Free.

TO 10/10: LINDA DAY CLARK
Exhibitions. View the work of this Baltimore-born photographer, known for artfully capturing the everyday life of African Americans. Morgan State University, James E. Lewis Museum of Art, 2201 Argonne Dr. Tues.-Fri. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 

TO 10/11: THE BRAVE: AFFIRMING POWER, PRESENCE, & POSSIBILITY
Exhibitions. Inspired by the lyrics of Danielle Ponder’s “Some of Us Are Brave,” this collection features artists exploring the complexities of Black freedom. Galerie Myrtis, 2224 N. Charles St. Tues.-Wed. by appointment, Thurs.-Sat. 2-6 p.m. Free. 

TO 10/11: BOARDS & BREAKFAST
Sports. Kids under 12 can snack and learn to skate with local pro Joey Jett of Bmore Create as well as shredders from the Skatepark of Baltimore and Shape Skate Foundation. Jake’s Skate Park, 300 Key Hwy. 10 a.m.-12 p.m. Free. 

TO 10/19: MARYLAND RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL
Festivals. Be transported to a world of old-time whimsy with everything from turkey legs to medieval sword fights during this beloved annual festival in Anne Arundel County. 1821 Crownsville Rd., Crownsville. Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-7 p.m. $11.82-310.91.

TO 10/19: PSYCHEDELICATESSEN
Exhibitions. Take a trip into the cartoon universe of NYC artist Steve Marcus with his new series of Jewish pop art inspired by 1960s psychedelic hippie culture. Jewish Museum of Maryland, 15 Lloyd St. Sun. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Mon.-Wed. 12-4 p.m. Free-$10. 

TO 10/25: STUDIO COMPANION
Exhibitions. See how a simple object became a cherished pet for painter Raoul Middleman in this new exhibit. Raoul Middleman Studio Museum, 943 N. Calvert St. Sat. 2-4 p.m. by appt. Free. 

TO 12/22: BALTIMORE FARMERS MARKET
Festivals. Maryland’s largest farmers market brings the community together with local farms, food vendors, and live performances. Saratoga & Holliday St. Sun. 7 a.m.-12 p.m. Free.

TO 12/31: COLLECTIVE ACTION
Exhibitions. Explore the effort to improve organized labor throughout the 21st century through the stories and experiences of working Baltimoreans. Baltimore Museum of Industry, 1415 Key Hwy. Wed.- Sun., 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 

TO 12/31: CROSSCURRENTS
Exhibitions. The Contemporary Wing galleries contain works reflecting everything from environment and ecology to social protest, recuperation, and migration. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free. 

TO 1/4/26: DECONSTRUCTING NATURE
Exhibitions. This collection of over 50 19th-century works on paper explores artist roles in transforming the environment into an industrial resource. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Free. 

TO 2/15/26: MODERNISMS
Exhibitions. Explore modernist works of 14 Jewish artists, many from Baltimore, including Florence H. Austrian, Gladys Goldstein, and more. Jewish Museum of Maryland, 15 Lloyd St. Sun. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Mon.-Wed. 12-4 p.m. Free. 

TO 2/15/26: PAWS ON PARCHMENT
Exhibitions. See how cats were depicted in medieval manuscripts as beloved pets, hunters, and important symbols in the period’s culture. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 1-8 p.m. Free. 

TO 4/27/26: TITAN
Exhibitions. Through rare photos and artifacts, take an in-depth look into the life of Maryland native Reginald F. Lewis, the first African American to lead a billion-dollar company. Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St. Mon., Thurs.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 12-5 p.m. Free. 

ONGOING: LATIN AMERICAN ART/ARTE LATINOAMERICANO
Exhibitions. For the first time, see over 200 artworks from the museum’s collection from South, Central, and North America and the Caribbean in one space. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St. Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thurs. 1-8 p.m. Free. 

Source

]]> Baltimore’s Top Dentists 2025 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/health/top-dentists-baltimore-2025/ Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:33:09 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=172343
Each year, we celebrate the dentists who give us bright, healthy smiles. Browse this year's list to find professionals to meet your needs in every specialty of dentistry. We also chat with five of our top pros about why they love the work they do.

Edited by Christianna McCausland

Photography by Christopher Myers

Health & Wellness
June 2025


“If you had a patient in need of a dentist, which dentist would you refer them to?”

his is the question we’ve asked thousands of dentists to help us determine who the topDentists™ should be. Dentists and specialists are asked to take into consideration years of experience, continuing education, manner with patients, use of new techniques and technologies, and of course physical results.

The nomination pool of dentists consists of dentists listed online with the American Dental Association, as well as all dentists listed online with their local dental societies, thus allowing virtually every dentist the opportunity to participate. Dentists are also given the opportunity to nominate other dentists who they feel should be included in our list. Respondents are asked to put aside any personal bias or political motivations and to use only their knowledge of their peers' work when evaluating the other nominees.

Voters are asked to individually evaluate the practitioners on their ballot whose work they are familiar with. Once the balloting is completed, the scores are compiled and then averaged. The numerical average required for inclusion varies depending on the average for all the nominees within the specialty and the geographic area. Borderline cases are given a careful consideration by the editors. Voting characteristics and comments are taken into consideration while making decisions. Past awards a dentist has received and status in various dental academies can factor into our decisions.

Once the decisions have been finalized, the included dentists are checked against state dental boards for disciplinary actions to make sure they have an active license and are in good standing with the board. Then letters of congratulations are sent to all the listed dentists.

Of course, there are many fine dentists who are not included in this representative list. It is intended as a sampling of the great body of talent in the field of dentistry in the United States. A dentist’s inclusion on our list is based on the subjective judgments of his or her fellow dentists. While it is true that the lists may at times disproportionately reward visibility or popularity, we remain confident that our polling methodology largely corrects for any biases and that these lists continue to represent the most reliable, accurate, and useful list of dentists available anywhere.

This list is excerpted from the 2025 topDentists™ list, a database which includes listings for more than 250 dentists and specialists in the Baltimore area. This list is based on thousands of detailed evaluations of dentists and professionals by their peers. The complete database is available at usatopdentists.com. For more information call 706-364-0853; write P.O. Box 970, Augusta, GA 30903; email help@usatopdentists.com or visit usatopdentists.com.

Browse all of the winners, and more local dental resources, in our Top Dentists Guide.

Unless otherwise noted, dentist is based in Baltimore.

2025 TOP DENTIST WINNERS

DENTAL ANESTHESIOLOGY

MARVIN LEVENTER

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
410-706-2470

ORAL PATHOLOGY

JOHN R. BASILE

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-7936

ENDODONTICS

PRASAD CHALLAGULLA

Valley Endodontics
Owings Mills
410-356-6500

HOWARD M. COHEN

Endodontic Specialists
Towson
410-321-1266

DOV ELMAN

Advanced Root Canal Specialists of Howard County
Columbia
410-772-9600

CHARLES P. HERBERT

Access Endodontics
Ellicott City
410-224-6150

LINA JARBOE

Access Endodontics
Ellicott City
410-936-4478

MARK D. LENTZ

Annapolis Endodontics
Annapolis
410-268-4770

JEFFERY O. LUZADER

Chesapeake Endodontic Center
Annapolis
410-224-7556

KENNETH MANGANO

Pasadena
410-647-3453

CHARLES MANN

410-931-0250

JUDY Y. MELAMED

Endodontic Partners
Lutherville
410-821-5553

RAKSHA MIRCHANDANi

Endodontics of Maryland
Ellicott City
410-997-7668

JOHN MULLALLY

Endodontic Partners
Lutherville-Timonium
410-821-5553

GHULAM MURTAZA

Baltimore/Washington Endodontics
Ellicott City
410-203-1800

SEAN M. O’SULLIVAN

Carroll Periodontics, Endodontics & Implant Dentistry
Westminster
(410) 224-7556

SOHAM C. PATEL

Carroll County Endodontics
Eldersburg
410-857-5700

ANDREW M. REFF

Greenspring Endodontics
Baltimore
410-653-0900

BRENDA K. RICHARDSON

Towson Endodontics
Towson
410-321-5700

S. CRAIG SCHNEIDER

Centre Park Endodontics
Columbia
410-715-8951

JUHEON SEUNG

Sterling Endodontics
Glen Burnie
410-896-1737

GERARD J. SIMONEAUX

410-931-0250

PATRICIA TORDIK

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
410-706-6512

BRADLEY A. TRATTNER

Endodontic Specialists
410-653-2020

ERIC VOLK

Lutherville
410-828-7668

BRIAN T. WYCALL

Baltimore/Washington Endodontics
Ellicott City
410-203-1800

IRENE SPATES

D.M.D.

“As a pediatric dentist, I love coming up with creative ways to communicate with the little ones about promoting good oral health. Sometimes it involves singing while cleaning their teeth or storytelling about ways to prevent sugar bugs or cavities. Pediatric dentistry allows me to play while I work, all while instilling lifelong positive oral habits.”

GENERAL DENTISTRY

MICHELLE R. ANDERSEN

Fells Point Dental
410-970-0440

CHRIS ANDERSON

Annapolis Family Dentistry
Annapolis
410-267-7713

GARY S. BARKER

Pasadena
410-647-6453

DOUGLAS M. BARNES

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
443-271-2194

SCOTT L. BAYLIN

Catonsville
410-747-1115

RAY MARTIN BECKER

Howard County Smiles
Columbia
410-730-4674

JEFFREY M. BEHAR

Renew Dentistry of Timonium
Timonium
410-252-3717

HERBERT H. BENAVENT

Benavent Dental
Clarksville
443-535-9600

JOSEPH BENDERSON

Baycove Family & Cosmetic Dentistry
Severna Park
410-384-9030

BRITTANY W. BERGERON

Town Center Cosmetic Dentistry
Towson
410-828-8000

MAYA M. BROOKS

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
410-296-0136

JULIA M. BURCHETT

Freedom Dental Care
Eldersburg
410-795-0055

KELLY M. BURK

Fallston Family Dental
Fallston
410-877-3818

APRIL L. CALTON

About Smiles Dentistry
Annapolis
410-990-4700

LAWRENCE T. CHEN

410-235-8525

LYNN R. CHINCHECK

Timonium
410-561-8845

DEVON B. CONKLIN

Baltimore Dental Arts
410-705-7062

CHRISTOPHER J. CONSTANTINE

Osler Dental Professionals
Towson
410-321-1144

LISA D’AFFRONTE

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
410-706-3194

JOEL DANZIGER

Elite Dental of Towson
Towson
410-823-5950

LAUREN DEYO

MD Family Dentistry
Westminster
410-848-8229

PETER G. DIACOLOUKAS

Towson
410-282-3641

JON E. EDMONDSON

Edmondson Family Dental Care
Windsor Mill
410-220-5309

GEORGE E. EVANS

Dental Care of Baltimore
Randallstown
410-922-1601

SCOTT W. FINLAY

Arnold
410-757-6681

JAMES P. FINNEY

Finney Family Dental
Towson
410-828-8828

ALEX M. FISHMAN

Brilliant Smiles of Maryland
Reisterstown
410-833-8380

NICOLE C. FOREL

Light Street Dental
410-659-0900

KELLY FOSTER

Timonium Dental
Timonium
410-252-1200

HERBERT BRETT FRIEDMAN

Towson Smile Care
Towson
410-296-7599

KAREN A. GARBER

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
410-706-4517

LIYA GOITOM

Pearl Smiles
Elkridge
410-799-1793

A. GARY GOODMAN

Goodman Dental Care
Annapolis
410-849-6247

JEREMY GOODMAN

Goodman Dental Care
Annapolis
410-849-6247

HOLLY A. GREEN

Blue Heron Dental
Annapolis
410-224-9608

NED S. GREENBERG

Dr. Greenberg Family Dentistry
410-686-4646

ROBERT M. GRILL

TMJ Facial Pain Center
Towson
410-665-2202

ANTHONY HAMOD

Bel Air Dental Care
Fallston
410-593-1199

ELIZABETH M. HARRISON

True North Dentistry
Bel Air
410-838-8078

HANNAH HOGE

Smith & Co. Dental
Bel Air
410-638-0920

EUGENE HUANG

Southgate Dental Care
Glen Burnie
410-760-4455

ASHLEY I. IZADI

Valley Dental Health
Cockeysville
410-666-1178

TOMICKA JACKSON-GEORGE

Jackson-George Dental
410-685-2850

TARA J. JENSEN

Confident Smiles Dentistry
Annapolis
410-268-8701

OWEN P. JORDAN

Bel Air
410-838-1166

KEITH E. KARAS

Columbia
410-290-8040

JLAWRENCE A. KATKOW

Katkow Dentistry
Columbia
410-730-2020

PAUL J. KINSEY

Severna Park
410-544-4012

ERIC S. KNEUSSL

410-256-2930

GEORGE KREISHEH

Charm City Smiles
Timonium
410-913-5700

THERESA T. KUJALA

THERESA T. KUJALA Bay Area Dental
Aberdeen
410-272-2783

RITA M. KUREK

410-574-1188

LYNDSAY C. KUZMAK

LK Dental
Westminster
410-848-5656

STEPHEN M. KUZMAK

Towson View Dental Care
Towson
410-296-2388

EDWARD S. LAZER

Owings Mills
410-356-7799

PEGGY A. LEARY

True North Dentistry
Bel Air
410-838-8078

WILLIAM E. LEBOE

410-659-0616

ALBERT LEE

Lee, Bonfiglio, Vesely & Associates
Annapolis
410-989-8298

SCOTT LEVER

McDonogh Dental Associates
Owings Mills
410-363-2500

SICONG LI

Smile.Li Dental
Fulton
443-393-3988

GERARDO LINARDUCCI

Aesthetic Family Dentistry of Bel Air
Bel Air
443-512-0444

CRAIG LONGENECKER

Hereford Dental Health
Monkton
410-498-4330

JONATHAN S. MANDRAS

Bel Air
410-893-3613

CLAYTON S. MCCARL JR.

McCarl Dental Group
Millersville
410-431-3860

HERBERT M. MENDELSON

Mendelson Family Dentistry
Owings Mills
410-356-4100

DAVID B. MERGERIAN

Bel Air
410-838-1166

ROBERT S. MINCH

Lutherville
410-321-5777

BONNY G. MITCHELL

Mitchell Dental Care
Edgewater
410-956-8380

BRIAN MOORE

Owings Mills
410-356-1400

BARRY D. MURPHY

Towson
410-823-2953

WILLIAM I. NAGLE

Lifetime Dental Care
Bel Air
410-698-4980

JENNIFER OUAZANA

Cosmetic & Implant Dentistry of Maryland
Pikesville
410-602-8100

CAROLINE F. OWENS

Perry Hall
410-256-3410

CHRISTOPHER PARSONS

Reservoir Dental
Phoenix
410-628-0555

JOSEPH C. PASSARO

Wooddell & Passaro
Davidsonville
410-956-5555

VIKASKUMAR PATEL

Smile Savers Dentistry
Columbia
410-469-1890

BIVIN PHILLIPS

Lifetime Dental Care
Bel Air
410-879-4363

ANDREW I. PUPKIN

Owings Mills
410-581-1411

SUSAN S. RA

Touch of Smiles Dental Care
Cockeysville
410-628-1818

VAIBHAV RAI

Smile Loft
Glen Burnie
410-768-4488

SHANNON REVELEY

Southgate Dental Care
Glen Burnie
410-760-4455

LORY RICHTER

Bel Air Smile Partners
Forest Hill
410-879-4444

JOANNE B. RIEF

Crossroads Dental Arts
Owings Mills
410-363-2121

JOHN D. RITTER

Annapolis
410-267-7901

MICHAEL R. ROSEN

The Center for Dentistry
Lutherville-Timonium
410-505-0416

ONEAL F. RUSSELL III

Annapolis
410-263-4300

STACEY W. RUSSELL

The Tooth Place
Severna Park
410-647-4269

DANNY B. SARUBIN

Sarubin Family Dental
Pikesville
410-594-9500

ELIZABETH S. SATOLA

Dobbin Dental Suite
Columbia
401-997-9366

ALAN R. SCHARF

Belair Dental Care
Fallston
410-879-8424

ALLAN D. SCHULMAN

Glen Burnie
410-761-0095

ALI R. SEDIGHIAN

Ellicott City
410-465-3021

VERNON L. SHEEN

Annapolis
443-482-5202

GEORGE R. SHEPLEY

410-889-7100

PAUL JAY SHIRES

410-449-7656

ANDREW B. SMITH

Smith & Co. Dental
Bel Air
410-638-0920

DAVID STERN

Jarrettsville
410-692-6132

CRAIG W. STOUT

Crofton Dental Suites
Crofton
410-721-2610

H. MARK SUGARMAN

Owings Mills
410-363-2500

THOMAS SWAUGER

Timonium Dental
Timonium
410-252-1200

HOLLEH TAJALLI

Canton Smile Studio
410-921-0097

CHRISTOPHER P. TOOMEY

Toomey Dentistry
Towson
410-823-6000

ARON D. TURNER

The Denture Doctor
Pikesville
410-602-2070

ARTHUR VAIL JR.

Vail Dental Associatesr
Arbutusr
410-242-5111

RODRIGO VALLAR

Padonia Dental Associates
Cockeysville
410-560-1400

BRIAN VALLE

Millersville
410-987-9100

JENNIFER P. VIRMANI

Naylors Court Dental Partners
Pikesville
410-484-2722

MOHIT VIRMANI

Naylors Court Dental Partners
Pikesville
410-484-2722

FIONA VISMANS

Jones Falls Dental
Baltimore
410-435-8200

MATTHEW H. WALLENGREN

410-431-1868

CHARLES WARD

Baltimore Dental Arts
410-705-7062

JOSHUA P. WEINTRAUB

Stevenson Smiles
Stevenson
410-764-8500

MICHAEL J. WEITZMAN

Northwest Dental
Glyndon
410-833-6200

ALEXANDRA T. WELZEL

410-235-1233

JAMES B. WOODDELL

Wooddell & Passaro
Davidsonville
410-956-5555

MARY TEDDY WRAY

Laurel Bush Family Dentistry
Bel Air
443-512-8703

JUDY H. YU

Dental FX
Pasadena
410-360-0440

JASON W. ZITOFSKY

The Tooth Place
Severna Park
410-647-4269

JUHEON SEUNG

D.D.S., M.S.

“When I was younger, I had severe dental misalignment that had to be corrected. This made me realize how powerful a healthy smile can be, not just physically but also in terms of confidence. As I learned more about [endodontics], I became fascinated with the artistry and precision involved in dental procedures. What I enjoy most about endodontics is the ability to provide relief to patients who are in significant pain and to save teeth that might otherwise be lost.”

ORAL & MAXILLOFACIAL SURGERY

BONNIE M. ARROYO

HarborView Surgical Arts
410-777-8276

BETHANY S. AWALT

Valley Village Oral Surgery Associates
Pikesville
410-581-9008

JOHN F. CACCAMESE JR.

University of Maryland Medical Center
410-706-6195

CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERS

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
410-268-7790

DOMENICK P. COLETTI

Central Maryland Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, PA
Columbia
410-997-1010

BOREK L. HLOUSEK

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
410-268-7790

JULIUS HYATT

Maryland Center For Oral Surgery & Dental Implants
Cockeysville
410-220-5220

ANUSH A. JOHN

Lutherville-Timonium
410-337-7755

KURT JONES

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
410-268-7790

BRYAN P. KEEGAN

Oral Surgery Associates
White Marsh
410-933-1008

KENNETH M. KUFTA

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
410-268-7790

JOSHUA E. LUBEK

University of Maryland Oral-Maxillofacial Surgery Associates
410-706-6195

SARAH Z. NAGHIBI

Maryland Oral Surgery Associates
Gambrills
410-721-0700

DANIEL T. RICHARDSON

Richardson Center for Oral and Facial Surgery
Elkridge
410-796-3333

J. ALEXANDER SMITH

Broadway Oral Surgery
Bel Air
410-838-6222

COLIN J. STANHOPE

Maryland Center for Oral Surgery & Dental Implants
Owings Mills
410-204-1467

CORNELIUS J. SULLIVAN

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
410-268-7790

AARON J. VAFAKOS

Broadway Oral Surgery
Bel Air
410-838-6222

CLIFFORD S. WALZER

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
410-268-7790

MINAS ZOULIS

Valley Village Oral Surgey
Lutherville-Timonium
410-581-9008

ORTHODONTICS

THOMAS BARRON

Barron Orthodontics
Timonium
410-628-0677

JOHN A. BENKOVICH III

Benkovich Orthodontics
Annapolis
410-268-1700

ROBERT P. BOLTON

Three Bridges Pediatric Dentistry & Orthodontics
Arnold
410-757-5437

DAVID B. BONEBREAK

Flagship Orthodontics
Hanover
410-779-8220

NICOLE C. BRUMMER

Brummer Orthodontics
Towson
410-415-1003

RICHA DUTTA

Ortho Roks
Hunt Valley
888-885-7657

AMANDA GALLAGHER WHETZEL

Amanda Gallagher Orthodontics
Multiple locations
443-272-4300

STEPHEN GODWIN

Bel Air Orthodontics
Bel Air
410-838-2244

ROBERT D. ISAACS

Drs. Isaacs, Nawy, Stern and Isaacs
Timonium
410-252-3880

MOHAMMAD IZADI

Izadi Orthodontics
Timonium
410-919-9806

KENNETH R. KYSER

Catonsville
410-744-0260

STEPHEN LABBE

Labbe Family Orthodontics
Gambrills
443-603-3448

JULIE LANGGUTH

Annapolis Orthodontics
Annapolis
410-266-8880

JOSEPH LAPONZINA

Bel Air
410-515-0035

MEGHAN P. MCINNES-PALMER

McInnes Palmer Orthodontics
Towson
410-823-1900

SCOTT G. NAWY

443-393-4900

MICHAEL NOORANI

Noorani Orthodontics
Glen Burnie
410-761-9180

ORA REINHEIMER

Philbin & Reinheimer Orthodontics
Annapolis
410-263-5600

DAVID R. ROSS

David Ross Orthodontics
Lutherville-Timonium
443-901-3100

TARUN SAINI

Saini Orthodontics
Columbia
410-730-1255

DINA SANCHEZ

Roland Park Orthdontics
410-296-4400

SANDRA E. SELNICK

OX Orthodontix
Ellicott City
410-740-0002

STEVEN M. SIEGEL

Orthodontists of Maryland
Glen Burnie
410-833-9330

ELIZABETH B. SPANNHAKE

Spannhake Orthodontics
Towson
410-321-5004

MOSHE T. STERN

Manchester
410-374-4882

LAWRENCE WANG

Baltimore Orthodontic Group
Catonsville
410-744-0260

ROBERT G. WINNARD

Odenton
410-551-9531

BENJAMIN D. WRIGHT

Wright Orthodontics
Severna Park
410-544-0072

ERIC WU

NuSmiles Orthodontics
Columbia
410-630-8189

NINA-CECELIA SANTOS

D.D.S., M.S.

“I tell my patients, ‘Turn your smile into a daily ritual of confidence.’ Every time you brush and floss, pair it with a power pose or a self-affirmation. Why? Because when you associate taking care of your teeth with feeling good about yourself, you’re more likely to stick with it. So next time you’re brushing, look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘This smile is strong, this smile is mine.’ Cheesy? Maybe. But confidence is contagious—and healthy smiles love that energy.”

PEDIATRIC DENTISTRY

GREGG T. BEHLING

Pediatric Dental Specialists
Arnold
410-757-5437

TRACY A. BOWDEN

Kids First Pediatric Dentistry
Timonium
410-828-5699

DIANA M. CAPOBIANCO

Growing Smiles Pediatric Dentistry
Bel Air
410-569-6700

HYEJIN ESTHER CHO

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Hanover
410-799-0780

ROXANNE CLARK

Kids Dental Space
Towson
443-241-7575

KAPIL DAVAR

Bel Air Pediatric Dentistry
Bel Air
443-567-5112

VIDHIMA DAVAR

Bel Air Pediatric Dentistry
Bel Air
443-567-5112

MICHELLE M. DECERE

Pediatric Dental Specialists
Arnold
410-757-5437

SANGITA T. DOSHI

Pediatric Dentistry of Columbia
Columbia
410-740-0144

MELENA EVANCHO PARLETTE

Dentistry for Kids
Hunt Valley
410-771-8200

EDWARD L. GINSBERG

Smiles 4 Children
Ellicott City
410-203-2410

GAL HERSHKO

Fulton Pediatric Dental
Fulton
410-988-4647

BEVERLY A. JIMENEZ

Chambers Family Dentistry
Annapolis
443-214-3119

MARTA JOLESZ

Chesapeake Pediatric
Dental Group
410-537-1725

SU KIM

Tiny Tooth Pediatric Dentistry
Columbia
410-622-9778

SHARI C. KOHN

Dentistry for Kids
Hunt Valley
410-771-8200

HAKAN O. KOYMEN

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
410-248-3384

JENNIFER MAI

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
410-248-3384

NEEL S. SATPUTE

Greenspring Pediatric Dentistry
Baltimore
410-484-4401

CHANI SIMHI

Baltimore Pediatric Dentistry
Pikesville
443-379-4085

RACHAEL L. SIMON

Smiles 4 Children
Ellicott City
410-203-2410

IRENE SPATES

Sparkling Charms Dental Studio
Baltimore
443-681-6455

LUZ M. TENNASSEE

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
410-248-3384

MAYA A. VERNON

Vernon Pediatric Dentistry
Severna Park
410-544-4888

MICHAEL T. VIRTS

Mt. Airy Children’s Dental Associates
Mount Airy
301-829-6588

SUSANNE S. WALLENGREN

Joppa Green Pediatric Dentistry
Lutherville
410-321-0200

SYLVIA YEN

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Hanover
410-799-0780

DAVID R. ROSS

D.D.S., M.S.

“When you improve someone’s dental health, you are giving a person the ability to have better overall health, not just orally but also systemically and psychologically. There is a large amount of research that proves people who have better dental health and smiles have better overall confidence and a more positive outlook on life.”

PERIODONTICS

Mary E. Aichelmann-Reidy

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-7961

WENDY C. BURSTEIN

McDonogh Dental
Owings Mills
410-363-2500

KYONG S. CHOE

Maryland Implant Dentists
Towson
401-821-8800

ANDREW H. CHON

Columbia Center for Periodontics & Dental Implants
Columbia
410-997-1189

HOWARD B. FISHER

410-532-2200

MORGAN BARKER HURWITZ

Maryland Implant Dentists
Towson
410-821-8800

SANJU JOSE

Columbia Center for Periodontics & Dental Implants
Columbia
410-997-1189

PETER E. JOSEPH

410-931-1000

JUSTIN W. KLEINMAN

Carroll Periodontics, Endodontics, & Implant Dentistry
Westminster
410-857-5700

MAUREEN H. LEFKOFF

Lefkoff Periodontics
Columbia
410-992-6600

BARBARA A. LESCO

Harbor Periodontics
410-727-6190

BRUCE P. MANDEL

Innovative Implants and Periodontics
Owings Mills
410-363-3780

ANGELA MIELE

Annapolis Periodontics
Annapolis
410-224-0500

DAVID A. MUGFORD

The Mugford Center for Periodontics & Dental Implants
Crofton
410-260-0790

KEVIN G. MURPHY

410-732-0202

KATHRYN S. MUTZIG

Towson Center for Dental Implants and Periodontics
Towson
410-321-9477

MARK A. REYNOLDS

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
410-706-7461

ARASH M. ROSTAMI

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
410-296-0136

HARLAN SHIAU

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
410-706-7961

KEYLA TORRES

Columbia Center for Periodontics & Dental Implants
Columbia
410-997-1189

LEO V. TRAIL JR.

Bel Air
410-569-8567

KIM-THI VAN-DINH

Harbor Periodontics
410-727-6190

THU M. VERSTEEGH

Harford Periodontics & Dental Implants
Bel Air
410-569-2243

MELODY WARD

Baltimore Dental Arts
410-705-7062

BRANDON WEST

West Periodontics
Lutherville-Timonium
410-252-0871

KARL J. ZEREN

West Periodontics
Timonium
410-252-0871

RODRIGO VALLAR

D.D.S.

“There is a misconception that there is a standard for a beautiful, healthy smile. Smiles and teeth come in all shapes and sizes, and there is no one-size-fits-all definition of what constitutes a perfect smile. Each person’s smile is unique, and what’s most important is that it reflects their individual health and confidence.”

PROSTHODONTICS

AREZOO A. BAHAR

Annapolis Prosthodontic Associates
Annapolis
410-268-7100

KEITH A. BOENNING

Boenning & Dancykier
Towson
410-828-1717

NATHAN DANCYKIER

Dental Implants & Cosmetic Dentistry of Towson
Towson
410-828-1717

JOHN P. DAVLIAKOS

Annapolis Prosthodontic Associates
Annapolis
410-268-7100

ANDREY DOROSHENKO

Owings Mills
410-697-6290

PEGAH GHIASI

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
410-296-0136

MICHAEL P. LINNAN

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
410-296-0136

RADI MASRI

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
410-706-8133

K. MICHAEL MURPHY

K. Michael Murphy DDS & Associates
410-235-1233

PATRICK L. OUSBORNE

Ousborne & Keller
Towson
410-828-1177

SEUNG B. PAIK

Ellicott City
410-531-6226

NINA-CECILIA SANTOS

Dental Designs of Maryland
White Marsh
410-220-2731

SARA SATIN

Annapolis Prosthodontic
Annapolis
410-268-7100

MARTIN SCHWARTZBERG

410-486-1133

GHASSAN G. SINADA

Maryland Prosthodontic Associates
Baltimore
443-519-5293

WILLIAM M. WAHLE

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
410-296-0136

Source

]]> Top Nurses 2025 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/health/top-nurses-baltimore-2025/ Thu, 08 May 2025 18:59:08 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=170556
—Photography by Christopher Myers

Each year, it’s our privilege to recognize a fraction of the thousands of nurses working in the area every day to make  patients’ lives healthier, safer, and happier. Without their skill and expertise, where would we be?

It is often said that nurses are “unsung heroes.” In this year’s feature story, we hear from nurses who are particularly unheralded, as they work outside the bright lights and camaraderie of hospital and community care settings—home health nurses.

In “Healing at Home,” writer Christina Breda Antoniades explores life for nurses who take care of patients who have been released to home but are not quite able to manage on their own. It’s a field that is only going to expand as the population ages, chronic conditions worsen, and more people require care outside the hospital.

Choosing these 158 nurses from the more than 600 nominations we received during our online submission period was a Herculean task undertaken by our panel of registered-nurse advisers, who gave their time and expertise to the selection process. Without their counsel, this list would not exist and we’re grateful for their time and insight.

DR. AMY ALSANTE
DNP, RN, NE-BC, CHEP, LSSGB
is the Chief Nursing Officer at Sunburst Workforce Advisors, with more than a decade of progressive leadership in acute and ambulatory care. Alsante holds a BSN from Towson University, an MS from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and a Doctorate in Executive Leadership from The George Washington University. She is passionate about cultivating cultures where exemplary professional practice can flourish, mentoring emerging nurse leaders, and creating innovative, fiscally sustainable care and staffing models.

LINDA K. COOK
PHD
is an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, where she teaches across all levels of nursing education. She has been a registered nurse for 48 years and is passionate about nursing. Her primary clinical background is critical-care nursing.

JULIA IRWIN
is has been a nurse for 17 years, all at Mercy Medical Center on the Inpatient Oncology Unit. The oncology population has a special place in her heart and she enjoys providing patients and their families excellent, compassionate care. She was on the Clinical Ladder, completing projects on medication reconciliation and group peer review. For the last seven years, she’s been the Clinical Nurse Manager and has enjoyed growing and supporting her staff. She’s a member of ONS and ANA.

JESSICA DECKER
RN, BSN, CPN
is the manager of the Pakula Infant Specialty Care Unit at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital. She is also a member of the Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital Vizient Nurse Residency Advisory Board.

CARLENE MELLO
is the nurse manager of a medical/surgery telemetry unit at GBMC. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees through the University of Phoenix and was a 2016 recipient of Baltimore’s Excellence in Nursing award.

DORHONJA NICHOLS
DNP, RN, NEA-BC
is the director of nursing for critical care and behavioral health services at the University of Maryland St. Joseph’s Medical Center. She is also a 2023 American Hospital Association Next Generation Leaders fellow and University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center Lean for Leaders graduate.

SARAH PORTER
is a director of nursing programs at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she is responsible for assisting the vice president of nursing with coordination of executive priorities and implementation of operational and strategic objectives.

KAYLENE ROSS
works part-time in perioperative education at MedStar Harbor Hospital, ensuring high-quality, safe patient care to surgical patients. Her more than 45 years of nursing experience includes open-heart surgery, pediatrics, labor and delivery, education, general and orthopedic surgery, ICU, and nursing leadership.

ACUTE CARE/FAMILY PRACTICE/GENERAL MEDICINE
Kayla Taylor
RN, Gilchrist Integrative Medicine at GBMC

ACUTE REHABILITATION
Lisa Leyrer
Nursing Director MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital

AESTHETICS
Kara Bagranoff
Aesthetic Registered Nurse Belcara Health

Amanda Pittillo
PA-C, ProMD Health Bel Air

CARDIOVASCULAR
Kim Caldwell
Charge Nurse MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

Kathleen “Kate” Jacober
Clinical Nurse MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

Kristen Reynolds
Nurse Case Manager UM St. Joseph Medical Center

Norma Velasco-Flores
Nurse Practitioner/Advance Practice Provider Heart Failure Clinic UM St. Joseph Medical Center

CASE MANAGEMENT
JoAnn Parr
Senior Director of Care Management, Utilization Review, and Care Transitions Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Jacqueline “Jacqui” Wienecke
Director of Case Management MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

CHILD ABUSE & NEGLECT 
Lily Grybauskas
Nurse Practitioner LifeBridge Health, Center for Hope

COMMUNITY CARE/AMBULATORY CARE
Ashley Clark
Nurse Navigator LifeBridge Health, Carroll Hospital

Carrie Mone
Registered Nurse University of Maryland Medical System

Priya Nair
Nurse Manager University of Maryland Medical Center

Eileen Simione
Registered Nurse Johns Hopkins Community Physicians

COMPREHENSIVE STROKE
Lindsay Goff
Stroke Coordinator BSN,RN,NRP UM Upper Chesapeake Health

Ariel Woodward
Stroke Program Coordinator MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

EDUCATOR
Jane Balkam
Professor of Nursing Notre Dame of Maryland University

Catherine Case
Clinical Affiliations Coordinator and Nurse Educator LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Carolyn Cash
Clinical Practice & Development Coordinator University of Maryland
Medical Center

Rodnita Davis
Post-Baccalaureate Registered Nurse Residency (PB-RNR) Program Manager, Program Manager, Nursing Affiliations, Coordinator, Pathway to Excellence Baltimore Veterans Affairs of Maryland Healthcare System

Maria Julienne Diloy
Nursing Practice and Professional Development Specialist The Johns Hopkins Health System

Jennifer Dinoto
Professional Development Specialist MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

Julie Ellis
Education Specialist Johns Hopkins Care at Home

Sarit Fleishman
Clinical Practice and Education Specialist University of Maryland Medical Center

Jessica Johnson
Professional Development Specialist MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

Kasey Mundell
Clinical Nurse II & Clinical Instructor University of Maryland R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center

Sarah Steward
Supervisor – Clinical Excellence LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

BENJAMIN TIMSUREN
INTERVENTIONAL PULMONOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND MEDICAL CENTER

“The absolute best part of nursing is the daily opportunity I get to help someone feel better, improve their symptoms, or facilitate their treatment and recovery. I really value being able to pair the education and technical knowledge I’ve learned as a nurse with my personality and feel like I’m being my best self.”

EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT
Lydia Bonvillain
RN, Forensic Nurse Examiner Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Sara Burchill
Nurse Manager LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Donna Criss
Staff nurse LifeBridge Health, Carroll Hospital

Pattie Diegert
Senior Director, Nursing UM Upper Chesapeake Health

Corinne Ebert
RN LifeBridge Health, Carroll Hospital

Ajitha Mattathil
Lead Clinical Nurse Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center

Ami Miles
ED Nurse Manager UM St. Joseph Medical Center

Alma Ta-asan
RN IV LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Kristi Twigg
Director of Nursing MedStar Harbor Hospital

JOHN JOSEPH FACUNDO
INTENSIVE CARE
LIFEBRIDGE HEALTH, SINAI HOSPITAL

“Throughout the years, I have held many fearful hands, been someone’s voice, witnessed families grieve. My patients might forget my name, and that’s okay, but not the way I made them feel. That’s how I know I’m doing it right.”

ENDOCRINOLOGY
Amy Wenz
Senior Nurse Practitioner The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

GERENTOLOGY
Maurine Gabriels
Registered Nurse LifeBridge Health, Levindale

HOSPICE/HOME HEALTH/PALLIATIVE CARE
Barbara Bell
Registered Nurse CMAG Health Solutions, LLC

Eyerusalem Hagos
NP Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Darleen Sullivan
Hospice Clinical Manager Gilchrist Integrative Medicine at GBMC

INFORMATICS
Connie Gibbons
Senior Clinical Systems Analyst LifeBridge Health

Ashley Shelter
Clinical Nursing Informatics Specialist MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

INTENSIVE CARE
Jennifer Delaney
Registered Nurse Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital

John Joseph Facundo
Charge Nurse, RN III, PCCN-CMC LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Amie Hyle
RN UM St. Joseph Medical Center

Melissa LaRue
Critical Care Registered Nurse Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital

Everette Livado
Registered Nurse LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Kayla Mandrykin
Registered Nurse LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Margaret McGregor
Charge Nurse LifeBridge Health, Northwest Hospital

Larisa Pokras
RN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Amanda Zambrano
Senior Clinical Nurse II University of Maryland Medical Center

INTERMEDIATE CARE
Fely Carillo
Clinical Nurse MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital

INTERVENTIONAL PULMONOLOGY
Ben Timsuren
Senior Clinical Nurse I University of Maryland Medical Center

INTERVENTIONAL RADIOLOGY
Jessica Dunn
Inpatient Nurse Navigator Interventional Radiology Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Holly Thorn
Interventional Outpatient Nurse Navigator Greater Baltimore Medical Center

LONG TERM CARE/POST-ACUTE
Lisa McKoy
Certified Nurse Educator LifeBridge Health, Levindale

MAGNET CORDINATOR
Abby Brzezenski
Magnet Coordinator MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital

MANAGEMENT/NURSE EXECUTIVES
Ashley Bandurchin
Assistant Director Professional Practice, Education, & Research Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Kristen George
Nurse Manager University of Maryland R  Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center

Andrea L’Heureux
RN, BSN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Cathy Mays
Chief Nurse Officer CMAG Health Solutions LLC

Glynda Murphy
Nurse Manager LifeBridge Health, Northwest Hospital

Sharon Owens
Executive Director of Nursing for Surgery The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Cindy Roles
Assistant Vice President of Nursing Operations MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

Kristen Sudano
Nurse Manager UM St. Joseph Medical Center

Leslie Taylor
Manager and Provider LifeBridge Health

GAIL ZEPHYR
MEDICAL-SURGICAL NURSING
MEDSTAR FRANKLIN SQUARE MEDICAL CENTER

“Nursing is synonymous with being empathetic, compassionate, caring, and being in service to others…I’ve learned to be grateful that I was able to care for patients and their families, to be gracious that on my next shift I would care for the same patient once they remained hospitalized, and grateful that they went home to continue their recovery.”

MEDICAL-SURGICAL NURSING
Sibley Barnes
Clinical Nurse IV MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

Nancy Bloom
RN LifeBridge Health, Carroll Hospital

Louela Cari-an
Registered Nurse II LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

David Hiett
Clinical Nurse MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

Melanie Hullana
Registered Nurse LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Leah Lewis-Garber
Nursing Outcomes Leader LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Hyeyon Kwon
Registered Nurse Baltimore Veterans Affairs of Maryland Healthcare System

Morgan Lutz
Charge Nurse LifeBridge Health, Northwest Hospital

Katie Pasqualini
Registered Nurse IV Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Karen Ponlaroche
Charge Nurse LifeBridge Health, Northwest Hospital

Gherell Regalado
Staff Nurse LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Sharon Romero
RN III Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center

Alyssa Wilkerson-Dietz
Clinical Nurse II UM St. Joseph Medical Center

Duncan Zeller
Clinical Nurse II University of Maryland Medical Center

Gail Zephyr
Director of Nursing MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

JODI FELIPE
WELLNESS NURSE
BRIGHTVIEW SENIOR LIVING ANNAPOLIS

“I’m a caregiver. I do whatever my residents need done and always smile, be kind. I believe the residents’ appearance and mood are a direct reflection of the care I’ve provided.”

MEMORY CARE/ASSISTED LIVING/GERIATRICS
Jodi Felipe
Wellness Nurse Brightview Senior Living Annapolis

NEUROLOGY/PSYCHOLOGY/BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
Edwin Juma
NP University of Maryland Medical Center

OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH
Christie Simon-Waterman
Nurse Practitioner The Johns Hopkins Hospital

ONCOLOGY
Kristie Davalli
Nurse Practioner LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Angela Galoppo
RN III The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Carol LaMere
Quality and Safety Nurse Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital Cancer Institute

Emily Little
Senior Clinical Nurse The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Matthew Magness
Registered Nurse UM Upper Chesapeake Health

Kimberly Mildner
RN Ascension Saint Agnes Cancer Institute

Kathy Mooney
Clinical Program Director Cellular Therapy The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Neelam Saini
RN I LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Kirsten Tomaschefsky
Assistant Nurse Manager/Interim Nurse Manager University of Maryland Medical Center

OPERATING ROOM
Jake Allam
BSN, RN Mercy Medical Center

Jeanne Delaney
RN, Assistant Nurse Manager University of Maryland Medical Center

Mac Gary Garcia
Senior Clinical Nurse I University of Maryland Medical Center

Nancy Gonzales
Clinical Nurse II MedStar Harbor Hospital

Donna McCormack
Clinical Nurse MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

Marshelle Morlock
BSN, RN Mercy Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstruction

Sarah Prock
OR RN II Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Clare Zimmerman
RIAO RN Team Leader LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Holly Watson
Clinical Nurse MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

ORTHOPEDICS
Rachel Nazareno
Registered Nurse LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Bianca Tilkens
Clinical Unit Coordinator Ascension Saint Agnes

Sara Trone
Staff Nurse LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

PEDIATRIC CARDIOLOGY ICU
Candace Spock
RN II The Johns Hopkins Hospital

PEDIATRICS
Vicki Lowe
Lactation Specialist Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center

Thomas Shelley
Ambulatory Nurse Manager LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

PEDIATRICS EMERGENCY
Jenna Spencer
Clinical Nurse Specialist The Johns Hopkins Hospital

PEDIATRICS: NEONATAL
Dorothy Jones
Clinical Nurse II MedStar Harbor Hospital

Angel Masemore
Clinical Practice Manager MedStar Harbor Hospital

Lindsay Sneller
Senior Clinical Nurse I University of Maryland Medical Center

PEDIATRICS: NON-NEONATAL
Samantha Amedore
RN Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital

Kim Bilott
RN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Tina Humbel
Nurse Manager University of Maryland Children’s Hospital

Jennifer Knox
Clinical Nurse II University of Maryland Children’s Hospital

Amanda Morris
Nursing Professional Development Specialist Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital

Hannah Riffey
Clinical Nurse IV – Inpatient Kennedy Krieger Institute

Emily Steer
CNII University of Maryland Children’s Hospital

Daisy Valladeres
CNII University of Maryland Children’s Hospital

PERIOPERATIVE SERVICES
Sara-Ann Ballard
BSN, RN, FNE-A, CAPA Mercy Medical Center

Annajeane Chua
RN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Angela England
Assistant Nurse Manager LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Patty Guthrie
RN III The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Everlyne Onyango
RN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Lisa Wisniewski
RN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

PSYCHIATRY
Janice Binns-Hines
RN I LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Tracey Burdock
Clinical Nurse II MedStar Harbor Hospital

Jamie Cherry
Psychiatric Nurse Coordinator – Outpatient Kennedy Krieger Institute

Andrew Fausto
Nurse Coordinator University of Maryland Medical Center

Davinder Varde
Registered Nurse LifeBridge Health, Carroll Hospital

Tina Vest
Nurse Practitioner The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

RADIOLOGY
Caitlin Kwedar-Wamba
Interventional Radiology RN III
Greater Baltimore Medical Center

CAROL LAMERE
ONCOLOGY
ASCENSION SAINT AGNES HOSPITAL CANCER INSTITUTE

“We’re always told: Don’t get too attached. Don’t care too much, because you have to be objective. But it doesn’t matter. You do care too much. And if you didn’t care too much, you wouldn’t be a nurse, you’d be something else.”

REHABILITATION
Jessica Leeper
Clinical Nurse MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital

STROKE COORDINATOR
Lindsay Goff
Stroke Coordinator BSN,RN,NRP UM Upper Chesapeake Health

SUPPLY CHAIN
Stacy Fisher Hill
Value Analysis Coordinator LifeBridge Health

SURGERY
Valerie Elliott
Lead Nurse Practitoner The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Tikiki Linston
RN III The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Cindy Walker
Wound Care Specialist Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center

SURGERY/MANAGEMENT/NURSE EXECUTIVE
Heather Cullen
Assistant Nurse Manager The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Kim Damon-Gant
Assistant Patient Care Manager Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center

Rose Karlan
Nurse Manager The Johns Hopkins Hospital

SURGICAL INTENSIVE CARE
Symone Everrett-Day
Clinical Nurse Specialist The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Madison Goundry
Lead Clinical Nurse The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Shannon Trainor
Lead Clinical Nurse The Johns Hopkins Hospital

TRAUMA
Farah Wittmeyer
Clinical Nurse II University of Maryland R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center

TRAUMA/SURGERY
Christina Interrante
Trauma Prevention Coordinator The Johns Hopkins Hospital

WOMEN’S HEALTH: GENERAL
Alexius Hall
Director of Nursing MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

Ashley McAree
Forensic Nurse/ Human Trafficking Liaison Greater Baltimore Medical Center

Leah Ruppe
Director of the Perinatal HIV Practice University of Maryland Medical Center

WOMEN’S HEALTH: LABOR AND DELIVERY
Michelle Hayes
Clinical Nurse II MedStar Harbor Hospital

Heather Johnson
RN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

Florence Okeke
Clinical Nurse II MedStar Harbor Hospital

Heidi Ransford
Clinical Nurse II MedStar Harbor Hospital

Summer Twist
RN LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital

WOUND, OSTOMY, CONTINENCE CARE
Christina Encarnacion
Wound Care Nurse MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

Sindhu Koneru
Wound Care Nurse MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

Source

]]> Into the Groove: Baltimore’s Vibrant Dance Scene in Photos https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/baltimore-dance-nights-club-venues-photos/ Wed, 19 Feb 2025 15:00:57 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=167319

Arts & Culture
Febuary 2025

ONE NIGHT back in 2015, I was walking home from work when I heard a hum coming from the corner of Ann and Fleet streets. I poked my head inside the brick building, the American Legion, Post Number 95, and found the small room packed with a five-piece band and several dozen dancers of all ages, swinging and spinning and dipping in time with the music’s swift tempo, as they did most Wednesdays.

The sight was mesmerizing, as if I had stumbled upon a secret society and, in many ways, I had. After all, one doesn’t usually think of the mid-aughts as one of America’s iconic dance eras—we tend to think of 1920s swing, 1970s disco, or even the techno, house, and Baltimore Club waves of the 1990s, when it was a part of everyday life.

And yet there in Fells Point, in the early 21st century, both stresses and smartphones were cast aside to partake in this deeply human pastime. A moment of uninhibited movement. Of rug-cutting abandon. Of connection and community. And for a brief spin, even bliss.

Undoubtedly, we could all use a bit of those feelings as we brave the ongoing winter and weather this new year. And luckily, as that fateful weeknight foreshadowed, it turns out that this city is full of dancing. On any given evening, Baltimoreans are two-stepping, lindy-hopping, crazy-legging, and moshpitting their way around town at a range of recurring dance nights, dance parties, and even dance classes.

And anyone can join them. As Alex Lacquement, host of the monthly Baltimore Honky-Tonk once told us, “I always tell people, if you can move your feet back and forth, and if you’re having fun, you’re dancing,”

Below, turn up the volume on our playlist—curated by Version DJ Kotic Couture—and feel the rhythm of the local scene. Then, whether you’ve got minimal skills or serious moves, find your own way to one of these very dance floors, too. —LW

Above: Version, a monthly queer and trans dance party, at The Compound. Opener: From left, Rocking out to disco-punk at the Ottobar; the Deep Sugar house-music dance party with DJ Ultra Naté at Club 1722; Background: DJs and disco ball on weekends at The Royal Blue.
Above: Scenes from the Ottobar, which hosts myriad dance nights, including Metal Monday moshpits; Version DJ Kotic Couture; DJ Rob Macy spins during the monthly Save Your Soul vinyl dance party at Lithuanian Hall; Version; The Royal Blue; Deep Sugar; Dancing beneath the disco ball on a recent winter night at The Royal Blue.
Above: Scenes from the weekly Lindy Hop at Mobtown Ballroom, which starts with a lesson for beginners; Boot scooting during the monthly Baltimore Honky-Tonk at Waverly Brewing; Showing off swing moves at Mobtown; The dance floor at Lithuanian Hall.
Above: Indie Sleaze Night at the Ottobar; the stacks at Save Your Soul; into the groove at Deep Sugar, which takes place on the Lord Baltimore Hotel rooftop during the summer; on the ones and twos with vintage 45s at Save Your Soul; spinning at Save Your Soul.
Into the wee hours of the night.

Source

]]> Rats: Baltimore’s Long History With Its Most Polarizing Pest https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/historypolitics/baltimore-rat-history-culture-community-extermination-solutions/ Thu, 02 Jan 2025 15:00:59 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=165747

Health & Wellness

RATS!

One city's long history with its most polarizing pest.

By Lydia Woolever

Photography Christopher Myers

Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare

December 2024

at the red-brick townhouse of Yvonne Richardson on a quiet corner in West Baltimore. Tucked behind Baker Street, away from the rushing traffic of Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s nothing but a patch of green grass and a lone municipal trash can, showing few signs of the bacchanal that breaks out here, night after night.

When the sun sets, a “mischief” of rats—that’s the term for a group of these rodents—emerges from beneath Richardson’s deck and along her wooden fence line. They skitter out into the evening, mingling with others in the adjacent alley, scuttling up and down its cracked asphalt, likely finding crumbs in empty bags of Utz potato chips or feasting on discarded chicken bones from the carry-out restaurant on the corner. In the standing water of puddles, they might wash it all down with a quick sip before dashing home before sunrise, out of the light, under the earth again.

ABOVE: JOSEPH WHITING OF DPW’S RAT RUBOUT TEAM ASSESSES THE AREA AROUND YVONNE RICHARDSON’S HOUSE. COLLAGE AT TOP: FISHING AND PETA. COURTESY OF THE MARYLAND CENTER FOR HISTORY AND CULTURE / BOX 8, FOLDER 2., PP284 AND FOLDER 1,PP284, JOSEPH KOHL PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION. TRASH CANS, HOUSES, AND SIGN. COURTESY OF THE UB ARCHIVES. RATS. SHUTTERSTOCK. ALL OTHER PHOTOGRAPHY, CHRISTOPHER MYERS.

Rats are nocturnal creatures, making them a rare sight to see during the daytime. But not for Richardson, who feels quite literally taunted by them—meaning no morning coffees outside, no afternoon barbecues—their persistence causing her to lose sleep at night.

“Right here!” she exclaims, pointing from her back door to the ground below, recalling her last run-in. “About four of them, just sitting there, looking at me, like, ‘What’re you gonna do?’”

She’s called the city to complain countless times, and so, once again, on this hot July morning, three employees of the Department of Public Works (DPW) are on site, wearing long pants, N95 masks, and latex gloves, roaming the yard and inspecting neighboring properties.

“We look for evidence—holes, droppings, runways—rats run along fences and walls, they use their whiskers to help guide them,” says Donald Brooks, crew leader of DPW’s Rat Rubout team, rattling off characteristics of the city’s most ubiquitous pest like a field ecologist. But, of course, his presence here today is not simply for scientific purpose. “Our mission is seek and destroy,” he says.

His target? The brown rat, aka the Norway rat, aka the wharf rat, aka the sewer rat, aka Rattus norvegicus, which happens to be the primary rat species not only in Baltimore, but most cities of North America, where it not only survives but thrives in the worlds of our human creation, just as its ancestors have for centuries.

“Rats like what we like, they adapt to the environment they’re in,” says Brooks, noting the rodent’s affinity for both trash-strewn streets and splendid green spaces. “Their lifespan is only about a year, but they multiply so quick—they breed like 12 in a litter, and in like 90 days, babies can have babies,” with each female rat reproducing as many as seven times a year.

Do the math, and that’s a lot of rats. Not to mention a lot of work for DPW.

ANTHONY HALL, DONALD BROOKS, AND JOSEPH WHITING OF DPW’S RAT RUBOUT TEAM, WORKING IN WEST BALTIMORE.

After surveying the area, his colleague, Anthony Hall, drops a yellow sign into at least a dozen identified burrows, with thick black letters warning adults, children, and pets to CAUTION and KEEP OFF. Brooks and fellow pest-control worker Joseph Whiting follow behind him, and with a long plastic nozzle, pump a plume of white powdered poison into each. They toss in a pack of poisoned bait for good measure, then fill the hole back up with dirt.

The whole process takes just a few minutes, but over the next several days, the rats will meet a gruesome end. By then, though, the Rat Rubout team will already be off to other locations, addressing every city district at least once a month in what they call “proactive” inspections, and also responding to an endless slog of 3-1-1 calls from residents reporting rat issues. As of late October, they’d completed more than 109,985 visits for 2024.

And yet, despite their best efforts, the rat remains a cunning adversary. The DPW team tells tales of rats walking around those black plastic bait boxes, about them kicking packs of poisoned bait out of their burrows, about them chewing through lead and concrete. Which is why it’s no surprise that the city’s relatively new trash cans—like the kind in Richardson’s yard, made of a thick composite resin, part of a $9-million purchase in 2016 aimed at reducing litter and in turn abating rats—have not been a magic bullet. They’ve certainly helped, says Hall, but that’s only “as long as people use them properly.”

He nods toward an overflowing can on the street corner, its lid ajar, a large gash the size of a fist gnawed right through it. Often enough, the rats get inside, spooking the city’s sanitation workers as they leap to frantic freedom during weekly trash pickups.

And so, after today’s poisoning, it’s just a matter of time before a new brood is back at Richardson’s, once again bingeing on the alley’s bounty. DPW will then repeat their process. In fact, they’ve been visiting this block for years now.

“It’s a never-ending story,” says Brooks, who has worked with Rat Rubout for four decades. (The program itself dates to at least 1943, when it was known as the Rodent Control Bureau, then under the Bureau of Street Cleaning. Later, rat removal fell to the Department of Health, then the Department of Housing, before finding its way to DPW in 2003.)

And Hall, a former sanitation worker who grew up in this very community, knows that first-hand. As a kid, it was not unusual for him to walk in the house and find a rat inside. On the steps, on the stove, on the kitchen table.

“In Baltimore,” he says, matter-of-factly, “there’s always been rats.”

TRASH CANS LINE AN ALLEY BEHIND RESTAURANTS.

Of course, Baltimore is not the only city with rat problems.

Despite its name, the Norway rat hails from thousands of miles beyond Europe, said to have originated in East Asia some millions of years ago. At first, it likely lived along streams and dined on a respectable diet of seeds, fruits, and insects. But as humans evolved, establishing permanent settlements and developing agriculture, the opportunistic species formed a sort of codependency. Slowly but surely, they spread west, with us, eventually hopping aboard boats and hitching rides around the world, their tiny remains even discovered in shipwrecks. Unsurprising then, that they’d find their way to the port of Baltimore, probably making first landfall in North America around the Revolutionary War.

Today, rats are found in every U.S. state and on every continent except Antarctica—as far as we know. They’re considered to be the second-most common mammal on the planet, just after humans, but even then, it’s hard to tell, their populations so large, their nature so elusive, making them nearly impossible to count.

“One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it,” wrote The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell in his seminal 1944 essay, “Thirty-Two Rats from Casablanca.” “In the whole city, relatively few blocks are entirely free of them.”

That’s why determining just how many rats live in any given metropolis is just a guessing game, with most estimates relying on the number of 3-1-1 calls—such as one website that recently ranked Washington, D.C., as the “Rat Capital” of the United States—or pest-control treatments, such as with Orkin’s annual list of America’s “rattiest cities.” This year, Chicago was ranked first, while Baltimore landed at a measly ninth—a personal affront to anyone who has ever cut through an alley or past a dumpster in this town. Let alone if you’ve ever had them living in your oven or walls.

Sure, rats might technically be more abundant in other cities, and New York certainly gets the lion’s share of attention, with its subway-scurrying, slice-dragging “Pizza Rat” being all but inducted into the internet’s viral-video Hall of Fame. But in Baltimore, rats have a certain omnipresence, invading everything from our vacant buildings to our fanciest restaurants, our nightly news to our national headlines, our pop-culture zeitgeist to our personal psyches. And as far as relationships go, it’s complicated.

The BALT rat bumper sticker.

Exhibit A: That infamous tweet five years ago, when then-President Donald Trump disdainfully declared Baltimore a “rat and rodent infested mess.” Baltimoreans were well aware of their rats, of course—didn’t like them, even hated them—but those were fighting words from a Manhattan billionaire.

“Give me the rats and roaches of Baltimore any day over the lies and racism of your Washington, Mr. Trump,” said local filmmaker John Waters within hours of the tweet, which specifically called out Maryland’s seventh congressional district, which then included both rural and wealthy suburbs—though clearly he meant the inner city, and its congressman, Elijah Cummings, a civil rights leader and son of sharecroppers who lived in majority-Black Madison Park. “Come on over to that neighborhood,” suggested Waters, “and see if you have the nerve to say it in person.”

FLIER FOR A CHARLES THEATRE SCREENING OF DESPERATE LIVING BY JOHN WATERS, CIRCA 1977. © JOHN WATERS, “DESPERATE LIVING,” 1977, VINTAGE FLYER, 11 X 8.5 INCHES, COURTESY OF CLAMP, NEW YORK

Waters’ own iconoclastic films have featured plenty of rats—on the cover of Desperate Living, in that Pecker sex scene, as a mood killer during a kiss in Hairspray—meant to elicit their own kind of shock and awe. Gross, mischievous, irreverent, and oddly charming, his depiction of rats fit right in with his lovingly twisted vision of Baltimore, in all its contradictions and complexities.

In that same spirit, over the years, some Baltimoreans have even adopted the rat as an unlikely mascot, making it the namesake of underground music festivals (Ratscape), the subject matter of performance art (RATS! by the Baltimore Rock Opera Society), and, most notoriously, the star of a now-prolific bumper sticker, featuring a whiskered silhouette and four capital letters spelling BALT, commonly spotted around the hipsterfied likes of Hampden.

It’s a polarizing affection, given that Black neighborhoods are disproportionately impacted by rat infestations, where they are more than mere nuisance—the rodents being vectors of serious disease and socioeconomic stigma.

And yet it’s also a quintessentially Baltimore defense mechanism. The city’s underdog attitude is often entwined with an ironic and self-deprecating sense of humor. Instead of bemoaning our struggles, some are embraced like a badge of honor. As if to take ownership of those flaws. As if to control the narrative from outsiders who seek to judge. Which is particularly true of rats.

After all, having made it through plagues, world wars, and the industrialization of society, they are nothing if not survivors. Baltimoreans can relate.

Still, Trump’s rhetoric struck a nerve. That fall, when he visited the city for a Republican conference, protesters planted a giant inflatable rodent bearing his resemblance, on President Street no less—certainly not the first time a politician has been compared to a rat, but doubly significant in this instance.

“If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land,” wrote The Baltimore Sun editorial board in 2019, in a piece titled “Better to Have a Few Rats Than to Be One.”

Of course, there are more than just “a few rats” in Baltimore. Decade after decade for more than a century, local officials have tried to tame their masses, and this spring, members of the city council renewed those same calls—part of a national wave of waging war against the rodent, their populations having especially proliferated during COVID.

But this time around, will it actually work?

FROM LEFT: THE CITY’S RELATIVELY NEW MUNICIPAL TRASH CANS, MADE OF COMPOSITE RESIN; RATS ARE ABLE TO CLIMB WALLS, SQUEEZE THROUGH CREVICES, AND EVEN SWIM.

To understand Baltimore’s rat problem, one must first understand Baltimore’s rats. They like city life, with all its people, food, and shelter. They live underground, in an intricate network of burrows, typically in groups of about two dozen, rarely straying far from home. On any city block, there might be as many as 10 groups, meaning hundreds of rats; if some die, the population bounces back quickly—as “fecund as germs,” The New Yorker’s Mitchell adeptly described them. And it’s quite impressive, actually: A single female can spawn a whopping 15,000 descendants in a single year.

About a foot long and a pound heavy, brown rats are omnivores, and they do eat trash—lots of trash, loads of it. But they’re also paradoxically picky eaters—perhaps because they’re anatomically unable to vomit, making them suspicious of new foods, thus difficult to poison. They prefer to avoid people, too, but will attack when cornered, their jaws strong, their teeth sharp, their agile bodies able to leap distances of several feet. They can also climb walls and squeeze through crevices. And they’re surprisingly strong swimmers.

Also contrary to popular belief, rats are clean freaks, spending hours each day grooming. But still, their cousin, the black rat has long been blamed for the Black Death of the Middle Ages, and our own brown rats are plenty dangerous. They carry lice and mites, as well as an array of illnesses that can be transferred to humans by way of flea, tick, bite, or feces—things like bubonic plague, salmonella, and typhus, to name a few. They’re also destructive—spreading debris, scarfing down drywall, destroying car wiring, at times starting house fires—causing billions of dollars in damages around the world each year.

And in many ways, they’re not all that different from us, either (more on that later), which is why they’ve become the second-most popular laboratory specimen after mice.

Throughout much of the 20th century, Baltimore was the epicenter of rat research, with the “golden age” of such science led by Johns Hopkins University ecologists David E. Davis and John B. Calhoun into the 1950s. Their extensive lab and field studies “remain the best source of information available for many aspects of rat biology,” wrote the authors of a new paper published in September’s rat-themed issue of the prestigious academic journal, Science. But all that actually began here even earlier.

Rats first made their way up the Chesapeake Bay and Patapsco River around the 1700s. On land, the rodents multiplied between the city’s wharves, warehouses, and narrow rowhomes, inspiring mom-and-pop exterminators to take out advertisements in the local newspapers as early as 1846. But no real dent would be made for another century, when, in 1942, Hopkins School of Medicine psychobiologist Curt P. Richter, later known as the “Pied Piper of Baltimore,” accidentally discovered a lethal compound that lab rats couldn’t taste.

And it was perfect timing. In the midst of World War II, Allied powers feared the Axis might use rodents as biological weapons. A key ingredient in the day’s most popular rodenticide then hailed from the war-torn Mediterranean, and in their scramble to find a substitute, the U.S. government employed Richter to test his new concoction in the back alleys of East Baltimore, then heavily populated by low-income Black residents.

The results were “quite encouraging,” wrote Richter in his 1968 memoir, Experiences of a Reluctant Rat-Catcher. Soon enough, he was hired by city hall. And over the next few years, his Rodent Control Project—the earliest predecessor of today’s Rat Rubout—baited the city from end to end, killing 900 rats at Lexington Market in a single evening, and well over one million when all said and done.

Effective? Evidently. Harmless? Not so much. Pets died. Children had their stomachs pumped. And after all that, young rats started to grow wary, eventually avoiding the poison entirely.

Enter the aforementioned Davis, who would take a far more holistic approach into the 1950s. Part of Hopkins School of Public Health, he instead focused on the role of habitat, believing “if you could control the environment, you could control the behavior,” explain Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden in their new book, Rat City, and thus limit the population size, perhaps even permanently.

His Rodent Ecology Project also coincided with the Baltimore Plan, an urban rehabilitation effort run by the city’s Health Department, which, through infrastructure improvements and code enforcement, intended to address its ailing neighborhoods.

Over the previous decades, through periods of immigration, urbanization, and industrial boom, low-income and predominantly Black residents had been crammed into overcrowded districts, riddled with dilapidated lodgings, deadly disease, and pervasive pests—each a byproduct of the city’s even longer legacy of racial segregation. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Baltimore had codified its Southern sympathies—from passing the nation’s first law prohibiting Black people from moving into white neighborhoods to enacting a slew of redlining real-estate practices and Jim Crow housing policies, which used factors like race and class to gauge risk and value. White neighborhoods were deemed “green,” while all but two Black neighborhoods were “red,” writes Antero Pietila in Not in My Neighborhood, “leaving behind a lasting stigma.” With limited housing options and no shortage of exploitative landlords, a vicious cycle of government-sanctioned discrimination and deterioration followed. Aka a Shangri-la for rats.

“Rats filled the niche created by the forces of racism and disinvestment,” writes Dawn Biehler, associate professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in her 2013 book Pests in the City. “Where disrepair was widespread throughout a building, block, or neighborhood, rats became entrenched residents.”

The Rodent Ecology Project saw only one solution: restricting the rodent’s access to food and shelter, a process that just so happened to be getting underway with the Baltimore Plan. “An all-out attack on bad housing conditions,” summarized The Sun in 1954—clearing yards, replacing fences, repairing windows, installing indoor toilets, sealing cellars, removing trash—“will reduce, possibly to zero, the number of rats in a neighborhood.” Because give them an inch, rats will take an entire block.

And it worked. For a while, at least. Little by little, landlords were forced to clean up. The city’s “sanitation squad” reported noncompliance. Property owners who couldn’t afford repairs were helped with funds. But over time, resources dried up, and the Plan dwindled. In its final years, organizers advocated for the creation of a new municipal agency to oversee the extensive and multi-pronged undertaking. But the city denied.

You see, politicians had already moved on, their attention now focused on the shiny new federal dollars of “urban renewal,” which meant instead demolishing those degraded homes and replacing them with public-housing projects that further displaced and segregated Black families (while also disturbing underground rat dens). Poor construction and inadequate maintenance only intensified inequalities for resource-strapped residents, and once more primed conditions for pests.

And as blight bubbled up again in Baltimore, so did tensions across America. “Rats cause riots!” chanted protesters on Capitol Hill in 1967. The House of Representatives had just blocked President Lyndon Johnson’s Rat Extermination Act, which would’ve provided $40 million for urban rodent control, part of a broader housing rehabilitation program. At the time, both experts and those engaged in the Civil Rights Movement knew that conditions like rat infestations were symptoms of larger systemic problems. But opponents blamed individual residents, their racist innuendo obvious as they openly mocked the legislation as a “civil rats bill.” Ironically, Congress was then spending $5,000 a year to keep its marble halls free of those very rodents.

Back in Baltimore, the same battle raged on, and poison returned as the primary weapon. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the city’s rat control efforts ebbed and flowed with inconsistent staff and funding. And so when the vermin humiliatingly devoured a 3,000-pound cake baked for the city’s big bicentennial celebration in the 1970s, Mayor William Donald Schaefer had had enough. Trying to bring things back from the brink, he threw a city-wide “Trash Bash,” bought a $10,000 “rat van,” and hired the Baltimore Theatre Project to perform a rat-themed educational drama at local elementary schools. But none of it stopped them.

By 1991, things had gotten so bad that some residents even reported the rodents swimming up their toilets. “If you accompany Rat Rubout workers on their poisoning rounds, you realize the city will never rub out all the rats in Baltimore,” wrote The Sun that year. “You get the impression that if Rubout bombardiers dropped a nuclear bomb over certain alleyways in the morning, people would die right away, but the rats would come out that night.”

Not that Baltimoreans would go out without a fight.

WILLIAM DONALD SCHAEFER POSING WITH NEIGHBORS AND HIS “TRASHBALL” PUBLICITY TRUCK, 1974; THE B.A.R.F. TOURNAMENT, 1994; THE AFRO CLEAN BLOCK CONTEST ON GILMOR STREET, 1945. COURTESY OF THE MARYLAND STATE ARCHIVES; THE MARYLAND CENTER FOR HISTORY AND CULTURE / BOX 8, FOLDER 2., PP284 JOSEPH KOHL PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION; THE AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS ARCHIVES

On a late-spring weekend in 1995, a peculiar tournament was underway on a residential corner of Fayette Street in East Baltimore, two blocks north of Patterson Park. For the past three years, contestants had gathered at the Yellow Rose Saloon, carrying rods, reels, and a hodgepodge of bait, including peanut butter and bacon. Inside the bar, they purchased three-dollar fishing licenses from B.A.R.F., aka the Baltimore Association of Rat Fisherpersons, and over the course of the next two days, cast their lines down the littered alleys in hopes of landing the largest rodent. That year, the top prize would weigh in at one pound, seven-and-a-half ounces, and more than 13 inches in length.

As ZZ Top blasted from the jukebox, onlookers, reporters, and animal-rights activists watched with awe and disgust. Once reeled in, the rats were beaten to death by a baseball bat—a demise that participants argued was still more humane than the city’s poison, then and now an anticoagulant, which essentially causes the creatures to bleed out over several days. And after all, they had a higher purpose, hoping to bring attention to this working-class neighborhood, beleaguered by crime, trash, and pests. All in all, a brutal but civic-minded stunt.

“It’s not one of the best neighborhoods in the world,” said Chuck Ochlech to The New York Times, the streets around the self-proclaimed “Ratman” scattered with smashed televisions, soiled diapers, and rotting garbage. “But we got to live here, and we’re doing what we can.”

EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS FROM MAYOR WILLIAM DONALD SCHAEFER’S RAT ERADICATION PROGRAM. —COLLECTION OF THE MARYLAND STATE ARCHIVES

At that point, communities were accustomed to taking matters into their own hands. After decades of failed promises, residents had gotten creative, with grassroots efforts ranging from educational campaigns to neighborhood street sweeps. Dating back to 1934, the Afro-American newspaper hosted an annual Clean Block competition, encouraging young people to scrubs stoops, paint doorways, and plant flowers for the chance to win a party. In the early ’80s, the Remington Improvement Association organized a three-year blitz, enlisting locals to poison burrows, collect garbage, and purchase trash cans, capping it all off with a “rat bash” at the corner church, during which kids pummeled a rat-shaped piñata named “Ratso.”

And then there were the vigilante residents who made it their personal crusade. Like Rosia McDaniel, known as “Mrs. Mac,” a nurse-turned-exterminator, who would hunt them down around Park Heights, poisoning some 14,000 rodents in a single month. She was known to grab them by her bare hands, iconically telling one Sun reporter, “They wouldn’t dare bite me.”

This is the same kind of cold-blooded heroism that helped Matthew Fouse rise to rat stardom in the 2000s. As a young adult, the Hampden resident spent evenings on the back porch of his Falls Road rowhome, drinking Natty Boh and using a pellet gun to plink off the panoply of rodents that tiptoed up and down his alley. (This was technically illegal, though the cops didn’t seem to care.) And when he moved to Abell a few years later, the hobby became a community affair.

“At first, the neighbors were scared to death,” says Fouse, a Pennsylvania native and lifelong hunter, but eventually they started calling to request his services, with a few even joining his ad-hoc neighborhood patrol. Some nights, they’d kill one. Other nights, they’d massacre 20. As a joke, he designed the group a logo and printed it on T-shirts. Those got so popular, he wound up selling them at local stores, and before long, the city’s most iconic bumper sticker was born.

“I never thought it would become what it is today,” says Fouse, who’s sold over a million stickers in all 50 states, earning him the nickname of “Rat Czar” along the way. “In the beginning, I’d get so excited to see one on the street. But then they started to look like rats—they were everywhere.”

Now you can find that BALT rat bumper sticker plastered on car tailgates, telephone poles, dive-bar bathroom stalls, Nalgene bottles—even tattooed onto the skin of some diehard fans. There’s also a limited edition, created after Trump’s tweet, featuring the rat in that well-known hairdo above the White House address. Fouse donated all proceeds to a local charity.

“Of course, a lot of hate came with it, too,” he says.

Indeed, the sticker has become divisive, critiqued for its insensitivity to the city’s deeply entrenched inequities, often sported by white hipsters but rarely if ever seen in the Black communities that deal with the worst rats. A 2016 Hopkins study linked rodent infestations in low-income neighborhoods with feelings of depression and distress. In other words, not all pests are equal, and maybe it’s easier to make light of a problem that’s not really yours.

“Anyone can cross paths with a rat, on the street, in their trash, even in their home,” says UMBC’s Biehler, “but the real difference is, how easy is it for you to get rid of them?”

Standing at the edge of his old alley off 33rd Street in early fall—its trash cans recently emptied—Fouse vows that he’s only ever had good intentions, be it uniting Baltimoreans over their common foe, or in giving everyone else the middle finger. “I hope the sticker can be a meeting point, and a sense of pride. Like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got our problems, and yeah, we’ve got our rats. But this is still a great fucking town,’” he says.

Suddenly, his eyes light up.

“Speaking of!” exclaims the Rat Czar, pointing to the neighbor’s fence line.

In the middle of broad daylight, a small brown rat rounds the corner, then disappears.

“RAT CZAR” MATT FOUSE POSES WITH A PELLET GUN AT HIS OLD HOUSE IN ABELL; GRAFFITI ART DEPICTS A RED CARPET FOR RATS TO THE SEWER.

Today, no one knows exactly how many rats live in Baltimore. But over the decades, a few surveys have attempted a census. In 1952, Davis, of Hopkins’ Rodent Ecology Project, estimated the city’s rat population to be about 48,000, though he admitted it was surely higher. Then in 2004, despite all that came after, experts surmised that those numbers hadn’t changed. By all accounts, it seems there are no fewer rodents today than there were some 75 years ago. If anything, there might be more.

Right now, the city has at least 13,000 vacant buildings, and another 20,000 vacant lots, with each abandoned property providing ample shelter for rats—the vast majority of them situated in the so-called “Black Butterfly.”

Coined by Morgan State University public-health researcher Lawrence T. Brown in his 2021 book of the same name, the “Black Butterfly” refers to the geographic areas to the east and west of downtown Baltimore. But more than just where Black residents are physically clustered—on either side of the central “White L”—it also reveals, both in the past and present, “where capital is denied and structural disadvantages have accumulated,” says Brown—the same communities that had been redlined all those years ago, enduring in a tangled web of political, economic, and environmental injustices for well over a century.

It’s no coincidence, then, that these are the same communities who suffer the brunt of illegal dumping and other litter issues. Or where, as a 2019 Sun analysis revealed, response times to 3-1-1 calls for dirty alleys disproportionately lag. And so it’s not simply bad luck that these parts of town also struggle the most with rats, or illnesses associated with them, like asthma.

1935 REDLINING MAP OF BALTIMORE, CREATED BY THE HOME OWNERS LOAN CORPORATION, FORESHADOWING THE LINES OF THE BLACK BUTTERFLY. —COURTESY OF SHERIDAN LIBRARIES, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

District 13—which includes majority-Black neighborhoods like McElderry Park and Middle East—receives the most Rat Rubout visits, a total of 17,439 as of press time in late 2024. But even that doesn’t tell the entire story. In District 7—where Richardson lives, which has received 7,555 visits, and was also ground zero for the city’s uprising following the police-related death of Freddie Gray a decade ago—the DPW team knows that there are persistent rat issues that simply aren’t reported.

“In the entirety of Sandtown, we only get a handful of calls,” says Rat Rubout’s Joseph Whiting, with the department receiving only 298 in 2023. “We try to tell people, it’s a free service, call as much as you want.”

Some of his colleagues call it apathy, but Whiting recognizes a sense of despair, recalling one elderly resident whose backyard, despite multiple treatments, still teemed with rat burrows. “I said, ‘How do you take the trash out?’ And she said, ‘Baby, I don’t . . .’ She had to walk it all the way around her block. These guys get on me, but I was almost in tears. You can’t help but take it personally.”

With an annual operating budget of $1 million, his 12-person team can only do so much. Rat Rubout also engages neighbors and leaves informational fliers, but they can’t just spray indiscriminately, requiring a resident’s permission to bait a property with Ditrac, the poison being toxic to humans, pets, and wildlife. And even when they do, their efforts are just a Band-Aid, especially in streets already strained with trash and vacants. The team reports those violations to the Department of Housing, which issues citations. But they can’t guarantee that landlords will pay them. And for some residents who own their homes, it’s an unaffordable expense.

“At that point, all we’re doing is hurting the poor more,” says DPW’s Hall. “It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Every few years, though, local politicians show up and demand that something must be done about this. The current call-to-arms comes on the heels of New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, who, despite his recent federal indictment, is leading a full-on assault against Manhattan’s rats. To that end, he hired the first-ever “director of rodent mitigation,” hosted a national “Rat Summit” of elected officials and experts, and created an online “rat information portal” for the general public. Then this fall, their city council passed a bill that would try another tactic: birth control.

Down I-95, back in Baltimore, this piqued the interest of city councilwoman Phylicia Porter, whose District 10, from Westport to Curtis Bay, is mired in not just trash and rats but additional health hazards related to its waterfront coal terminal and waste incinerators. And so earlier this year, she initiated a hearing between several city agencies and the council’s Health, Environment, and Technology Committee on the state of rat abatement.

“I want to emphasize that having a clean and healthy neighborhood is a fundamental right that our constituents deserve,” said Porter during her opening remarks in September. Over the next 50 minutes, efforts were reviewed, experiences were shared, and ideas were discussed, ranging from the familiar— increased community engagement, improved inter-agency collaboration—to the novel, including automatic resident consent for Rat Rubout treatments and that newly popular rodent contraceptive, known as ContraPest.

CITY COUNCILWOMAN PHYLICIA PORTER, WHO IS LEADING THE CURRENT CONVERSATION ON RATS.

Previously piloted in other cities like Boston and Chicago, the edible EPA-approved formula works by temporarily restricting fertility in both female and male rats, effectively reducing birth rates, just long enough to hopefully increase the impact of Rat Rubout. Distributed in protected boxes, it has a salty-sweet flavor that entices the rodents. DPW received one preliminary demonstration from the parent company in 2018. At the end of 2024, they ordered the first batch of product to initiate a pilot program. As of press time, there was no confirmed start date for its implementation.

Whether it works or not remains to be seen. After all, time and time again throughout the September hearing, trash was called out as the primary culprit. As long as it overflows, everyone seems to know, so too will the rats. Which ultimately raises the age-old question: Who bears more responsibility—individuals or their government? Unsurprisingly, fingers get pointed. More often than not, it’s dismissed as a “people problem.”

“That’s the softer version of a long history of stigmatizing people as rodents—of course Donald Trump being the most recent example of that,” says Lawrence Brown, also citing the city government’s own Municipal Journal, which referred to Black homes as “pest holes” in 1917. “If you say that people are responsible, you’re basically excusing the policies, practices, systems, and budgets that are really behind the conditions in which they live. It’s a way of erasing what’s really happening, and presenting the victims as the villains.”

What everyone can seem to agree on, though, is the sentiment that was shared by Councilwoman Danielle McCray, representing District 2 neighborhoods like Belair-Edison and Highlandtown, toward the end of the hearing: “What we’re doing right now, it’s not enough . . . it’s not enough.”

In addition to Rat Rubout, DPW oversees the city’s sanitation efforts: residential trash and recycling, street and alley cleaning, and lot maintenance (high grass being another hiding place for rats). More than 200,000 tons of waste move through Baltimore annually, not counting the estimated 10,000 tons in illegal dumping. And while officials claim those municipal trash cans have helped, residents still report unreliable weekly pickup, once again along the same socioeconomic lines. Surely the inconsistent recycling during COVID didn’t help, either, when private pest-control companies also noticed a sharp uptick in business.

In its new 10-year plan, DPW lists larger crews, local business outreach, and the hiring of resident litter squads among its opportunities for growth. Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Scott continues to host his annual spring and fall cleanups, and the city’s BMORE Beautiful program supports local communities through microgrants, adopt-a-lots, and environmental stewardship projects for youth. For his part, Governor Wes Moore wants to revamp 5,000 vacants over the next five years. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that rats will require a wide range of both immediate and sustained solutions.

“This is not an issue that is going to be solved by one strategy alone,” says Porter, an Edmondson Village native and Pigtown resident. Instead, she supports a three-tiered approach of community engagement, improved trash disposal, and ContraPest. “When we have a sanitation issue, a vacant housing issue, an absentee landlord issue, that is all connected to the rodent population and how it is proliferating throughout the city of Baltimore. . . . We have a lot of work to do.”

Still, she gets why residents might be skeptical about lasting results. The next council committee meeting is not yet on the books, and Baltimore has a tarnished track record when it comes to the follow-through of its elected officials.

In 2017, for example, Mayor Catherine Pugh launched HEAL, aka the clunkily named Healthy Elimination of All-pests Long-term, which continues to provide exterminations for a dozen public-housing developments throughout the city. But a year and a half after the program’s launch, Pugh resigned as mayor amid an unrelated scandal, which involved receiving special treatment from the University of Maryland Medical System.

In a fitting twist, one of their board members, Walter Tilley—a campaign donor who flew Pugh to a Las Vegas conference on his private jet—just so happens to own one of the region’s most popular pest-control companies, which was contracted for HEAL. At one point during her tenure, she even knighted him as the city’s “Honorary Rat Catcher.”

Today, one in three public-housing developments in Baltimore fails to meet federal inspection, according to a recent analysis from The Baltimore Banner, with rodents still cited as one of their many health and safety concerns.

DEAD RATS ARE A COMMON SIGHT ON THE CITY STREETS; A MURAL IN HAMPDEN INCLUDES MISCHIEVOUS RATS.

Throughout his research in the 1950s, John B. Calhoun— a protégé of Hopkins’ Davis—got certifiably hooked on rats. As their Rodent Ecology Project wrapped, he took what he’d learned in the streets of Baltimore, built a tiny replica block on an empty lot behind his house near Towson, and for the next two years, from a plywood observation tower, meticulously watched the creatures’ every move. His findings remain “the most comprehensive and complete account of rodent behavior ever produced,” write Adams and Ramsden in Rat City, noting that Calhoun knew more about this particular critter “than anyone else alive.”

Some of that, though, would come to haunt him. In his experiments, he found that rats built fairly civil worlds, but as conditions became overcrowded, things took a more dystopian turn, leading to societal breakdowns—interpreted by some as a warning for humanity. On the brighter side, his work inspired the classic children’s novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, earned him a consideration for the Nobel Prize, and influenced generations of scientists to come. He was also a muse for local filmmaker Theo Anthony’s much-buzzed-about Rat Film documentary in 2016, the soundtrack of which was created by local composer Dan Deacon using live rats.

The soundtrack for Rat Film, by local artist Dan Deacon, who crafted each song with the help of live rats.

Today, at the same time that hundreds of thousands of rats are killed by cities each year, hundreds of thousands more are bred to be used in labs across the U.S., including plenty at Hopkins. They were the first mammals to be domesticated for research purposes, dating back to the 1800s, and over the centuries that followed, have become medical marvels.

It turns out, many of our own characteristics closely resemble those of rats, and symptoms of our conditions can be replicated within them, making the rodent one of our most important model organisms. So while they wreak their havoc on our societies, they’ve also yielded invaluable contributions to our health and well-being, from cancer research to organ transplantation to a better understanding of psychedelic drugs—along the way saving countless human lives.

“They are likely to remain our companions,” wrote Science in September. “A better understanding of this, and their nature, will help us minimize their negative impacts and appreciate what they still have to teach us.” The academic journal would also go on to advocate for more ethical welfare considerations for rodents used in scientific research.

That’s in part because recent studies have discovered that rats are not only smart and social, but also that they show evidence of empathy and altruism. That they console one another, help friends in trouble, and, after enough time together, even extend the same kindness to strangers. That they understand rules and make plans. That they recall memories. That they feel regret—and maybe hope. They’ve even learned how to drive tiny vehicles. And to play hide-and-seek with their researchers.

No wonder for centuries we’ve also kept the pests as pets.

They’re ticklish. They like to snuggle. They even dream.

Toward the end of John Waters’ 1990 film, Cry-Baby, the namesake character, played by actor Johnny Depp, is stuck in prison. Dressed in a black-and-white-striped uniform, he spends his days pining for his girlfriend and a ragtag gang of juvenile-delinquent friends. But finally, he plots his escape, crawling down a manhole and through the compound’s sewer system, at one point losing his pants and falling into a subterranean pit of Norway rats.

In the midst of his horror, one rodent catches the protagonist’s attention. With squeaks and squeals, it beckons him to follow, as if to say it knows the way out, and down a dimly lit tunnel, the duo eventually reach an exit. “Thanks, pal,” says Depp emphatically, before climbing up to his freedom—only to find himself delivered right into the hands of the jailhouse guards.

From the depths below, the rat snickers out a maniacal laugh. Once again, man’s ultimate foil.

PILES OF TRASH PROVIDE PRIME FOOD AND SHELTER.

It’s just one of many rat cameos in the oeuvre of Waters. The Lutherville native has commonly used rodents as comedic supporting characters—repulsed audiences or not. After all, he, too, has mixed feelings about the vermin, as he was recently reminded during a run-in at a local club.

“I went down the alley, and a thousand rats ran out, and it was really exciting, in a way—it felt like I was in, oh, I don’t know, the Middle Ages,” says Waters. “I hate rats, I’m scared of them, but I’m thrilled at how frightening they are.”

The way he sees it, we’re never going to get rid of them entirely, so we might as well learn to live with them, at least metaphorically speaking. He has no desire to harm rats. He’s certainly not feeding them, either. But if they can be used as a means of beating Baltimore’s bullies to the punch, so be it.

“You take it, you embrace it, you use it for humor, you make it your own, and it doesn’t have the same power anymore,” says Waters. “But if my house was overrun by rats and the landlord wasn’t doing anything about it, I’d get rat revenge. Because I don’t think that’s funny.”

And what exactly would that look like?

“Capture the rats, take them to the landlord’s house, and leave them there.”

Source

]]> Where to Find Bargain Bites in Baltimore https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/bargain-bites-baltimore-great-food-on-a-budget/ Fri, 11 Oct 2024 15:05:45 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=163409

Come one, come all. There’s something to satisfy every palate (and pocketbook) at these easy-on-the-wallet eateries.

Edited by Jane Marion

Written with Amy Scattergood and Mike Unger
Photography by Justin Tsucalas
Illustrations by Paige Jung
Pictured model: Jessica Trejo
Food & Drink

Bargin Bites

Come one, come all. There’s something to satisfy every palate (and pocketbook) at these easy-on-the-wallet eateries.

Edited by Jane Marion

Written with Amy Scattergood and Mike Unger.
Photography by Justin Tsucalas
Illustrations by Paige Jung
Pictured model: Jessica Trejo
October 2024

ITH SURGING FOOD COSTS, supply chain logjams, labor shortages, and rising rents, there’s a reason why your dinner tab can add up to a bad case of sticker shock. More often than not, eating out feels like a real luxury. The good news is that on many blocks in and around Baltimore, there are plenty of places to get glorious grub without breaking the bank.

Thanks to our diverse population—with residents hailing from Poland, Mexico, Greece, Italy, and West Africa, to name a few—the choice for a phenomenal frugal feast knows no bounds (or borders). From Fells Point to Dundalk, you’ll find heartfelt cooking and crave-worthy dishes as deeply delicious as any high-fallutin’, white-tablecloth restaurant. In other words, the absence of fine china and votive candlelight has no bearing on what comes out of the kitchen.

It costs a lot to run a restaurant—from the price of equipment to the cost of dinnerware—but many of the places on this list have managed to cut costs with smaller spaces, often geared toward carryout, which means there’s generally countertop service and a minimal staff.

But that doesn’t mean these spots don’t shoot for the stars. There’s so much artistry and craftsmanship on display, so much personality (and even a few personalities: see our cover models, Ekiben’s Steve Chu and Ephrem Abebe) in these casual kitchens that serve everything from hefty sandwiches to exemplary tacos and designer dogs. In addition to new discoveries, our list includes those can’t-miss dining destinations for anyone in the vicinity (though some spots are so celebrated they draw people from across state lines).

After all, you can’t call yourself a Baltimorean if you haven’t opened wide for a fried chicken biscuit with spicy honey from Blacksauce Kitchen—or even wider for a meatball sub at the venerable DiPasquale’s. Or burned the roof of your mouth on the molten mozzarella that bubbles and blankets the crab in the iconic pies at Matthew’s Pizzeria.

While hardly exhaustive, this list should get you started if you’re looking to combine top-notch, flavorful fare with the most bang for your buck. In most cases, we aimed for a single meal that was $20 or so per person. In some cases you can quell those hunger pangs for even less than that, depending on where—and when—you go and what you order.

So, make a point of heading to one of these spots to keep your belly full and get the most value for your dining dollars. In our book, that’s priceless.

Above: The price is right for tasty tacos and oversized burritos at Mystic Burrito in Highlandtown.

Blacksauce Kitchen

Remington

The tiny Remington storefront of Blacksauce Kitchen is open only two days a week, which can be a frustrating realization for those of us who love Damian Mosley’s food. Mosley is a gifted chef, and also runs a busy catering business, so he can open his restaurant any time he wants to, which is Thursdays and Saturdays. Also, a word to the wise: He only offers his legendary biscuits on Saturdays. Mosley loves his smoker, and thus the biscuits are sometimes made with smoked cheddar, the fried pork loin with smoked rhubarb jam. A mere glance at the me listed on Instagram—on any given day you’ll find rabbit and dumplings, sweet potato doughnuts, smoked crab and grits, or a brisket smashburger—can get you steering your car to Remington.

Best Bite: Smoked chicken with mole—one of the best things to come out of Mosley’s smoker—is a glorious mound of roast chicken swathed in house mole negro.

Chaps Pit Beef

East Baltimore

For more than three decades, the glorified shack sat in the parking lot of a nightclub on Pulaski Highway, a beacon emitting not light but the irresistible scent of pit beef. Lines regularly stretched out the door as people waited, often in the cold or rain, for what many consider to be the preeminent version of a uniquely Baltimore form of barbecue. When it was announced that Chaps would move, there was a palpable panic. What if something—gasp—changed? Exhale, carnivores. The new larger and spiffier location (there are also now outposts in Aberdeen and Glen Burnie) is a few hundred feet from the original one, in that same strip-club parking lot. Best of all, the pit beef sandwich—charcoal-grilled to order, thinly sliced, ideally topped with onions and horseradish sauce—is just as delicious now as it’s ever been. You won’t even have to wait outside before eating one.

Best Bite: Was there ever any doubt? It’s the pit beef sandwich or bust.

Fells Point (and other locations)

Steve Chu and Ephrem Abebe’s Ekiben, pictured, first started as an Asian fusion food cart in 2014, before moving to a scrappy storefront in Fells Point. Then the word got out—and the humble spot’s knock-out Taiwanese chicken bao buns landed on Travel & Leisure’s best place to get a sandwich in Maryland. Other plaudits for the fare (Thai chicken meatballs, tofu in peanut sauce) have followed, from Vogue to the James Beard Foundation, which named Chu a semifinalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic last year. Ekiben keeps expanding (with two additional brick-and-mortars) and the lineup of bowls, buns, and sides has grown, too. (Garlic chile oil noodles are a great recent addition.) But none of this has distracted these grounded guys, best friends since their college days at UMBC, from staying true to their mission of serving some of the most unique Asian fusion fare around—here in Baltimore or anywhere else, for that matter.

Best Bite: Always get the Taiwanese chicken (aka the Neighborhood Bird) on a bun or in a bowl—or by any means possible.

Clark Burger

Govans

The best thing about Clark Burger is not its excellent Angus-beef hamburgers, or its plates of poutine (yes, one of the owners is from Toronto), its massive milkshakes, or even the Full Mountie Burger (which is, of course, a poutine hamburger), but the fact that you can take all of this with you when you see a movie at the Senator Theatre. The Senator, one of the city’s best theaters, is conveniently next-door to Clark Burger, so when you go see the latest MCU flick, or a revival showing of There Will Be Blood, you can enjoy a cheeseburger, a plate of fries with crab dip, an order of poutine brimming with brisket, and a banana milkshake while watching the movie. Fortunately, you’ll have about two hours to recover.

Best Bite: The Original Burger is a minimalist wonder with a beef patty, tomato, lettuce, and pickles—plus optional cheese. It’s simple and nearly perfect.

Cocina Luchadoras

Fells Point

While every day is an excellent day for tacos, arguably the best time to head to Cocina Luchadoras in Fells Point is Friday, when owner Rosalyn Vera serves birria tacos. These are quesabirria tacos, the addictive concoction of griddled corn tortillas lacquered with cheese and loaded with birria, served with a cup of the consomé from that chile-spiked beef stew. If Fridays aren’t possible, there are tortas on Thursdays, burritos on Wednesdays, taco specials on Tuesday, and Vera’s sopes, tamales, and elote ribs every day. Vera and her staff, mostly family members, make their own tortillas with heirloom corn masa from the L.A.-based Masienda company, which makes the tacos some of the best in town.

Best Bite: The quesabirria tacos are a wondrous combination of chile-rich meat, crisped house-made tortillas, and melty cheese, all happily dipped in a cup of broth.

Old Goucher

Just when you thought you’d eaten enough rotisserie chicken to last a lifetime, you get a taste of the chicken at Chachi’s. The on-the-spit chicken manages to be both tender and crisp, with just the right amount of spice to bring out the best in the bird. A selection of vibrant sauces for dunking enhances the flavor profile. (The green anchovy or roasted-garlic mayo should be applied liberally.) Chef and co-owner Karl Diehn (formerly of Dylan’s Oyster Cellar) is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, so it’s no surprise that these birds have, well, a leg up on the competition. Elevate your experience with a visit to nearby Fadensonnen, where you can purchase a pint of Kölsch and eat (and drink) it all in the communal courtyard.

Best Bite: Aside from the chicken, the schmaltzy potatoes coated in drippings from being placed beneath the bottom of the spit are a stellar accompaniment.

Bargain Tips

TIP No. 1

Belly Up to the (Salad) Bar

For those who like to pile it onto their plates, look for salad bars and buffets. During the pandemic, we feared we’d never see another salad bar—we don’t mind being wrong.

TIP No. 2

Loyal Friend

Restaurants love a repeat patron and loyalty cards are a way for them to offer you an incentive to come back again—and again. After a certain amount of points are accrued, many offer discounts (and sometimes free stuff) to frequent flyers.

TIP No. 3

Get Happy

Happy hours are a budget-lovers bonanza, from deals on appetizers and drinks to more substantive entrees. And there’s nothing more convivial or communal than eating at the bar.

TIP No. 4

Get Social

Use social media to track all the dizzying deals out there from Taco Tuesdays to half-price wine night. Follow your favorite spots on Facebook and X to stay informed.

TIP No. 5

Sharing is Caring

If you care about your bottom line, consider sharing a meal. It’s a fact that portion sizes have been rising since the 1970s, sometimes doubling and even tripling. If you’re watching your wallet—and your waistline—split your meal with your dining companion.

Mount Vernon

It’s been nearly 15 years since husband-and-wife team Gregory Brown and Naijha Wright-Brown opened this vegan restaurant with a soul food slant, yet the menu feels—and the food tastes—as revolutionary today as ever. Barbecue ribs made from soy and smothered in a sweet sauce have a satisfying texture and fantastic flavor. A chickpea burger with jerk seasoning is well-spiced. Local art hangs on the wall of the small space, along with a 2014 news clipping about Stevie Wonder’s visit to the restaurant. He, like Land of Kush, is not as young as he once was, but they’re both as cool as ever.

Best Bite: Whatever entree you order, get some baked mac and cheese to go with it. Made of wheat elbow noodles and vegan cheese with just a hint of sweetness—it’s comfort food at its absolute finest.

DiPasquale’s

Canton

A visit to the relocated DiPasquale’s in Canton is an assault on the senses—in the best possible way. For starters, the whole place smells like pungent provolone, pecorino, Gorgonzola, and other cheeses sitting in the cold case, folded into substantial subs, or melted onto an array of sublime brick-oven pizzas. (Try the version with spicy soppressata and green olives.) And while there’s a book-length menu that lists Italian classics—stuffed artichokes, chicken or veal Parm—your best bet is to see it all with your own eyes: Scan the case stuffed with bowling ball-sized arancini, octopus salad, and overflowing stuffed peppers or stand at the deli counter where the subs are assembled. Word of warning: You’ll want one of everything.

Best Bite: The colossal meatball sub is so big it will fill you up for days, though you’ll likely devour it in one sitting

Helmand Kabobi

East Baltimore

Although The Helmand, a perennial Best Restaurant winner, is unusually affordable as white-tablecloth restaurants go, the opening in 2017 of its more casual spinoff restaurant, Helmand Kabobi, was fantastic news for Baltimoreans who value, well, value. Kabobi features a counter for casual eating as well as a more formal dining room, but most of its business comes from nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital folks ordering take-out. You can get many of the same dishes as at The Helmand, plus more bowls and wraps, all of which travel extremely well. There are kabobs, stews of eggplant and chickpeas, slow-cooked lamb, as well as the kaddo borani, a dish of pumpkin with garlicyogurt sauce (and fan favorite at The Helmand), as well as freshly baked naan and baklava.

Best Bite: The Kabuli pallow, an ornate presentation of long-cooked lamb beneath a dome of spiced rice pilaf, is the Afghan national dish for a reason.

Heritage

Govans

There aren’t many restaurants—bargain or bougie—where you could be blindfolded, point to anything on the menu and be assured that whatever arrives at your table will be delicious. Heritage Smokehouse is one of them. The brisket (try the mammoth sandwich), pulled chicken, shaved pork, and whatever else owner and pitmaster George Marsh has decided to put in his smokers out back on the day you visit (we’ve had trout in the past) are all excellent. We also love the starters (rockfish fritters) and sides (baked mac and cheese).

Best Bite: The smoked pork spareribs are dry-rubbed and cooked to perfection, so that the meat requires a slight tug to be separated from the bone—they’re the best version of the classic barbecue staple we’ve eaten in this city.

Koshary Corner

Remington

Bowls, usually filled with a protein, veggies, and maybe some rice, are ubiquitous these days and chains have popularized them in the past several years. Koshary has them beat by a few centuries or so. Egypt’s national dish generally consists of white or brown rice, quinoa, lentils, tomato sauce, chickpeas, vinaigrette, and fried onions. The version at this stall in R. House is terrific, but whatever you order, start with pita slices topped with hummus and za’atar. Like everything at Koshary Corner, they’re the all-too-rare combination of healthful and delicious.

Best Bite: Owner Iman Moussa’s strikingly fresh and satisfying version of the koshary. Adding some of her juicy chicken shawarma is always a good decision. We’re indebted to Moussa for popularizing it here.

Fells Point

When Broadway Market in Fells Point was renovated in 2019, a few new vendors opened in the building, including this colorful stall. Helmed by husband-and-wife team John Hartzell and Kesorn Imsin, the menu is impressively large and includes dishes passed down through generations of Imsin’s family in Northern Thailand. There are familiar dishes like pad Thai, Drunken Noodles, papaya salad, and spring rolls, but also pad see ew, or broad rice noodles with eggs and peanuts, many curries, and multiple versions of fried rice including one, of course, with Maryland jumbo lump crab. There’s also a version of khao soi, the Northern Thai noodle dish, as well as a dish with braised pork shoulder and pickled mustard greens. Each dish can be spiced to order, a welcome bonus for both chile-heads and the heat-averse.

Best Bite: Khao soi, the fantastic mash-up of noodles, vegetables, herbs, and protein in a spicy yellow coconut curry, is harder to find than it should be.

La Cabaña

Dundalk

Simply finding La Cabaña, opened in 2015 by the Rodriguez family, is most of the battle: It’s hidden behind a 7-Eleven in Dundalk. But once you’ve discovered the place, you’ll never forget the way there, as it’s one of the best taquerias in the city. The tortillas are made in-house, as is everything else, including the bottles of excellent salsas on the cozy wooden tables in a dining room lit by lamps fashioned by tequila bottles. There’s a trompo set up on the outdoor patio on Wednesday evenings, which results in fantastic al pastor tacos. Weekends are for lamb specials, including lamb tortas, lamb soup, and roasted lamb by the pound. But there’s much on offer every day, including excellent pozole, quesabirria tacos with consomé, chilaquiles, and menudo.

Best Bite: Lamb barbacoa tacos—deeply flavorful stewed meat with all the fixings atop house tortillas—aren’t easy to find, especially iterations this good.

Mera Kitchen Collective

Midtown

Craving Middle Eastern fare like stuffed grape leaves, hummus, or falafel? Or maybe something from Mexico like handmade chicken tamales or tacos de carne asada? Or perhaps Yassa chicken wings bathed in a tangy mustard sauce washed down by a refreshing glass of bissap from West Africa? The beauty of Mera Kitchen Collective is that you don’t have to decide. Founded first as a pop-up, and then as a brick-and-mortar in a rowhome on Calvert Street, the Mount Vernon worker-owned co-op café features fabulous fare made by chefs who draw on their culinary heritage from places as varied as Jordan, Burkina Faso, and Latin America—and who now consider Charm City their home. The menu changes on a whim, but everything you eat here will be the very best version of what you would find if you ate in the chefs’ homelands.

Best Bite: The colorful Burkinabé plantain and avocado bowl is a feast for the eyes and treat for the tastebuds. Go easy on the five-alarm ginger habanero sauce that’s served on the side unless you’re sitting near the fire extinguisher.

Nana

Towson

Most people know the James Beard-nominated chef Carlos Raba from his cooking at Clavel, the much buzzed-about taqueria in Remington he co-owns with Lane Harlan. Thankfully for us, the talented Sinaloan chef has spread his talents to another ZIP code, in the Anneslie neighborhood of Towson near his home. The father of two has expanded his vision to include family friendly fare such as quesadillas and Sinaloan-style “doggos” (hot dogs wrapped in bacon, decorated with tomato and caramelized onion, and slathered with mayo-avocado sauce served on house-made buns), plus 24-hour brined rotisserie chickens prepared al pastor (a smoky marinade made with chiles, pineapple, and spices) or bichis (a glorious mixture of onion, garlic, and herbs).

All the recipes are heirlooms from Raba’s native Mexico, which means tortillas are handmade and the fare is as authentically South of the Border as it comes. Nana is named for Raba’s grandmother, who, along with other family members, taught him the art of making those tortillas and now looks over the kitchen from a vintage photo hanging on the wall.

Best Bite: Every bite is a best bite and you’re here for the savory stuff, but don’t miss the comfort-food-in-a-cup rice pudding.

Orient Express

Charles Village

This homey Sichuan restaurant in Charles Village has been serving Hopkins students for decades, first with Chinese-American dishes like General Tso’s chicken and Kung Pao shrimp—which are still on the lengthy menu—and more recently, as more Chinese students come to Baltimore and more local folks appreciate actual Sichuan cuisine, with more authentic dishes. Now you can order spicy bullfrog, Chengdu Sister Rabbit, duck blood with pickled cabbage, and other Sichuan dishes, along with more recognizable fare like spicy wontons, mapo tofu, and sesame cold noodles. The dining room is cozy, with DIY hot tea and a big flatscreen TV that always plays O’s games. The wooden tables are big enough to order plenty, ideally with a group so you can try multiple dishes.

Best Bite: Sour cabbage fish soup, a classic Sichuan dish, is a soulful bowl of tender white fish in peppercorn-charged broth.

Whether served whole or by the slice, Neapolitan-style or New York-style, these pies are upper crust.

BALTOZ

The puffy pies at this Anneslie take-out spot— peppered with pickled chiles, scattered with shiitakes and spinach— are as pretty as a picture. That’s not surprising given that its co-owner, Vlado Petrovski, studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Believe what you see: The pies taste as good as they look.

BENNIE’S PIZZA

This Columbia mall outpost has some star power behind its menu: Gerald Addison, the celebrity chef of D.C.’s Maydan fame, runs the operations and oversees the kitchen, which turns out oversized, floppy slices of New York-style pies.

ITALIAN GARDENS

Grabbing a slice at this Kenilworth Mall fixture is a rite of passage if you live in Baltimore County, though city dwellers have been known to make the pilgrimage, too. Consider the options, thick or thin, red or white, while the pleasant staff waits for your order.

MATTHEW’S PIZZERIA

The Neopolitan-style crab pie—backfin crabmeat and onion tucked under a blanket of mozzarella and Reggiano sprinkled with Old Bay—at this 81-year-old Highlandtown institution is legend. It’s Baltimore bucket list good.

RIBALDI’S

The 20-inch pizza at this Hampden carryout classic is so big that the box barely fits in the trunk of the car—and a single slice is not much smaller. This is train station pizza (in a good way). Sprinkle some shaky cheese and garlic powder on top before you head out the door.

TONY’S OF N.Y.

The name tells you all you need to know about this new pizza joint in Timonium, brought to you by Limoncello. Pies come in a variety of sizes and types, but the lunch deals—two cheese slices and a Coke for $7.99, for example—offer exceptional value.

Hampden

You know you’re in for a treat the second the yolk from the sunny-side-up egg starts to coat the jasmine rice, pickled red onions, cucumber kimchi, toasted sesame seeds, scallions, and most importantly, the tender bulgogi that comprise the Korean rice bowl at this international mash-up carryout spot in The Rotunda. There are also Vietnamese and taco versions of the bowl, as well as bánh mì sandwiches, po’ boys, and wings. A half-dozen kinds of topped French fries can make a meal by themselves.

Best Bite: The poutine fries—loaded with cheddar cheese curds and beef gravy—rank up there with hockey and Norm Macdonald among Canada’s greatest gifts to the United States. Thankfully, we only need to go to Hampden (or this year, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where The Local Fry has a permanent stall) to enjoy them.

Toki Underground

Harwood

It was happy news when the D.C. ramen-ya Toki Underground opened in Baltimore last year, even more so when they chose a former garage along a rough-and-tumble stretch of Greenmount Avenue for their noodle shop. There are seats at the counter, a bigger dining room, a beckoning deck, and a fun collection of shokuhin sampuru, the Japanese art of plastic food. The food is pretty phenomenal in its real form, with excellent tonkotsu ramen, a vegan variation made with mushrooms, and add-ons including chicken karaage. There’s an additional menu including dumplings, dan dan noodles, a terrific collection of buns (cloud shrimp, fried chicken), and inventive cocktails, some made with baijiu (Sichuan sorghum liquor) and one sporting a garnish of grilled pork belly.

Best Bite: The red miso ramen is a massive bowl of perfectly cooked noodles, chashu, Chinese broccoli, and a jammy egg, all in a thick, gorgeous broth spiked with chiles.

Villagio Cafe

Towson

At this charming little BYOB Persian restaurant on York Road, winners inhabit all sections of the large menu, starting with the rich and creamy baba ghanoush. Stuffed grape leaves are served with a tangy house dressing, and just about every entrée comes with outstanding basmati rice. Specialty versions are available for an additional fee, which is worth it. Adas polo includes lentils, dates, and raisins, and loobia is a mixture of sauteed beef tenders and green beans simmered in tomato sauce. Even the grilled tomato that accompanies most dishes is charred and sweet, proving nothing is an afterthought.

Best Bite: The chicken koobideh kabob: Charbroiled ground chicken breast mixes with minced onions and saffron to create a kabob that’s as moist as it is tender.

These dogs are something to bark about.

Ann’s Dari-Creme

FOOTLONG

The name of the main attraction at this Glen Burnie mainstay speaks for itself. Ann’s has been serving footlong franks since 1950. It keeps things simple. “The works” means a footlong with mustard, chili, and onions on a long roll. It’s quite the culinary feat.

Attman’s Delicatessen

THE BULLDOG

This East Baltimore institution has been known for its corned beef since opening in 1915. It also serves jumbo hot dogs, which are split then grilled. The Bulldog marries them by topping a link with a handful of corned beef and Swiss. Add Attman’s mustard for the full experience.

Killa Dogz

MARYLANDER DOG

It sounds counterintuitive to say that a $24 hot dog (the market price on our visit) is a bargain, but when you bite into this lump crab-topped dog, we’re sure you’ll agree. Chunks of crab blanket your choice of a Polish sausage, beef hot dog, or chicken, pork, and beef combo. After you think you’re done, glance at the bottom of the box—there’s enough crabmeat for another meal.

Polock Johnny’s

HALF SMOKE

For more than a century, the name Polock Johnny’s has been synonymous with Polish dogs. Top this smoked, half-beef, half-pork dog with PJ’s relish—which includes onion, celery, peppers, and ketchup—and with each bite you’ll taste history.

Sausage Master

HOT COUNTRY

One of the busiest stalls at the new Lexington Market was a staple at the old one as well. Since 1986, it’s served plump, juicy sausages with basic fixings like chili, cheese, sauerkraut, and onion. The Hot Country is a spicy smoked pork sausage that packs a punch. Sausage Master lives up to its name.

Snake Hill

THE CURRY LITTLE RABBIT

Made from rabbit and rattlesnake (yes, rattlesnake), this dog has a pleasing gaminess that separates it from the rest at the Highlandtown sausage bar. It’s topped with fresh cilantro and an outstanding house-made mango chutney that adds a bit of sweetness.

Sophia's Place European Deli

FRESH SAUSAGE WITH SAUERKRAUT

The sausage at this Polish stall in Broadway Market is essentially a sandwich. The large link comes on a hoagie roll with an array of colorful peppers, onions, and spicy mustard. It’s a meal all by itself.

Stuggy's

FRANK ZAPPA

There are a plethora of contenders at this Fells Point corner bar, including the well-known crab mac and cheese dog. But the cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped, onion-and pepper-topped, Stuggy’s sauce-covered dog named for the Baltimore-born nonconformist music legend, is the one to freak out about.

Highlandtown

Lots of great California-inspired Mexican options populate the menu at this funky Highlandtown spot. Tacos are packed with fresh veggies and meat. Quesadillas stuffed with protein, beans, and cheese require two hands to pick up, and a side of the fresh-cut fries are a delicious, if not traditional, accompaniment to any meal. But there’s a reason burrito is in its name. They’re the stars of the show, overstuffed and brimming with creative combinations—some inspired by the Pacific Rim, like the one with pork braised in banana leaves.

Best Bite: Get at least one pescado burrito: A filet of seasonal fish is combined with Spanish rice, beans, and pico de gallo before being grilled to perfection.

For great deals, check out these meals on wheels.

BMORE GREEK GRILL

With hefty gyros and salads, rice bowls piled high with lamb, chicken, and shrimp, and French fries topped with feta, this family- owned food truck uses recipes that immigrated from Greece with them.

DIZZY COW PIZZERIA

Making pizzas in a mobile Italian wood-fired oven, Dizzy Cow’s pies feature fermented dough, local ingredients, and interesting toppings: brie and fig, pineapple and ham, and more.

FUZZIES BURGERS

Helmed by brothers Josh and Brad Vecchiolla, Fuzzies— which also has a wildly popular food stand at Camden Yards—turns out smashed-to-order burgers tricked out with bacon and pimento cheese and paired with Old Bay-dusted fries.

JIMMY’S FAMOUS SEAFOOD

A peripatetic version of the landmark seafood restaurant, this truck offers crabcake sandwiches, “crabby fries,” crab-cake egg rolls, crab pretzels—and Smith Island cake bars (!).

KOMMIE PIG

The irreverent brainchild of two friends, one born in Russia, this truck features BBQ rib platters, pulled-pork sandwiches, fries topped with BBQ, and a pork-loaded sandwich called a Chernobyl.

KOOPER’S CHOWHOUND

An offshoot of the Fells Point tavern, this food truck has been wheeling burgers around town for 15 years: build-your-own- Black Angus beef creations that are best with a side of sweet-potato fries.

MEXICAN ON THE RUN

Jimmy Longoria has parked his taco truck on Sherwood Road in Idlewylde since 2016, making maybe Baltimore’s best quesabirria tacos from his mother’s superb birria. Get them with consomé.

SHAREEF’S GRILL

Getting its start selling halal hot dogs and burgers at a West Baltimore mosque, Shareef’s truck now offers wraps, platters, and catfish nuggets. For $5 extra, you can get crab on pretty much anything.

TACOS JALISCO

Parked in front of a Fells Point Catholic church for over two decades, this taco truck may be the oldest food truck in Baltimore. Helmed by the Costilla family, look for tacos and made-to-order gorditas.

Source

]]> Top Dentists 2024 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/health/top-dentists-baltimore-2024/ Tue, 09 Jul 2024 15:54:55 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=160155

Open up and say—AI?

Edited by Christianna McCausland

Written by Michele Wojciechowski

Photography by Matt Roth

Illustration by Alicia Corman

Health & Wellness

Top Dentists 2024

Open up and say—AI?

Edited by Christianna McCausland

Written by Michele Wojciechowski

Photography by Matt Roth

Illustration by Alicia Corman

June 2024


That's right, it's a brave new world for dentistry, with advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, making a positive impact on the patient experience, as writer Michele Wojciechowski explains in this year’s feature, “The Impression You Get.” And if you are looking for a practitioner who is at the top of this dynamic field, the following package is full of 254 dentists who have made our annual list by being the best in their respective specialties. So go ahead, open up and say “ahhhh” knowing you are in good hands.

“If you had a patient in need of a dentist, which dentist would you refer them to?”

HIS IS THE QUESTION we’ve asked thousands of dentists to help us determine who the Top Dentists should be. Dentists and specialists are asked to take into consideration years of experience, continuing education, manner with patients, use of new techniques and technologies, and, of course, physical results.

The nomination pool of dentists consists of dentists listed online with the American Dental Association, as well as all dentists listed online with their local dental societies, thus allowing virtually every dentist the opportunity to participate. Dentists are also given the opportunity to nominate other dentists who they feel should be included in our list. Respondents are asked to put aside any personal bias or political motivations and to use only their knowledge of their peers’ work when evaluating the other nominees.

Voters are asked to individually evaluate the practitioners on their ballot whose work they are familiar with. Once the balloting is completed, the scores are compiled and then averaged. The numerical average required for inclusion varies, depending on the average for all the nominees within the specialty and the geographic area. Borderline cases are given a careful consideration by the editors. Voting characteristics and comments are taken into consideration while making decisions. Past awards a dentist has received and status in various dental academies can factor into our decisions.

Once the decisions have been finalized, the included dentists are checked against state dental boards for disciplinary actions to make sure they have an active license and are in good standing with the board. Then letters of congratulations are sent to all the listed dentists.

Of course, there are many fine dentists who are not included in this representative list. It is intended as a sampling of the great body of talent in the field of dentistry in the United States. A dentist’s inclusion on our list is based on the subjective judgments of their fellow dentists. While it is true that the lists may at times disproportionately reward visibility or popularity, we remain confident that our polling methodology largely corrects for any biases and that these lists continue to represent the most reliable, accurate, and useful list of dentists available anywhere.

Health & Wellness

The Impression You Get

New technologies are changing the face of dentistry and making for a better patient experience.

DENTIST WINNERS 2024

THIS LIST IS EXCERPTED from the 2024 topDentists™ list, a database which includes listings for more than 250 dentists and specialists in the Baltimore area. This list is based on thousands of detailed evaluations of dentists and professionals by their peers. The complete database is available at www.usatopdentists.com. For more information, call 706-364-0853; write P.O. Box 970, Augusta, GA 30903; email help@usatopdentists.com or visit www.usatopdentists.com.

Browse all of the winners, and more local dental resources, in our Top Dentists Guide.

Unless otherwise noted, dentist is based in Baltimore.

DENTAL ANESTHESIOLOGY

Marvin Leventer

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-2470

ORAL PATHOLOGY

John R. Basile

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-7936

ENDODONTICS

Louis H. Berman

Annapolis Endodontics
Annapolis
(410) 268-4770

Prasad Challagulla

Valley Endodontics
Owings Mills
(410) 356-6500

Howard M. Cohen

Endodontic Specialists
Towson
(410) 321-1266

Dov Elman

Advanced Root Canal Specialists of Howard County
Columbia
(410) 772-9600

Lina Jarboe

Access Endodontics
Ellicott City
(410) 936-4478

Mark D. Lentz

Annapolis Endodontics
Annapolis
(410) 268-4770

Jeffery O. Luzader

Chesapeake Endodontic Center
Annapolis
(410) 224-7556

Kenneth Mangano

Pasadena
(410) 647-3453

Charles Mann

(410) 931-0250

Judy Y. Melamed

Endodontic Partners
Lutherville
(410) 821-5553

Raksha Mirchandani

Endodontics of Maryland
Ellicott City
(410) 997-7668

John Mullally

Endodontic Partners
Lutherville-Timonium
(410) 821-5553

Ghulam Murtaza

Baltimore/Washington Endodontics
Ellicott City
(410) 203-1800

Sean M. O’Sullivan

Carroll Periodontics, Endodontics & Implant Dentistry
Westminster
(410) 857-5700

Frank Parreira

Chesapeake Endodontic Center
Annapolis
(410) 224-7556

Soham C. Patel

Carroll County Endodontics
Eldersburg
(410) 549-9760

Andrew M. Reff

Greenspring Endodontics
(410) 653-0900

Brenda K. Richardson

Towson Endodontics
Towson
(410) 321-5700

S. Craig Schneider

Centre Park Endodontics
Columbia
(410) 715-8951

Juheon Seung

Sterling Endodontics
Glen Burnie
(410) 896-1737

Patricia Tordik

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-6512

Bradley A. Trattner

Endodontic Specialists
(410) 653-2020

Eric Volk

Lutherville
(410) 828-7668

Brian T. Wycall

Baltimore/Washington Endodontics
Ellicott City
(410) 203-1800

DANIEL T. RICHARDSON

ORAL SURGERY | RICHARDSON CENTER FOR ORAL AND FACIAL SURGERY

GENERAL DENTISTRY

Michelle R. Andersen

Fells Point Dental
(410) 970-0440

Chris Anderson

Annapolis Family Dentistry
Annapolis
(410) 267-7713

Gary S. Barker

Pasadena
(410) 647-6453

Douglas M. Barnes

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(443) 271-2194

Scott L. Baylin

Catonsville
(410) 747-1115

Ray M. Becker

Howard County Smiles
Columbia
(410) 730-4674

Jeffrey M. Behar

Renew Dentistry of Timonium
Timonium
(410) 252-3717

Herbert H. Benavent

Benavent Dental
Clarksville
(443) 535-9600

Joseph Benderson

Baycove Family & Cosmetic Dentistry
Severna Park
(410) 384-9030

Brittany W. Bergeron

Town Center Cosmetic Dentistry
Towson
(410) 828-8000

Maya M. Brooks

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
(410) 296-0136

Julia M. Burchett

Freedom Dental Care
Eldersburg
(410) 795-0055

Kelly M. Burk

Fallston Family Dental
Fallston
(410) 877-3818

April L. Calton

About Smiles Dentistry
Annapolis
(410) 990-4700

Lawrence T. Chen

Baltimore
(410) 235-8525

Lynn R. Chincheck

Timonium
(410) 561-884

Devon B. Conklin

Baltimore Dental Arts
(410) 583-7010

Christopher J. Constantine

Osler Dental Professionals
Towson
(410) 321-1144

Lisa D’Affronte

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
Baltimore
(410) 706-3194

Joel Danziger

Elite Dental of Towson
Towson
(410) 823-5950

Lauren Deyo

MD Family Dentistry
Westminster
(410) 848-8229

Samuel M. Dodek

Dodek Dental Group
Columbia
(410) 381-1344

Jon E. Edmondson

Edmondson Family Dental Care
(410) 944-9090

George E. Evans

Dental Care of Baltimore
Randallstown
(410) 922-1601

Scott W. Finlay

Arnold
(410) 757-6681

James P. Finney

Finney Family Dental
Towson
(410) 828-8828

Alex M. Fishman

Brilliant Smiles of Maryland
Reisterstown
(410) 833-8380

Nicole C. Forel

Light Street Dental
(410) 659-0900

Kelly Foster

Timonium Dental
Timonium
(410) 252-1200

Brett Friedman

Towson Smile Care
Towson
(410) 296-7599

Karen A. Garber

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-4517

Liya Goitom

Pearl Smiles
Elkridge
(410) 799-1793

Jeremy Goodman

Goodman Dental Care
Annapolis
(410) 849-6247

Holly A. Green

Blue Heron Dental
Annapolis
(410) 224-9608

Ned S. Greenberg

Dr. Greenberg Family Dental
(410) 686-4646

Robert M. Grill

TMJ Facial Pain Center
Towson
(410) 665-2202

Anthony Hamod

Bel Air Dental Care
Fallston
(410) 593-1199

Elizabeth M. Harrison

True North Dentistry
Bel Air
(410) 838-8078

Hannah Hoge

Smith & Co Dental
Bel Air
(410) 638-0920

Eugene Huang

Southgate Dental Care
Glen Burnie
(410) 760-4455

Ashley I. Izadi

Valley Dental Health
Cockeysville
(410) 666-1178

Tomicka Jackson-George

Jackson-George Dental
(410) 685-2850

Tara J. Jensen

Confident Smiles Dentistry
Annapolis
(410) 268-8701

Owen Jordan

Bel Air
(410) 838-1166

Keith E. Karas

Columbia
(410) 290-8040

Lawrence A. Katkow

Katkow Dentistry
Columbia
(410) 730-2020

John J. Kim

North County Dental
Sparks
(410) 472-3443

Paul J. Kinsey

Severna Park
(410) 544-4012

Eric S. Kneussl

(410) 256-2930

George Kreisheh

Charm City Smiles
Timonium
(410) 913-5700

Theresa T. Kujala

Bay Area Dental
Aberdeen
(410) 272-2783

Rita M. Kurek

(410) 574-1188

Lyndsay C. Kuzmak

Westminster
(410) 848-5656

Stephen M. Kuzmak

Towson View Dental Care
Towson
(410) 296-2388

Edward S. Lazer

Owings Mills
(410) 697-6290

Peggy A. Leary

True North Dentistry
Bel Air
(410) 838-8078

William E. Leboe

(410) 659-0616

Albert Lee

Lee, Bonfiglio, Vesely & Associates
Annapolis
(410) 989-8298

Scott Lever

McDonogh Dental Associates
Owings Mills
(410) 363-2500

Gerardo Linarducci

Aesthetic Family Dentistry of Bel Air
Bel Air
(443) 512-0444

Craig Longenecker

Hereford Dental Health
Monkton
(410) 498-4330

Daniel Maher

Dental Designs of Maryland
White Marsh
(410) 834-4284

Jonathan S. Mandras

Bel Air
(410) 893-3613

Clayton S. McCarl

McCarl Dental Group
Millersville
(410) 431-3860

Jay McCarl

McCarl Dental Group
Millersville
(410) 431-3860

Herbert M. Mendelson

Mendelson Family Dentistry
Owings Mills
(410) 356-4100

Thomas F. Menton

Menton Family Dental Care
Ellicott City
(410) 740-9400

David B. Mergerian

Bel Air
(410) 838-1166

Robert S. Minch

Lutherville
(410) 321-5777

Bonny G. Mitchell

Mitchell Dental Care
Edgewater
(410) 956-8380

Brian Moore

Owings Mills
(410) 356-1400

Barry D. Murphy

Towson
(410) 823-2953

William I. Nagle

Lifetime Dental Care
Bel Air
(410) 698-4980

Lory Richter

Bel Air Smile Partners
Forest Hill
(410) 879-4444

Joanne B. Rief

Crossroads Dental Arts
Owings Mills
(410) 363-2121

John D. Ritter

Annapolis
(410) 267-7901

Michael R. Rosen

The Center for Dentistry
Lutherville-Timonium
(410) 505-0416

Stacey W. Russell

The Tooth Place
Severna Park
(410) 647-4269

Elizabeth S. Satola

Dobbin Dental Suite
Columbia
401-997-9366

Alan R. Scharf

Bel Air Dental Care
Fallston
(410) 593-1199

Allan D. Schulman

Glen Burnie
(410) 761-0095

Ali R. Sedighian

Ellicott City
(410) 465-3021

Saureen S. Shah

Glen Burnie
(410) 768-3288

George R. Shepley

(410) 889-7100

P. Jay Shires

(410) 296-6527

Andrew B. Smith

Smith & Co Dental
Bel Air
(410) 638-0920

David Stern

Jarrettsville
(410) 692-6132

Craig W. Stout

Crofton Dental Suites
Crofton
(410) 721-2610

H. Mark Sugarman

Owings Mills
(410) 363-2500

Holleh Tajalli

Canton Smile Studio
(410) 921-0097

Christopher P. Toomey

Toomey Dentistry
Towson
(410) 823-6000

Aron D. Turner

The Denture Doctor
Pikesville
(410) 602-2070

Arthur Vail

Vail Dental Associates
Arbutus
(410) 242-5111

Rodrigo Vallar

Padonia Dental Associates
Cockeysville
(410) 560-1400

Brian Valle

Millersville
(410) 987-9100

Kathryn R. Ver Brugge

Lifetime Dental Care
Bel Air
(410) 698-4980

Jennifer P. Virmani

Naylors Court Dental Partners
Pikesville
(410) 484-2722

Mohit Virmani

Naylors Court Dental Partners
Pikesville
(410) 484-2722

Matthew H. Wallengren

(410) 431-1868

Charlie Ward

Baltimore Dental Arts
(410) 705-7062

Samuel A. Wealcatch

(410) 602-1800

Joshua P. Weintraub

Stevenson Smiles
Stevenson
(410) 764-8500

Thomas Weiss

Weiss Dentistry
Cockeysville
(410) 666-9266

Michael J. Weitzman

Northwest Dental
Glyndon
(410) 833-6200

Alexandra T. Welzel

(410) 235-1233

Kai Weng

Dental Designs of Maryland
White Marsh
(410) 220-2731

James B. Wooddell

Wooddell & Passaro
Davidsonville
(410) 956-5555

Mary Teddy Wray

Laurel Bush Family Dentistry
Bel Air
(443) 512-8703

Judy H. Yu

Dental FX
Pasadena
(410) 360-0440

RICHA DUTTA

ORTHODONTICS | ORTHOROKS ORTHODONTICS

ORAL & MAXILLOFACIAL SURGERY

Bonnie M. Arroyo

HarborView Surgical Arts
(410) 777-8276

Bethany S. Awalt

Valley Village Oral Surgery Associates
Pikesville
(410) 581-9008

John F. Caccamese

University of Maryland Medical Center
(410) 706-6195

Christopher Chambers

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
(410) 268-7790

Domenick P. Coletti

Central Maryland Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, PA
Columbia
(410) 997-1010

Borek L. Hlousek

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
(410) 268-7790

Julius Hyatt

Maryland Center For Oral Surgery & Dental Implants
Cockeysville
(410) 220-5220

Anush A. John

Lutherville-Timonium
(410) 337-7755

Kurt Jones

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
(410) 268-7790

Bryan P. Keegan

Oral Surgery Associates
Bel Air
(410) 515-0430

Kenneth M. Kufta

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
(410) 268-7790

Sarah Z. Naghibi

Maryland Oral Surgery
Gambrills
(410) 721-0700

Daniel T. Richardson

Richardson Center for Oral and Facial Surgery
Elkridge
(410) 796-3333

J. Alexander Smith

Broadway Oral Surgery
Bel Air
(410) 838-6222

Cornelius J. Sullivan

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
(410) 268-7790

Aaron J. Vafakos

Broadway Oral Surgery
Bel Air
(410) 838-6222

Clifford S. Walzer

Oral Surgery Specialists
Annapolis
(410) 268-7790

Mathew Woodward

Columbia Oral and Facial Surgery
Columbia
(410) 730-6001

Kenneth Wu

Columbia Oral and Facial Surgery
Columbia
(410) 730-6001

LINA JARBOE

ENDODONTICS | ACCESS ENDODONTICS

ORTHODONTICS

Thomas Barron

Barron Orthodontics
Timonium
(410) 628-0677

John A. Benkovich

Benkovich Orthodontics
Annapolis
(410) 268-1700

Robert P. Bolton

Pediatric Dentistry and Orthodontics
Arnold
(410) 757-5437

Byron A. Bonebreak

Vanguard Orthodontics
Clarksville
(410) 381-1077

David B. Bonebreak

Flagship Orthodontics
Hanover
(410) 779-8220

Nicole C. Brummer

Brummer Orthodontics
Towson
(410) 415-1003

Richa Dutta

Orthoroks Orthodontics
Hunt Valley
(888) 885-7657

Amanda Gallagher-Whetzel

Amanda Gallagher Orthodontics Nottingham
Nottingham
(410) 256-2044

Stephen Godwin

Bel Air Orthodontics
Bel Air
(410) 838-2244

Robert D. Isaacs

(443) 393-4900

Mohammad Izadi

Izadi Orthodontics
Timonium
(410) 919-9806

Stephen Labbe

Labbe Family Orthodontics
Gambrills
(443) 603-3448

Julie Langguth

Annapolis Orthodontics
Annapolis
(410) 266-8880

Joseph LaPonzina

Bel Air
(410) 515-0035

Meghan P. McInnes-Palmer

McInnes Palmer Orthodontics
Towson
(410) 823-1900

Scott G. Nawy

(443) 393-4900

Mairead M. O’Reilly

Annapolis
(410) 266-0025

Margaret Pitrone

PSJ Orthodontics
Westminster
(410) 848-6700

Ora Reinheimer

Philbin & Reinheimer Orthodontics
Annapolis
(410) 263-5600

David Ross

David Ross Orthodontics
Lutherville-Timonium
(443) 901-3100

Dina Sanchez

Roland Park Orthdontics
(410) 296-4400

Sandra E. Selnick

OX Orthodontix
Ellicott City
(410) 740-0002

Steven M. Siegel

Orthodontists of Maryland
Glen Burnie
(410) 833-9330

Elizabeth B. Spannhake

Spannhake Orthodontics
Towson
(410) 321-5004

Moshe T. Stern

Manchester
(410) 374-4882

Lawrence Wang

Baltimore Orthodontic Group
Catonsville
(410) 744-0260

Robert G. Winnard

Odenton
(410) 551-9531

Benjamin D. Wright

Wright Orthodontics
Severna Park
(410) 544-0072

Eric Wu

NuSmiles Orthdontics
Columbia
(410) 630-8189

JUSTIN W. KLEINMAN

PERIODONTICS | CARROLL PERIODONTICS, ENDODONTICS, & IMPLANT DENTISTRY

PEDIATRIC DENTISTRY

Patricia Jackson Babcock

Elkridge Family Dentistry
Elkridge
(410) 796-0020

Gregg T. Behling

Pediatric Dental Specialists
Arnold
(410) 757-5437

Tracy A. Bowden

Kids First Pediatric Dentistry
Timonium
(410) 828-5699

Diana M. Capobianco

Growing Smiles Pediatric Dentistry
Bel Air
(410) 569-6700

Hyejin Esther Cho

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
(410) 248-3384

Roxanne Clark

Kids Dental Space
Towson
(443) 241-7575

Kapil Davar

Bel Air Pediatric Dentistry
Bel Air
(443) 567-5112

Vidhima Davar

Bel Air Pediatric Dentistry
Bel Air
(443) 567-5112

Michelle M. Decere

Pediatric Dental Specialists
Arnold
(410) 757-5437

Sangita T. Doshi

Pediatric Dentistry of Columbia
Columbia
(410) 740-0144

Melena Evancho

Dentistry for Kids
Hunt Valley
(410) 771-8200

Edward L. Ginsberg

Smiles 4 Children
Ellicott City
(410) 203-2410

Beverly A. Jimenez

Chambers Family Dentistry
Annapolis
(443) 214-3119

Marta Jolesz

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
(410) 248-3384

Su Kim

Tiny Tooth Pediatric Dentistry
Columbia
(443) 241-8133

Shari C. Kohn

Dentistry for Kids
Hunt Valley
(410) 771-8200

Hakan O. Koymen

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
(410) 248-3384

Jennifer Mai

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
(410) 248-3384

Neel S. Satpute

Greenspring Pediatric Dentistry
Baltimore
(410) 484-4401

Rachael L. Simon

Smiles 4 Children
Ellicott City
(410) 203-2410

Luz M. Tennassee

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
(410) 248-3384

Michael T. Virts

Mt. Airy Children’s Dental Associates
Mount Airy
301-829-6588

Susanne S. Wallengren

Joppa Green Pediatric Dentistry
Lutherville
(410) 321-0200

Sylvia Yen

Chesapeake Pediatric Dental Group
Perry Hall
(410) 248-3384

JENNIFER MAI

PEDIATRIC DENTISTRY | CHESAPEAKE PEDIATRIC DENTAL GROUP

PERIODONTICS

Mary E. Aichelmann-Reidy

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-7961

Kyong S. Choe

Feldman, Slevin, Hurwitz & Choe
Towson
(410) 821-8800

Andrew H. Chon

Columbia Center for Implants & Periodontics
Columbia
(410) 997-1189

Howard B. Fisher

(410) 532-2200

Morgan Barker Hurwitz

Feldman, Slevin, Hurwitz & Choe
Towson
(410) 821-8800

Sanju Jose

Columbia Center for Periodontics & Dental Implants
Columbia
(410) 997-1189

Peter E. Joseph

(410) 931-1000

Justin W. Kleinman

Carroll Periodontics, Endodontics, & Implant Dentistry
Westminster
(410) 857-5700

Maureen H. Lefkoff

Lefkoff Periodontics
Columbia
(410) 992-6600

Barbara A. Lesco

Harbor Periodontics
(410) 727-6190

Martin Leybovich

Pikesville
(410) 774-0160

Bruce P. Mandel

Innovative Implants and Periodontics
Owings Mills
(410) 363-3780

Angela Miele

Annapolis Periodontics
Annapolis
(410) 224-0500

David A. Mugford

The Mugford Center for Periodontics & Dental Implants
Crofton
(410) 260-0790

Kevin G. Murphy

(410) 732-0202

Kathryn S. Mutzig

Towson Center for Dental Implants and Periodontics
Towson
(410) 321-9477

Mark A. Reynolds

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-7461

Arash M. Rostami

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
(410) 296-0136

Harlan Shiau

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-7961

Keyla Torres

Columbia Center for Periodontics & Dental Implants
Columbia
(410) 997-1189

Leo V. Trail

Bel Air
(410) 569-8567

Kim-Thi Van-Dinh

Harbor Periodontics
Baltimore
(410) 727-6190

Thu M. Versteegh

Harford Periodontics & Dental Implants
Bel Air
(410) 569-2243

Melody Ward

Baltimore Dental Arts
(410) 705-7062

Karl J. Zeren

Timonium
(410) 252-0871

PROSTHODONTICS

Arezoo A. Bahar

Annapolis Prosthodontic Associates
Annapolis
(410) 268-7100

Keith A. Boenning

Boenning & Dancykier
Towson
(410) 828-1717

Nathan Dancykier

Boenning & Dancykier
Towson
(410) 828-1717

John P. Davliakos

Annapolis Prosthodontic Associates
Annapolis
(410) 268-7100

Andrey Doroshenko

Owings Mills
(410) 356-7799

Pegah Ghiasi

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
(410) 296-0136

Michael P. Linnan

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
(410) 296-0136

Radi Masri

University of Maryland School of Dentistry
(410) 706-8133

K. Michael Murphy

K. Michael Murphy DDS & Associates
(410) 235-1233

Patrick L. Ousborne

Ousborne & Keller
Towson
(410) 828-1177

Seung B. Paik

Ellicott City
(410) 531-6226

Nina-Cecilla Santos

Dental Designs of Maryland
White Marsh
(410) 220-2731

Martin Schwartzberg

(410) 486-1133

Ghassan G. Sinada

Maryland Prosthodontic Associates
(443) 519-5293

William M. Wahle

Greater Baltimore Prosthodontics
Towson
(410) 296-0136

Source

]]> Baltimore’s Charles and Senator Theaters Turn 85 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/baltimore-charles-senator-movie-theater-history/ Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:52:31 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=155977
Chris and Kathleen Lyon with “Buzz” Cusack in front of The Charles Theatre. —Photography by Mike Morgan

On a cold weeknight in February, a small stream of people walk under the marquee of The Charles Theatre in Station North, queuing to watch a 29-year-old Jim Jarmusch film. Once inside, moviegoers buy popcorn at a retro metalwork concessions stand and mill around between cherry-red metal chairs and cafe tables set out on the concrete floor. Exposed brick walls run down both sides of the lobby to the five screening rooms, the walls hung with movie posters. A vintage Super Simplex 35-millimeter film projector, circa the 1920s, stands at the end of the hallway, a reminder of the theater’s long history.

And what a history it is. The Charles Theatre, then called The Times, opened as an all-newsreel theater in 1939, the same year The Senator Theatre opened just four miles north in Govans. That the two theaters, now the oldest movie theaters in Baltimore, are still open and screening films is thanks to the creativity and perseverance of one local family.

Over the years, James “Buzz” Cusack, his nephew John Sandiford, Cusack’s daughter, Kathleen Cusack Lyon, and her husband, Chris Lyon, reclaimed both theaters when each closed, rebuilding and reopening them, then reopening them again after the pandemic and then after subsequent entertainment-business strikes threatened to keep them shuttered.

In so doing, they’ve kept more than just marquee lights on in Baltimore—they’ve kept Baltimoreans watching movies on the big screen, sitting in darkened auditoriums in the kind of camaraderie that’s born from a collective love of cinema.

The two theaters show much more than old art films. The Senator tends to screen bigger-budget movies, while The Charles skews toward independent films. Both theaters have revival programs, showing older or recently remastered films every week, and The Charles offers a Cinema Sundays Club, a long-running, membership-driven film club.

All this, as well as daily showings is done by members of the family, plus a small staff of folks who help manage the theaters, sell and take tickets, pour sodas, and scoop out requisite bags of popcorn.

Times Theatre, 1939. —Baltimore Museum of Industry

On that February night, the auditorium showing Jarmusch’s Dead Man was half-full, not a bad crowd for a late Thursday night and a 1995 movie. Many of those in the seats seemed to know each other, something that Sandiford, who runs the revival series, says is common.

Above the darkened theater, The Charles’ oldest projection room, unmanned since the 2013 digitalization of film, is a tiny ad-hoc museum. Old photos, news clips, movie posters, and memorabilia are pinned or duct-taped to the sage-green walls, covering them in a wild collage, like a police evidence board. A poster for Pink Flamingos is stuck to an old metal storage cabinet with fraying masking tape, Divine pointing her gun directly at the digital projector, her red dress frozen in time.

“I hope people in Baltimore realize how rare it is to have not just one but two indie theaters like that,” says Linda DeLibero, senior lecturer in Johns Hopkins’ film and media studies department, of the importance, especially in the wake of the pandemic, of having both The Charles and The Senator still in business.

“I can’t stress enough how different it is to see a film on the big screen,” continues DeLibero, who has lived in Baltimore for decades and seen hundreds of films across both screens. “You cannot replicate it even on a big-screen TV. It’s the actual visual experience, and the aural experience of seeing a film the way the filmmakers intended it to be seen.”

DeLibero underscores the incredible value of being able to see such wildly different films as Top Gun Maverick and Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, which both screened post-pandemic at The Charles, as well as taking her film students—many of whom had never seen Hitchcock on the big screen—to see North By Northwest at The Senator.

“We really are so extraordinarily lucky to have those theaters.”

Projection room collage at The Charles Theatre. —Courtesy of the Lyon Family

Both movie houses opened in 1939 as single-screen theaters, which at the time, says Kathleen Lyon, “was the only kind of movie theater there was.” The Charles was originally built in 1892 as a Baltimore Traction Company powerhouse and cable-car barn, designed by Baltimore architect Jackson C. Gott in the Romanesque-Revival style.

The theater became an art house in 1958 and was renamed The Charles, remodeled several times, expanding and transitioning to a first-run movie house, then an art house again, until it finally closed in 1993, as the neighborhood declined and moviegoers stayed home to watch videos with the advent of the VCR.

A few months before The Charles closed, Sandiford, then in his 20s, had been hired as a projectionist. It was a fortuitous hire. “John is the cinephile of the family,” says Lyon of her cousin, who broached the idea of taking over the imperiled theater to his uncle, a contractor and renovator of old buildings. (If you want to save a theater, the best folks to do so tend not to be those watching Fellini films in their basements, but somebody who owns a construction company.)

“He left all the equipment,” says Cusack of the previous operator, “just up and left. And John asked me what it would take to get it open.”

Sandiford and Cusack leased the theater, reopened it, then renovated and expanded it in 1998 into what had been Godfrey’s Famous Ballroom, converting the space in the process from a single-screen to a multi-screen theater. Baltimore architect Alex Castro reworked the historic spaces, retaining the original brickwork, adding stadium seating for the four new theaters, and opening the lobby space into what is now Tapas Teatro restaurant—a providential passageway, as you can now take your sangria and jamón serrano into the theater.

The retro ticket booth and concession stand were fabricated by local metalwork designer Jonathan Maxwell, who was a projectionist at The Charles when he was a student at Maryland Institute College of Art. (Maxwell would also go on to design the metalwork at The Senator.)

“It was like an all or nothing proposition,” says Lyon. “It was extremely risky. And there was really no way to know if it was going to work.”

“ALL THESE PEOPLE SEEM TO HAVE SEEN EVERYTHING, BUT THEY’VE NEVER SEEN IT IN THE THEATER.”

The Charles reopened in 1999. “John Waters came and it was just this magnificent, optimistic, idealistic celebration,” says Lyon. “It was a miracle that it happened. And then it made money and it worked.”

Unlike The Charles, The Senator was built as a movie theater. Designed by Baltimore architect John J. Zink in the Art-Deco style and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it showcases a two-story circular lobby, an extensive painted mural portraying the history of film, and the original wood paneling and terrazzo floor.

“The Senator was the premier showcase in the city,” says Lyon of the Govans movie house. “At the time, the city had myriad theaters, and The Senator was the jewel.”

The Senator was built for the Durkee family in 1939. Durkee Enterprises, which at one time owned many of Baltimore’s theaters—including the Ambassador, Arcade, Belnord, Boulevard, Patterson, and Waverly—continued to run The Senator through the decades. Barry Levinson’s Diner held its premier there in 1982. In the late ’80s, Tom Kiefaber, grandson of the chain’s founder, bought the theater, then the last single-screen movie house in Baltimore.

By then the jewel had become seriously tarnished, and its decline furthered, until the City bought the theater at auction in 2009. Cusack and his daughter leased the theater until they bought it in 2012.

“When The Senator was facing foreclosure, I was really upset. I took it personally,” says Amy Davis, a longtime staff photographer at The Baltimore Sun who has lived near The Senator for decades. “We could see the searchlights blazing the sky for grand openings from the window of our house.”

Davis took it so personally that she started cataloging the city’s older movie theaters with her camera, publishing a book, Flickering Treasures: Rediscovering Baltimore’s Forgotten Movie Theatres, in 2017.

“I give [the Cusack family] a lot of credit for keeping these theaters running, despite the odds. Look what happened to the Parkway,” she says, about the Parkway Theatre, a vaudeville-turned-movie theater that first opened in 1915, was renovated and reopened in 2017 after a nearly 30-year closure, only to close again in 2023, another victim of the pandemic. (Of the 72 theaters Davis profiles, only five are still open, and only two of those—The Sena tor and The Charles—still show movies.)

Cusack and Lyon worked the same magic on their second theater. “The building was in total disrepair. There were holes in the roof. It was falling down around us,” says Lyon, who by this time had left her career as a lawyer and joined her father running The Charles. (Lyon is now the sole lessee of The Charles and the owner of The Senator.)

“It’s just a blight in the neighborhood to have an empty movie theater. It’s just sad and depressing,” she continues. “These neighborhood theaters were all anchors,” says Davis, “in many cases really an important part of the identity of each neighborhood.”

So Cusack and Lyon did extensive renovations, built three additional screens, and put in a restaurant—Clark Burger, for movie-watching with cheeseburgers and poutine—just as they had done at The Charles.

“We restored all the architectural features, got the gold leaf back, had the mural on the ceiling repainted. We had a model built of the original Art Deco chandelier,” says Lyon, sighing. “It was a process.” When the theater did finally reopen, in 2013, it was with a screening of, appropriately, Waters’ Hairspray, which had also held its premier there 25 years earlier.

Andres Londoño began working at The Senator even before the Cusacks bought it. He stayed on, working at both theaters over the years, and is now the general manager at The Senator. That he’s finishing a degree not in film but in computer science comes in handy, he says, now that the theaters operate digitally. But he can also still operate the dual 35-millimeter projectors in both theaters, which was useful when Oppenheimer came out, the rare film that was distributed both digitally and in old-school film to those theaters that could still show it that way. (Sandiford, the former projectionist, also screens film movies sometimes for the revivals.)

Crammed into the central projection room upstairs at The Senator, those old projectors still stand, alongside digital projectors, an old film Autowind platter system, and a big black-box server emblazoned with a Ravens sticker.

“There’s so much history. It’s hard not to fall in love with them,” says Londoño of both theaters.

Above: Interior theater, lobby, and exterior of The Senator Theatre, 1939. —Baltimore Museum of Industry; Seats at the Senator Courtesy of the Lyon Family

The Cusacks have succeeded in large part because they do pretty much all the work themselves. Buzz Cusack was his own general contractor for both theaters, and the fact that both Chris and Kathleen Lyon are lawyers likely helped with, well, everything.

During the pandemic, Chris, a trial attorney, ran his practice out of the office next to The Charles’ main projection room. And when the theaters finally reopened, he left the practice to work fulltime with his family. Cusack, now 83, still heads to The Charles most days, and he and his wife, Nancy, go to the movies on Saturdays, as they have for decades.

While big national movie chains have essentially turned into theme parks, with some even featuring in-seat dining and craft cocktails, the Cusacks have kept things old-school.

“We don’t overcomplicate it with hot foods; we don’t have nachos and hotdogs. We just try to keep our business model as simple as we can,” says Lyon. “Because there are so many moving parts, and it’s just us, and we don’t have layers of management, or even anyone who answers our phones. So we keep it as minimal as we can, and let the movies and the space speak for themselves.”

The revivals of recently restored, hard-to-find, or older movies, like the Jarmusch film, began soon after The Charles’ expansion. Sandiford started revival programs at both the Charles and Senator theaters, screening those films—recently: The French Connection, Oldboy, Delicatessen, The Thing, All About Eve—a few nights each week. These screenings might not always bring in a lot of revenue, but they bring in film buffs—and loyalty.

In the wake of the COVID lockdown, when theaters were shuttered for a year and a half and people stayed home watching movies, lots of movies, on their TVs and laptops and tiny phones, our appetite for watching movies on the big screen has only increased.

“All these people seem to have seen everything,” says Sandiford, “but they’ve never seen it in the theater.”

Cinema Sunday Club has also been a boost. It began at The Charles in 1995, when local movie-lover George Udel, longtime director of the Baltimore Film Forum, wanted Baltimore to have a cinema club and approached Cusack and Sandiford. (A colorful portrait of Udel painted by the late Baltimore artist Raoul Middleman hangs near the main auditorium.) Udel inaugurated and ran the club until his death in 1999, and it’s been going strong ever since, except for a hiatus during the pandemic.

“Cinema Sundays is having a real renaissance,” says Lyon of the club, in which members come for Sunday morning bagels, coffee and conversation, watch a current movie, then stay for a discussion led by a guest speaker. The club, now in its third decade and with attendance up to as many as 150, is now hosted by Howard Community College film professor Mike Giuliano. It’s composed not just of Charles loyalists, but, as Lyons puts it, “They are Cinema Sundays loyalists. It’s even deeper, it’s like another layer.”

Both Cinema Sundays and the revival programs also helped keep the theaters open after the pandemic, when many feared for the survival not just of neighborhood, family-run theaters, but of all movie theaters. “It cannot be overstated how devastating that was,” says Lyon. “We just went into this survival mode, where we had these two dark, empty buildings. We had no customers, no income, but we still had employees, we still had insurance premiums to pay, and we still had big bills. And the worst part of it was that we didn’t know when it was going to be over.”

Lyon says that she and her family wondered at what point they would have to sell their house, or just cut their losses and get out of the business.

“Everyone was just, ‘Doomsday, doomsday, you’re done,’” she says, as streaming took over the business model and many theaters shuttered for good. Both theaters rode out the pandemic, making COVID-related upgrades, getting PPP loans—and waiting. But even when the theaters were allowed to reopen, the future was hardly rosy, with audiences unsure about returning to public places, particularly the older viewers who fuel art-house theaters, and the industry itself unsure if people would just keep streaming movies at home rather than returning to actual movie houses.

“So then we were in this holding pattern of, like, Jesus, are we ever getting back to being able to sup port ourselves? Are movie theaters dead? Literally, it was the end of the world,” says Lyon. “The industry is dead in the water. It was just an ominous, stressful time—on the heels of a disaster.”

And then, just as moviegoers were returning and the industry was getting back on its feet, the Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, shutting down the movie pipeline again, pulling actors from promotional tours and red carpets, and condemning film lovers to more of an uncertain future.

But two things sustained theaters in the summer and fall of 2023: the Barbenheimer phenomenon, in which moviegoers returned in droves to see big-production films by Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, and Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour, which screened in theaters just as the summer films were leaving.

“The timing was impeccable. And you know, we sold out the theater. Thank you, Taylor,” says Lyon. “We have been very slowly climbing out of this multifaceted hole. It was not easy, but we survived.”

Those of us who love movies have also survived, turning off our devices and emerging from our houses to return to theaters and watch films on the big screen, where they are made to be seen. Buoyed by bigger-budget, more mainstream releases, The Senator has returned to 2019 numbers. The Charles, with its art-house, older crowd, has had a slower, less linear recovery, though Cinema Sundays and a devoted base have kept it going.

“It’s a testament to these theaters,” says Lyon. “They really have a unique place in people’s minds here.”

She also credits Baltimoreans. “They are loyal, and they are supportive,” she says.

As for her family, “We’re the stewards of these buildings; we’ve done the best job we possibly could, and we put our blood, sweat, and tears and everything else into this. They’re really just these special things.”

This piece appeared in our April 2024 issue. For more great Baltimore stories, consider becoming a subscriber.

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]]> Best Restaurants 2024 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/best-restaurants-baltimore-2024/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:00:02 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=154200

Edited by Jane Marion

Written with Amy Scattergood, Mike Unger, and Lydia Woolever. Additional writing by Janelle Erlichman Diamond

Photography by Scott Suchman

Illustrations by Noemi Fabra
Food & Drink

Best Restaurants 2024

A paean to the places that made our mouths water this year.

Edited by Jane Marion

Written with Amy Scattergood, Mike Unger, and Lydia Woolever. Additional writing by Janelle Erlichman Diamond
Photography by Scott Suchman
Illustration by Noemi Fabra
March 2024


ith the fight for survival firmly in its rear-view mirror, our culinary scene has reached a new inflection point. For the past year, eating out has been an unfettered joy again. Handheld menus have returned (long live print!), service has stepped up (tip well, people!), and we avowed gastronomes can all breathe a little easier (especially without masks). The trend toward more casual dining is still holding strong, mix-and-match small plates remain de rigueur, and both the craft cocktail and the mocktail movement have left an indelible imprint on bar menus. Best of all? Chefs seem more committed than ever to honing their craft and shaping their menu missions. If we didn’t know it before, we know it now: Restaurants are more vital than ever. With so many of us working remotely or hybrid, they play a critical role in providing a place to connect, commune, and gather. In fact, at their best, restaurants are sort of accidental communities, where anyone can feel a sense of belonging and home.

Make no mistake, our city might be small, but it’s also mighty, with a restaurant scene that’s as determined, as dynamic, as delicious as any in the country. The culinary landscape continues to make its mark on the national scene, charming out-of-towners, wowing those of us who live here, and one-upping itself every year with a raft of award nominations, including James Beards—for owner-chef Chris Amendola of Foraged and Foreman Wolf’s Charleston in 2023—as well as national press, featuring Little Donna’s in The New York Times and Clavel’s Lane Harlan in Bon Appétit. This was the year that growth in the fine-dining sphere steadied, but there were some false starts and stalls for a variety of reasons, from longer-than-expected build-outs to prolonged lease negotiations. While there’s always next year, we are eagerly awaiting the reactivation of spaces like Café Hon on The Avenue in Hampden by Foreman Wolf.

That said, we still have plenty to crow about, thanks to standbys like Restaurante Tio Pepe and The Prime Rib that have been at it slowly, consistently—since time immemorial, it would seem—and a handful of newcomers, like Ammoora in Federal Hill and Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles in Fells Point, that are welcome additions to our already vibrant scene.

Picking a best restaurant is admittedly something of a soft science, but we do our homework, studying menus, engaging with servers, and speaking with chefs about their vision. With notepads and iPhones in hand, we carefully evaluate every spot, not only for quality and execution of the food but for originality, ambiance, service, and value. We ask ourselves if the restaurant is caving to TikTok trends or turning out enduringly excellent dishes, with something novel and exciting that can’t be found on every table in town.

This year’s lineup runs the gamut from innovative, chef-driven independents like our cover model, CookHouse, in Bolton Hill, Le Comptoir du Vin in Station North, and Little Donna’s in Upper Fells, to the long-running tried-and-trues like The Helmand in Mt. Vernon and collegial Peter’s Inn in Fells Point.

As part of this list, you’ll also find a collection of deeply personal Love Letters—reflections on restaurants that hold a special spot in our hearts. While the Love Letters are all officially Best Restaurants, we’re giving them a little extra care because they remind us that the very definition of a “best restaurant” is a place that transcends the table and speaks to us on a deeper level.

As always, you’ll agree with some of our choices and debate others. But whatever the case, do get out there to revisit old favorites and make new discoveries. It’s a great time to be hungry in Baltimore.

Alma Cocina Latina

STATION NORTH

Even after a chef change and a total menu rehaul in January, the fare at this Venezuelan dining spot still thrills. Award-winning chef Héctor Romero has a particular passion for exploring the culturally diverse cuisine of his country, largely influenced by indigenous Caribbean cooking, while also incorporating ingredients from migrants who flock to Venezuela from all over the world. The dishes are a beguiling blend of citrus, spice, sweet—and often heat.

Begin your journey with an order of Iberian croquettes (topped with quince jelly) or the Nikkei crudo, a fusion of Japanese and Peruvian cuisine. This iteration highlights hamachi and tuna tartare marinating in ají amarillo-spiked tiger's milk. As for the entrees, every one is a star. Our favorites are a delicate red snapper floating in mustard seed and coconut milk sauce; and an eggplant fricassee, a vegan marvel of Indian tempura eggplant and flash-fried kale spiked with Trinidadian curry and a smoky aji dulce, plus a tangy garam masala-spiced goat yogurt served in a saucepan on the side. Combine that with the restaurant’s Instagram-worthy beauty—co-owner Irena Stein has an impeccable sense of style—and the whole experience is a culinary adventure you won’t soon forget.

Clockwise from top: Kebbet karaz meatballs resting in a pool of sour cherry reduction; Arabic coffee service with assorted treats; with its Damascus décor, the space is positively posh.

he word “ammoora” means captivating and beautiful, which is also an apt description for the dishes that emerge from the kitchen of Baltimore’s first fine-dining Syrian restaurant. Executive chef Dima Al-Chaar’s massive menu is an ode to her native country, which allows you to pick your journey around a region that’s known for vivid flavors and bold blends of spices. Chargrilled lamb kofta gets tossed with onion and parsley, and is tinged with Turkish chile and served with a tangy cucumber yogurt dip. Tiny kebbet karaz meatballs, flecked with mint and cinnamon gremolata, float in a bath of sour cherry reduction sauce worth sopping up with cloudlike rounds of house-made pita. Even the Arabic coffee is scented with cardamom. The space, set inside the Ritz-Carlton Residences, has serious swagger, too, with mother-of-pearl-inlaid furniture and glistening Arabic coffee carts. Go with a group and book a booth tucked behind drapery and upholstered in dusty pink velvet. It’s a flavor journey that transports you straight to Damascus.

Ananda

FULTON

Open the doors to Ananda and you’ll immediately forget you’re in a Fulton development. A gowned hostess will usher you through a gorgeous restaurant filled with book-lined shelves, stained glass, and roaring fireplaces. Brothers Binda and Keir Singh have created a terrific menu of both traditional Punjabi dishes and more modern creations, from garam masala goat and chicken biryani to burrata salad with gremolata and roasted cauliflower, corn, and crab soup. Ananda has its own nearby farm, so it’s no surprise that some of the finest dishes are created from seasonal produce, each perfectly spiced, with heat calibrated to taste. Among the best on our visit: palak chaat, a bowl of impossibly crispy spinach with pomegranate seeds, tamarind chutney, and housemade yogurt; and roasted broccoli, doused with spices, house-made cheese, garlic, and more tamarind. The Singhs raise chickens and ducks for their eggs and source meats locally, with that attention to quality and detail evident on the plate. Order as many dishes as you can.

Antrim 1844 and The Smokehouse Restaurant

TANEYTOWN

Dining at this restaurant on a 19th-century estate-turned-quaint-hotel feels like being on vacation. The first part is getting there, which, unless you live in northern Carroll County, isn’t easy. But the journey is worth it. Dinner begins with hors d’oeuvres and cocktails in the cozy bar or one of several seating areas before you’re escorted to your table. A piano player often fills the multiple dining rooms with music, adding to the ambiance. On our last visit, we were handed a menu with our name printed on it, along with that of executive chef Inti Villalobos-Coady, whose six-course tasting menu offers a panoply of French-inspired cooking.

There are options for each course, and we started with grilled octopus with couscous, fava beans, sweet corn, and shishito peppers, which added a nice element of heat. Our main dish, an excellent pan-seared halibut, was presented in a mushroom and dashi broth with cipollini onions and foraged mushrooms. Preparing a classic fish like this is a risk, but Villalobos-Coady is more than up to the task—the dish is a marvel. Meals here are not to be rushed, and many couples linger over bites of crème brûlée or a rich cheese plate for dessert. An after-dinner cappuccino—or better yet a cognac—is a perfect cap to a meal that feels like an escape from the monotony of everyday life. Perhaps next time we’ll get a room and stay the night.

Ash Bar

MT. VERNON

From the dimly lit, red-hued dining room to the snake-themed dishware and naughty-but-nice café society vibe, Ash Bar is a true Baltimore original (the same can be said of the Ulysses hotel in which the restaurant resides). But style only goes so far without substance. Here, the menu—overseen by Lauren Sandler, formerly of Woodberry Kitchen—features mostly elevated bistro fare, including a delicate pan-roasted salmon with celery root velouté, a comforting rigatoni Bolognese, and a classic roast chicken with tomatoes. Some offerings do shift with the seasons, but there are signature staples like the 24-hour pressed potatoes with sour cream and trout roe (think blinis) that you should order no matter how often you go. The preparations are solid and at a price point that won’t break the bank. If you want to extend that festive feeling, begin (or end) your night at the Bloom’s bar just down the hallway, which looks like something straight out of a David Lynch film, or stroll around the corner of the hotel to grab a potent craft cocktail from The Coral Wig, the latest creation from Clavel’s Lane Harlan.

Azumi

HARBOR EAST

There are few things as much fun as eating sushi on the Baltimore waterfront, chopsticking up perfectly cut hirame, ikura, and toro as the sun sets behind the Domino Sugars sign. This experience is brought to you by Azumi, located on the ground floor of the Four Seasons Hotel, featuring an omakase menu and fish flown in daily from Tokyo’s famed Toyosu Market. In addition to a stellar list of seafood for that sushi, which includes specialties like truffle uni and A5 Miyazaki Wagyu beef with foie gras, there are also various showy rolls, tempura, and barbecue-style robata, as well as bigger dishes, of which the miso black cod is particularly good. It’s worth noting that the nigiri is divine but smaller than average. (The upside is that this delivers the full flavor in one bite.) If you’re feeling flush, splurge on the Emperor’s Sushi Feast, consisting of 40 pieces of fresh fish for $240. And then maybe order another Serenity sake cocktail with the bill to ease the sticker shock.

Clockwise from top: Sandlin’s signature fried chicken and biscuits with pickles; a pear and Prosecco cocktail; the whimsical décor; pouring a drink.
The bunny-themed bathroom.

It takes a unique talent to transform a former neighborhood watering hole into a white-hot dining destination, but that’s exactly what Top Chef alum Jesse Sandlin has done with her latest concept, on the site of the former Wharf Rat in Fells Point. With its pink walls, rabbit-themed art, and bodacious bubble chandeliers, the place is pure whimsy. The fun also translates to the food—Sandlin’s decadent menu is built around the namesake buckets of audibly crisp fried chicken (plus divinely flaky biscuits) and perfectly paired bottles of Champagne. (Fun fact: The acidity of the bubbles cuts the fat from the chicken.) And while the offerings can best be described as casual, quirky, and Southern-accented—fancy deviled eggs, pimento cheese croquettes, fried oyster po’ boys—there’s a slate of wonderful chef-driven dishes, too, that show off Sandlin’s skills. The shrimp and grits, smothered in shrimp cream and a fantastically flavorful rendition of the Low Country standard, is coastal comfort food at its best.

Charleston

HARBOR EAST

While perfection is nearly impossible to achieve in any pursuit (let alone the restaurant business), this paragon of white-tablecloth dining comes close. After 26 years, co-owners Tony Foreman and Cindy Wolf still hit it out of the park night after night, sustaining a level of attention to detail that’s worthy of the highest gastronomic honors. There’s a reason why Wolf has been nominated for James Beard Best Chef Mid-Atlantic many times over. (Though we’re baffled by the Beard folks who never actually bestow her with the medal.) Inspired by her frequent culinary travels to Michelin-starred spots in France, the chef works tirelessly to tantalize our tastebuds—and all her plates are an archetype of artistry. A single sea scallop sautéed in lemon brown butter sits on a throne of cauliflower purée ringed by tiny capers on one iteration of the menu; pan-roasted magret of duck is partnered with a sunset-colored strawberry-rhubarb compote on another.

The front of the house is flawless, too; oenophile Foreman, along with genial maître d’hotel Peter Keck, keep things running with military precision, and not a fork is out of place. The positively splendid dining rooms—a series of three spaces, plus the bar, are exquisitely tasteful, each with its own personality, which means that no two visits are ever the same. Need a second opinion? While the ever-evolving tasting menu offers a three-to-six course option, last summer, one patron ordered a whopping 11 dishes, and that’s not even the restaurant record of 13. (Basically, one of everything.) Can’t say we blame them.

The Choptank

ANNAPOLIS

It would be hard to find a more apropos setting in which to slurp oysters, crack crabs, or indulge in the other bounties of the Chesapeake Bay than this second location of the Atlas Restaurant Group’s upscale Maryland seafood house concept. But setting alone—though it’s hard to beat this one, which overlooks the capital city’s famed Ego Alley—does not produce a top-notch restaurant. The food here speaks for itself. Rockfish ceviche features thick pieces of fish, thin slices of cucumber, and chopped tomatoes, onions, and jalapeños. The freshness of each component is evident. Steaks, strips, and sandwiches are available, but you come here for the cornucopia of fish and shellfish that can be seared, broiled, or blackened. On a recent visit, we opted for scallops with a side of amazingly rich ponzu-shiitake brown butter. In the warmer months, it can be a struggle to get a reservation, so plan accordingly. Once you’re here, you’ll see—and taste—why.

Best Restaurants
From Amy Scattergood

Cinghiale

HARBOR EAST

Seldom does a restaurant do so many things so well. At Cinghiale, Tony Foreman and Cindy Wolf’s beautiful Harbor East enoteca and osteria, dinner starts with a worldclass selection of imported cheeses and meats. Antipasti include foie gras, roasted pumpkin soup, and a terrific bluefin tuna crudo with avocados, cucumber, capers, and chile oil. Be sure to order at least one of the outstanding house-made pastas, which come in every conceivable shape and size. (They’re available in full and half portions.) The mushroom lasagna, with roasted eggplant and garlic fonduta, is delightfully rich. Our server heard us mention that we planned to share it and thoughtfully split the order on two plates.

Mains include meats like roasted venison, which is lean and tasty, with sweet potatoes and mustard greens. Veal, duck, chicken, and fish are all complemented rather than overshadowed by the methods in which they’re prepared. (The grilled swordfish, in a hazelnut-anchovy brown-butter sauce, is the perfect example of this synchronicity.) With an impressive multipage wine list—and a sommelier on hand for advice—Cinghiale has every angle covered.

Clockwise from top: Lamb chops with English peas and mashed potatoes; the Cilantro cocktail; The Honey, I’m Foam cocktail.
Bar director Gabriel Valladares at work.

hortly before 6 p.m. a line forms around the block outside this brownstone bistro, which doesn’t take reservations. When the doors officially open, customers are quickly seated inside the intimate but charming dining room, or at the smallish but lovely bar. What comes next—intricately made, inventive cocktails and spectacular dishes—explains the place’s popularity. Bar director Gabriel Valladares is among the most talented mixologists in the city, and his drinks are as artful as they are tasty. The food side, thoughtfully conceived and expertly prepared by chef-owner George Dailey, is equally impressive. Starters like panko-encrusted chèvre baked in a smoky tomato sauce and a grilled octopus tentacle in a tomato-based romesco sauce are wildly inventive. The steak frites ($10 off on Wednesdays) are always a crowd favorite, but we found even more joy in the vegan “scallop” curry, made with king oyster mushrooms and a Thai coconut curry dotted with peanuts. It’s a sterling example of Dailey’s creativity and attention to detail, traits that make CookHouse worth the wait, however long the line may be.

Dok Khao Thai Eatery

COLUMBIA

Don’t let the outdoor mall near the Merriweather Post Pavilion discourage you—Porntipa Pattanamekar’s Columbia restaurant is a bustling gem of a place. There’s a salmon-colored chaise lounge in the foyer for those waiting for a table (no reservations) and a working fountain in the center of the large, inevitably crowded dining room. Plants and birdcages decorate the restaurant—even the chandeliers are enclosed by birdcages—and the whole place evokes a dream-like garden shop.

The large menu is loaded with Thai favorites: The curries are excellent, with spice adjusted to taste, and there are exemplary versions of expected dishes (pad Thai, tom yum soup, drunken noodles) plus specialties like lychee duck curry, lamb massaman curry, and “cry baby noodles,” an addictive sweet-and-sour concoction. Especially on the weekend, Dok Khao can get very busy, but don’t be put off by those large crowds—the service is spectacular, with attentive waiters and dishes appearing as if by magic. There’s also a surprisingly large dessert menu that includes mouth-watering mango parfaits and a Thai tea crème brûlée.

Duck Duck Goose

FELLS POINT

The name might conjure memories of a children’s game, but the fare at Ashish Alfred’s outstanding French restaurant is geared toward the most mature of palates. That said, despite the elevated food, Alfred knows his restaurant sits in a neighborhood known more for partying than pâté, so it’s unpretentious and approachable. Start with a Duck L’Orange cocktail, which he swirls with duckfat-washed Sagamore Rye and gooseberries, cardamom bitters, star anise, and cinnamon. It’s a wonderful drink that sets the stage for the food. Classic Parisian appetizers like escargot and duck liver pâté are excellent, as is the roasted cauliflower, which is brilliantly paired with a date purée. As one might expect, the namesake duck is represented heavily among the entrees (the roasted duck breast is rich and tender), but much else shines as well. If there’s a better place to get coq au vin in the city, we’ve yet to find it. Dessert is not to be overlooked here, and the croissant bread pudding, topped with caramel, is lighter than most but no less delectable. It’s fun and French—a combination Duck Duck Goose has nailed.

Best Restaurants
From Janelle Erlichman Diamond

Foraged

STATION NORTH

Stew in summer? It’s not the first dish that comes to mind in that season, but Chris Amendola has never been satisfied with the status quo. His menu is ever-changing—sometimes even daily, as a dish might be served with a different kind of pasta or variety of tomato on any given night. But the chef always stays true to his ideals: using the freshest, most local ingredients possible (including, as the name would suggest, some that he forages himself) in creative ways. Take that stew, for example, which is a signature menu item on most visits. It is mushroom-based, and includes ricotta, herbs, pine nuts, and a poached egg. The result is a burst of umami that hits the spot any time of year.

On one recent visit, the seasonal offering of lightly fried squash blossoms stuffed with cheese reminded us of elevated jalapeño poppers; on another, a clever Maryland-style mushroom “crab cake” mimicked our state seafood. And while vegetables really shine here, the kitchen treats meat with similar respect. Take, for example, another offering—a leg of lamb topped with zesty chimichurri served over eggplant purée with roasted tomato and broccoli. As with so many of the dishes here, it was a perfect melding of ingredients and offers an apt demonstration of why Amendola was named a James Beard Award semifinalist in the Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic category last year.

Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen

HOPKINS-HOMEWOOD

Renowned chef-owner John Shields opened this quintessential Bay-to-table restaurant inside the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1998 and, a quarter-century later, it hasn’t deviated from its mission. The menu still highlights the bounty of the Chesapeake in dishes like Chincoteague fried oysters, smoked blue catfish catties, and rockfish imperial accompanied by creamy garlic mashed potatoes that makes a wonderfully rich dish combining the best of land and sea. Shields also excels with less traditional dishes like pleasingly spicy udon noodles tossed in a soy sauce, chile oil, orange zest, and toasted sesame seeds, while lamb meatballs with figs and yogurt sauce are worthy of their menu moniker “Greektown.” Gertrude’s wouldn’t have thrived for 25 years if its chef-owner had rested on his laurels. Thankfully, he hasn’t. And bonus points to Shields for being one of the most congenial chefs in town.

From top: Chocolate pavé; preparing food on the line during dinner service; making sheets of pasta; the house-made tagliatelle with shrimp.
The living wall in the dining room

Even after nearly a decade, this Brewers Hill restaurant in the century-old boiler room of the Gunther Brewing Company continues to dazzle diners. For starters, there’s the always amiable Director of Operations Nancy Hart Trice, who sets the tone with her warm hospitality. And then there’s her husband, chef Jerry Trice, who meticulously sources the very freshest local ingredients and draws inspiration from around the world to make them shine.

The hits keep coming. A cavalcade of appetizers—from a colorful kale and greens salad with pickled onions to the green garbanzo hummus with flatbread to a refreshing halibut crudo scattered with slices of avocado sitting in a puddle of coconut milk and charred habanero oil—are edible masterpieces. The signature Thai seafood hot pot—clams, mussels, shrimp, and pieces of white fish floating in a dizzyingly delicious curry and topped with a hill of cilantro—brims with fragrant flavor. Desserts, an afterthought on many a menu, are the pièce de résistance here, thanks to pastry chef Jessica Banner. Consider whatever is in season, whether that means a chocolate pavé or Black Forest pavlova. (She also bakes the homemade Parker rolls, a New England classic.) Also of note: There’s not a bad seat in the house here. Sidle up to the open kitchen and watch the show unfold—or sit on the gorgeous patio and count your lucky stars for great food in a beautiful setting.

The Helmand

MT. VERNON

There’s little need to change much of anything at a restaurant like The Helmand. For more than three decades, gracious owners Pat and Qayum Karzai have quietly led the fine-dining scene in the city. The kitchen of this Baltimore culinary linchpin has produced a kaleidoscope of flavors that wows both newcomers and customers who have been coming since day one. Everyone knows that The Helmand’s renowned kaddo borwani—pan-fried and baked baby pumpkin seasoned with sugar and served on yogurt garlic sauce—is a must-order. But the menu, exotic yet approachable, is filled with other items to tempt you, like the zardalu challow—chunks of lamb simmered with sun-dried apricots, prunes, tomatoes, garlic, turmeric, and chile peppers—or the mourgh challow: chicken sautéed in yellow split peas and tomatoes. Every time we return, which is often, we’re thrilled that it’s just as we remembered.

Hersh’s

RIVERSIDE

Drive to the southernmost end of Light Street in South Baltimore and you’ll find one of the city’s best pizzerias in a big brick building on the corner that once housed a barbecue joint. Owned and operated by the Hershkovitz siblings, Stephanie and Josh, Hersh’s is strung with Edison bulbs and seems to be guided by the heat and principle of the 5,000-pound, Italian-made, wood-burning pizza oven that the pair forklifted into the space. The Neapolitan-style pies that emerge from this behemoth are spectacular: a margherita with house-made mozzarella, a version of Frank Pepe’s classic New Haven clam pie, and a white pizza with pistachios and kale that keeps regulars coming back. The pasta, also made in-house, is excellent as well: a short list of cavatelli or tagliolini, each perfectly tricked out. In short, Hersh’s has everything a pizzeria should have—great pies—plus everything most pizzerias do not, including rustic entrees (a satisfying swordfish over couscous) and deft appetizers (wood-fired octopus) that you’d expect to find at a white-tablecloth spot.

Clockwise from top: Shrimp a la plantxa; a variety of tinned fish; mesclun greens with sliced apples and crumbled La Peral; fresh baked bread; Chef Ben Lefenfeld and his co-owner brother, Jake.
Gathering plates to serve.

his Basque-country restaurant inside historic Meadow Mill is a paradise for food worshippers. Like the region itself (known for its many Michelin-starred spots), a visit here feels like an endless feast combining classic ingredients with creative flavors. Whatever the season, co-owner/executive-chef Ben Lefenfeld’s ever-changing menu, inspired by this coastal region between France and Spain, is a thrill to peruse. Explore all the offerings, from an outstanding assortment of conservas (tinned fish) to the one-bite snacks known as pintxos (the chorizo with Manchego and shishito pepper is one of the best bites in Baltimore). Many of the bigger entrees—including a plate of wood-grilled eggplant with ricotta or strip steak with black-garlic butter—are prepared over the coals of the asador grill, which adds dimension with smoky flavor. The pristine seafood is always formidable, including the grilled shrimp and scallops with zucchini escabeche, fennel pollen, and aioli we devoured on one recent outing. Service is pleasingly dependable (special shout-out to veteran Aaron Loux, who makes it look effortless). And half-price wine night on Sundays with a bottle of the region’s famed Rioja is our favorite way to wind down the weekend.

La Scala Ristorante Italiano

LITTLE ITALY

Little Italy’s La Scala is as old-school as they come. The servers are dressed like steam-train conductors, the pepper grinders are brandished like wands, and the pasta—made in-house—is worthy of all those ancient ladies making orecchiette on Pasta Grannies. Chef-owner Nino Germano has been running the place for over a quarter-century, and it manages to be both traditional and idiosyncratic: There’s a bocce ball court near the front door, and instead of a chandelier, there’s a wooden octopus hanging from the ceiling. Whatever makes Germano happy is fine with us. There are splendid iterations of gnocchi and risotto and antipasta on offer, as there should be. The calamari fritti and veal scallopini are outstanding, as has been every plate of pasta we’ve ever ordered, particularly the Bolognese, puttanesca, and ethereal gamberi fra diavolo. Finish off with a demitasse of espresso and at least one order of tiramisu.

Le Comptoir Du Vin

STATION NORTH

Hidden away in a sliver of a rowhouse on a ramshackle Station North street, walking into Le Comptoir is like stumbling upon a sudden portal to Aix-en-Provence. Rosemary Liss and Will Mester have created a French-ish bistro and wine bar that feels at once upscale and familial, as if your Gallic grandparents had been secretly trained in the classics. Bottles of wine line the walls, the menu is chalked on a blackboard, and the dishes—ever-changing rustic takes on countryside food that are both unconventional and unexpected—come on mismatched china.

One night, there might be a cassoulet or a stew of lentils with goose liver. Another might yield tomato tarts or soup au pistou. An appetizer of rolled pig’s head, green sauce, and grilled bread is spectacular, as is the restaurant’s famous mussel toast with saffron aioli. If there aren’t enough of the tiny dinner tables, there’s a basement dining room that feels like a forgotten wine cellar and which turns into a patio during the warmer months. The bread is made in-house, the natural wine list is long, and the desserts (lemon posset!) are sublime.

Limoncello

LOCUST POINT

The menu at this contemporary Italian restaurant is attractive for many reasons. Let’s start with the food: Antipasti like the torta di melenzane, aka baby eggplant in tomato sauce topped with fresh mozzarella, are excellent, as is the bruschetta with fig jam, Gorgonzola, and 24-month aged prosciutto. Pasta dishes, like orecchiette with crumbled fennel sausage and roasted-garlic broccoli rabe, harken to Italy’s Campania region, where the owners have their roots. And entrees, like a plate of grilled shrimp, swordfish, calamari, and octopus with fingerling potatoes and an arugula-tomato salad, are caringly prepared.

Chef-co-owner Gennaro DiBenedetto allows the seafood to speak for itself while ensuring that its flavors are accented by the right level of char from the grill. But we also love the menu itself—literally. Its colors and fonts are festive, capturing how it feels to dine here. Located on the first floor of shiny Anthem House in Locust Point, the sprawling space is bright and lively, and the large bar has some of the most comfortable stools in town. Reservations fill up on the weekends, so plan ahead or risk disappointment.

Best Restaurants
From Lydia Woolever

Linwoods

OWINGS MILLS

Don’t come to this 36-year-old Owings Mills stalwart if you’re looking for newfangled trends or to fill your social media feed with images of salmon with edible gold leaf or chopped sandwiches—yes, those are both a thing. This white-linen spot—long the ad-hoc fine-dining room for Baltimore County—is all about quality and consistency, resulting in the kind of cooking you’ll want to enjoy with friends or family for a special occasion, or any reason at all. Whether you grab a seat at the bar to sip a pineapple martini and snack on shrimp scampi flatbread; choose to perch at the grill line, with its view of the open kitchen and garde mangers stacking salads in ring molds; or sit at a table for that piece of simply prepared fish that’s been on the menu since the beginning, all roads lead to perfection. The eponymous Linwood Dame, who last year sold the business to his longtime executive chef, Tom Devine, and Erena Vedensky, Linwoods’ chief financial officer, is no longer a nightly presence, but other familiar faces, like veteran staffer-turned-general-manager Stacey Taylor, prevail to table touch and make you feel oh so cared for.

Magdalena, A Maryland Bistro

MT. VERNON

If you want to impress out-of-towners or just want to get glitzed up for a night on the town, head to this epitome of elegance inside The Ivy Hotel. The posh dining rooms and Eden-like patio exude a quiet luxury, but after a post-pandemic relaunch, the bistro-style menu is a bit more approachable. The menu draws from the area’s best fishermen and farmers and leans into the seasons, while always paying its respect to the Mid-Atlantic. Each dish is executed with consistency and care, from a crispy sea bass with chanterelles, Sungold tomatoes, and turmeric oil in summer to a golden Amish chicken with pickled okra in the fall.The whiskey selection, the cocktails, and Wine Spectator-awarded bottle list make for ideal accompaniments.

We suggest going with a few friends for maximum sharing opportunities. Our own perfect Magdalena order includes a basket of house-made bread with ever-changing butters, the artisan cheese plate, and the heavenly dessert board including pastry chef Cassidy Lueck’s phenomenal ricotta doughnuts served with a scoop of seasonal ice cream. For the ultimate experience, splurge for a room upstairs (breakfast from the restaurant is included).

Clockwise from top: The dining room; house-made pasta; shaking a cocktail; the tuna cannoli; the foie gras terrine with pickled beets and sour cherry compote.
A bowl of ziti Bolognese.

This intimate Butchers Hill boîte—all aglow on East Pratt Street in the former Salt Tavern space—fires on all cylinders, from the food to the service to the vibe. Working in his compact kitchen, owner Matthew Oetting puts a polished spin on familiar Italian-leaning favorites, and his presentations result in some of the prettiest plates in the city. On one visit, that might mean a tangle of toothy house-made frutti di mare linguini splashed with white wine, teeming with clams, mussels, and scallops, and enrobed in uni butter. On another, it might mean an inventive scallop piccata tossed with artichokes and tomato-garlic sofrito, or a work-of-art tuna cannoli shell stuffed with yellowfin and dabs of avocado purée. The bar program offers four different types of negronis, a roster of amaros to help you digest, and wine by the glass that leads to some of the most generous pours around. The place gets packed and can get a little loud, but it’s always a good sign when you’re where everyone else wants a piece of the action, too.

The Milton Inn

SPARKS

Ever since its 2021 opening under the auspices of the Foreman Wolf Restaurant Group and chef-partner Chris Scanga (formerly of Petit Louis Bistro in Roland Park), this bucolic country haven, whose former claim to fame is that it was John Wilkes Booth’s one-time schoolhouse, only gets better and better. Over time, the menu has become more approachable, with less focus on game and more emphasis on the greatest hits from the Louis menu—the iconic crispy squash blossoms with saffron aioli, the Left Bank-leaning quiche Lorraine, the croque monsieur, and the best onion soup this side of the Seine. But there are plenty of items that are unique to the Inn, too, further highlighting Scanga’s mastery of French foundational cooking. The pan-roasted Scottish salmon in sorrel sauce is exemplary, as is a simple New York strip boosted by Béarnaise and the divine steak tartare complete with caviar and a quail egg.

There’s no such thing as a bad seat here—some rooms are bright and airy; others are dark and moody. The patio, replete with a fireplace, is perfect even when the air has a slight chill. Whatever the backdrop, the execution is on-point, the flavors are fantastic, and the hospitality is warm and sincere. Go on Wednesdays when wine is half price. And always visit the dog-themed bathroom near the bar, even if only for the selfie.

Nihao

CANTON

After briefly closing for a reboot last year, NiHao reopened with a new menu that put the Canton rowhouse restaurant more in line with chef-owner Peter Chang’s small empire of Mid-Atlantic restaurants highlighting traditional regional Chinese cuisine. NiHao’s kitchen now sends out plates of its superb signature Peking duck (a holdover from the previous iteration, as regulars would have revolted otherwise), plus huge bowls of flounder spiked with hot chiles or Sichuan peppercorns and cabbage, both takes on the classic water-boiled fish, as well as crispy popcorn chicken laced with bright red chiles—not to mention an impressive list of dim sum. NiHao also features more than a dozen baijiu cocktails, made with the national spirit of China, traditionally distilled from sorghum, which makes for a great addition to the local mixology scene. Be sure to order the xiaolongbao (soup dumplings) steamed in bamboo trays, or the crispy, doughy balloon of bubble pancake that is another of Chang’s signatures. It’s a great, showy start to what is a banquet of a meal.

Best Restaurants
From Jane Marion
Clockwise from top: The scene at the bar; mac and cheese with a lobster tail; a server holding the bison rib-eye.

It’s risky business taking a scalpel to a legend, but after 25 years as a go-to destination for Baltimore County diners, The Oregon Grille needed some work. Its menu had grown predictable and its appearance stale. Enter the Atlas Restaurant Group, which reopened the restaurant last year after a multi-million-dollar renovation. Thankfully, with its dark wood tones and some of the old horse saddles still on display, the space retained its rustic elegance and clubby vibe.

Plenty of interesting dishes now permeate the menu, including a potato skin-caviar appetizer and roasted beet-burrata salad with arugula, candied pistachios, tangerines, and a honey vinaigrette. But rarely have we left a restaurant raving about a specific dish like we did after devouring the bison rib-eye. The 14-ounce star of the show emerged from the kitchen with a deep char yet juicy red interior. Bison is leaner than beef, which is why we were so impressed by its deep flavor. As the fireplace crackled and a piano player tapped away on the keys, we were reminded that while The Oregon Grille has a storied past, it’s now writing an exciting new chapter.

Peerce’s

PHOENIX

This jewel box of an Indian restaurant, nestled along Dulaney Valley Road, is a beacon from a dark stretch of country road. As you step onto the patio, you’ll find yourself in a verdant Eden overflowing with greenery and a trellis entangled with vines. The interior of the restaurant—think dramatic, curry-scented dining rooms that flicker with candlelight—is equally elegant. Co-owner brothers Binda and Keir Singh of Howard County’s Ananda explore their roots in Punjabi cooking with traditional yet modern interpretations of always well-seasoned dishes like tandoori chicken, fish curry, garam masala goat, and lamb vindaloo. And their vegetable-based offerings, from spiced okra with onions to eggplant curry, crush the concept that vegetarian fare is boring.

The expansive menu also bends with the seasons and nods to Maryland, as evidenced by the crab khumbi with sweet meat tucked into a portobello mushroom capped with coconut chutney. And as anyone who has ever been to Peerce’s knows, no visit is complete without at least a passing conversation with the sartorially suited Keir, who sets the tone with his genuine warmth and is always on hand to make a recommendation. (Ask him about the off-menu butter chicken if you like a lot of heat.)

Peter’s Inn

FELLS POINT

Whenever we have new guests in town, there’s always one place we take them for the most culinarily quintessential introduction to Charm City. Somehow both gritty and quietly cosmopolitan, eccentric yet accessible, this former Ann Street biker bar manages to capture all the wonderful contradictions of our underdog town. Only owners Karin and Bud Tiffany could combine a sidecar-ed martini served on a silver platter with a stereo cranking out The Clash. Or a just-right New York strip steak with a giant taxidermied marlin above the bar. Or Prince Edward Island oysters (with a “bump” of caviar, no less) and the best Texas toast-style garlic bread you’ve ever had.

Hand-written menus mingle with antique oil paintings and the oohs and aahs of both longtime loyal patrons and wide-eyed come-latelys. That’s because Peter’s is the inimitable blend of no-fuss and plenty of frills, with each dish having its own magic touch. On a recent visit, our pasta al limone arrived with an unexpected punch of buttery sautéed shrimp, smashed pistachios, and smoky chile flakes. It’s a sin to skip the surprisingly lovely house salad, decadent smoked trout pâté, or divine pot de crème dessert. And those relatively new French fries rival McDonald’s, which we mean as the highest possible praise.

Preserve

ANNAPOLIS

Occasionally we find ourselves in Annapolis in search of supper, and more often than not, that means we’ll make our way up Main Street to this now-mainstay on the state capital’s most bustling strip. Amidst the throngs of white-hatted Navy plebes and across from the bright lights of Chick & Ruth’s Delly, Preserve is easy to miss, though once you’ve had a bite inside, you won’t soon forget it. Since 2015, husband-and-wife team Jeremy and Michelle Hoffman—formerly of Thomas Keller’s Per Se and Danny Meyer’s Union Square Café, respectively—have been turning out some of the most ambitious food in Anne Arundel County.

Much is in the name here, with the chef’s Pennsylvania Dutch heritage melding with the ingredients of the Chesapeake and pickled and preserved elements dotting the boundary-pushing menu. Fried duck tongues with rice vinegar aioli and chile crisp were an appetizer we never knew we needed, while the pork terrine is a perennial star, especially the version with fennelpeach kraut and Dijonnaise on offer last summer. Always indulge in the daily specials, inspired by provisions from the restaurant’s roster of local farmers, and on that note, consider a bottle from Old Westminster Winery, made just up the road.

Best Restaurants
From Mike Unger

Puerto 511

DOWNTOWN

Open since 2014 and reworked in 2019 with a prix-fixe-only menu, Puerto 511 is a hidden gem tucked away off a side street in the heart of downtown. Open the door to what feels like a secret gateway to Lima, and you’ll find Peruvian chef-owner Jose Victorio Alarcon’s minimalist dining room, with 10 small tables next to a tiny open kitchen. There’s lovely artwork on the walls and a steep staircase down to a beautiful dining room for larger parties, with a fireplace to boot. With five courses on weekdays and seven during weekends, Alarcon’s menu is a perfectly orchestrated series of dishes—all sized and paced just right—like shrimp in sweet chile sauce atop a corn tamal; grilled veal skewers over Peruvian corn and potatoes with pepper sauce; and a stunning dish of fish ceviche with sweet potatoes in tiger’s milk, a regional marinade of yellow peppers and lime. Puerto 511 is BYOB, which allows for personalization, but they also offer pisco sours, the traditional Peruvian cocktail—and a stellar accompaniment to Alarcon’s glorious food.

Restaurante Tio Pepe

MT. VERNON

This subterranean Spanish stalwart on the quiet edge of Franklin Street isn’t the hot spot it used to be. In fact, on a recent Tuesday night, we were the only table in the place, but before long, that felt like being in on one of Baltimore’s best-kept secrets. Two servers swept through with glasses of potent house-made sangria and the sort of old-world service that M.F.K. Fisher would praise. By the time other locals trickled into the cavernous dining room—dimly lit, decked in white tablecloths, dripping with oil paintings, and the occasional lipstick-red carnation—we were too busy swooning over the luscious garlic soup off the special’s menu (which hasn’t changed in a decade) to pay them any mind.

With minute steaks and stringbean almondines, the menu is stuck in 1968, the year that Tio Pepe opened, but that makes it kinda cool again. Start with the hollandaise artichokes and Serrano ham with melon. Then, while it might sound sacrilege, forgo the famous paella for near-perfection soft-shell crabs with lemon and butter and, always, the masterpiece suckling pig with pan jus, smoky black beans, and cinnamon-scented apple sauce that you’ll be dreaming about for days. But before you head back out into the modern-day night, find room for a café Americano and slice of the delightful pine nut roll for dessert. Turns out, they kind of knew how to live 56 years ago.

Tagliata

HARBOR EAST

This Italian Harbor East hot spot is the juggernaut of the Atlas Restaurant Group, which has 25 area restaurants (and counting). The vibe is swank—from the oversized card-stock menu (good riddance, QR codes!) to the sophisticated dining room to a lineup of deeply delectable dishes, thanks to co-owner-chef Julian Marucci, who coaxes big flavors from simple ingredients. All the offerings are excellent here, but be sure to order at least one of the house-made pastas stuffed or coated with all sorts of scrumptious items from rabbit to crab with uni cream.

The rest of the menu is a hit parade, too—some signatures with timeless preparations, like the beef tenderloin with spicy black garlic mostarda, others seasonal, like the smoked carrots with ricotta and truffle honey or risotto with roasted corn and crab. Pair it all with a pick from the seemingly limitless selection of award-winning wines, from Piedmont to Puglia. At the end of the meal, lounge on the patio or in the piano lounge over an espresso martini while taking in the spectacle of decked-out patrons passing by. La dolce vita, indeed.

Tapas Teatro

STATION NORTH

Like a classic film, this beloved Spanish restaurant is as relevant today as it was when it debuted 23 years ago in Station North. Adjacent to the Charles Theatre, it still draws moviegoers who down pitchers of the signature sangria (which can be brought inside the cinema). Everyone else seems to love it as well. The bar, dining room, and streetside tables are packed, but the staff remains friendly and unflappable. On a recent visit, we heeded our server’s advice and started with a handful of small plates. All were excellent, but the huevos de cordoniz y chorizo—strips of sausage topped with a rich quail egg on toasted crostini—stood out. After four, we wanted more. Along with the description for gambas al ajillo—shrimp sautéed in olive oil with garlic and parsley—comes a parenthetical: “Add capers or/and chiles for a kick.” To which we say, do both—it takes an already outstanding dish and turns it into a masterpiece. Like most movies, many restaurants fade over time. Only the greats endure.

Thames Street Oyster House

FELLS POINT

It seems like every hip restaurant has a raw bar these days, but well before freshly shucked seafood found itself in the Roaring Twenties-esque revival, there was Thames Street on its cobblestone namesake in Fells Point. For over a decade, owner Candace Beattie and executive chef-partner Eric Houseknecht have helped remind our city about oysters, the shellfish which once reigned supreme along the nearby waterfront long before crab was ever king. And here, in this Chesapeake-meets-New England eatery, those half-shells are served as impeccably as they come.

This is the place for even the least bold to try their first oyster. Your server will guide you from the accessible to the challenging. But the rest of the menu shouldn’t be missed either. The buttery whole-belly clam roll—with fat fried bits of bliss tumbling over the edge of a griddled split-top bun so good we’d eat it solo—would make our last meal. For sharing, a splurge for the five-pound lobster—stuffed with blue crab, shrimp, and scallops—is worth it, though the claw-knuckle-and-tail-packed polenta with English peas, mushrooms, and spring onions makes an ideal and still indulgent substitute. Funnily enough, we get especially jazzed about the seasonal sides, which on one late summer visit included the loveliest brown sugar baked lima beans we’ve ever seen.

The Tilted Row

BOLTON HILL

Executive chef Amy Hessel and owner Ziad Maalouf have created a destination-worthy restaurant on the ground floor of a modernist Bolton Hill apartment complex, with a menu of Middle Eastern dishes with a Maryland twist. Sit at the counter and watch the crew making plates of falafel-encrusted salmon, charred octopus with black-garlic aioli, or lamb kofta with hummus and preserved lemons. There is an excellent Sunday brunch (massive cinnamon rolls! crab Benedict!) and Blue-Plate specials like the fried chicken and biscuits that draws locals on Thursdays with dedicated regularity. Close to Maryland Institute College of Art, there’s a deceptive casualness to The Tilted Row that makes diners feel comfortable, yet the exceptional service, beautifully run open kitchen, and pretty plating elevate the place to fine-dining status. Be sure to order the za’atar focaccia, or the desserts—one regular often just orders the brown-butter toffee cake—as Hessel was also trained in pastry.

Clockwise from top: Chef Zack Mills on the line; the interior with nautical art; raw oysters on ice; the mushroom tart.
Blue crab and bone marrow.

et inside the historic, circa-1798 Whitehall Mill, True Chesapeake is a lofty, industrial setting for sophisticated Chesapeake cuisine. Most of the menu highlights hail from the raw bar, befitting a restaurant with its own local oyster farm, on St. Jerome Creek in Southern Maryland. Those oysters come a variety of ways: shucked, roasted, and topped with Old Bay and butter or Gruyére and black truffles; in dishes like oysters Rockefeller and oyster stew; or fried with cucumber noodles, pickled jalapeño, and puréed fennel. Of course, chef Zack Mills’ menu offers more than just oysters: There’s a silken spaghetti with middleneck clams; an elegant mushroom tart that looks like a beautiful bird’s nest built from pastry crust and filled with local funghi; and a spectacular blue crab and bone marrow dip, served in the bones. The cocktail list, made at the centerpiece bar embedded with crushed oyster shells, of course, is a finely tuned accompaniment for any dish. And the weekday happy hour for $6 martinis, Old-Fashioneds, and daquiris makes us, well, happy indeed.

Verde

CANTON

Long before gourmet pizza (including gluten-free and vegan) became a thing on menus across Maryland, there were blistered Neapolitan wonder wheels at this convivial hangout with Edison bulbs, marble accents, house-made fior di latte mozzarella, and a wood-fire pizza oven that turns out pizzas with pizzazz. You’d be hard-pressed to find pizza with more personality—Verde’s feature pairings such as prosciutto and fig, smoked mozzarella and lemon, and mushrooms with truffle cream. (And whichever one you pick, make a mental note to come back and try a different one next time.) But the toppings are only part of the equation. We also love the thin crust with its perfectly charred cornicione (outer edge), slight chewiness, and tangy topping of cheese. The menu is rounded out with excellent offerings from the bar (here’s looking at you, negronis!) and an array of outstanding antipasti—we constantly crave the puttanesca-style shrimp—that make this so much more than a neighborhood pizza joint.

Woodberry Tavern

HAMPDEN-WOODBERRY

We’ll admit that it took us some time to adjust when the restaurant once known as Woodberry Kitchen reopened as a tavern after the pandemic. But now that the place has found its footing, we can see that, though James Beard Award-winning chef Spike Gjerde’s original iteration was inarguably ambitious, the tavern is a more understated expression that’s no less charming. With its Windsor chairs, Persian carpets, and nostalgic desserts, the restaurant’s farm-to-fork DNA is still very much in place, with a focus on regional specialties that are at once familiar and novel.

As ever, almost all ingredients are sourced locally and dishes change with the seasons, but the experience is now more intimate. Executive chef Steven Kenny (a veteran staffer who worked at Easton’s famed Bartlett Pear Inn) is laser-focused on what’s available on any given day, but devises dishes that are as pioneering as ever. In early fall, that might mean “crab service” (a trio of dishes including crab salad, a crab pot, and crab fritters) or tortellini with chanterelles and sweet corn. In the colder months, you might find a pretzel-crusted pork loin with miso-buttered cabbage. When the mercury dips, oysters three ways emerges, including fried, roasted, and raw. The pretty-as-a-picture baked Alaska is iconic. Turns out, you can go home again, especially after a total reinvention.

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]]> Six Baltimore Bartenders Who Turn Cocktail-Making Into an Art Form https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/baltimore-bartenders-elevating-art-of-cocktail-making/ Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:00:31 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=154174

From behind their bars, they’ve seen it all. Blossoming love affairs and breakups. Fights and reconciliations. Joy and despair. They’ve served as amateur psychoanalysts, sounding boards for business ideas, and the voice of reason—some people need to be told when it’s time to go home While many people become bartenders for practical reasons—the flexible hours, the wide availability of jobs—others find the profession a calling.

“It takes a very special human to be in hospitality,” says Amie Ward, president of the Baltimore Bartenders’ Guild. “We enjoy putting other people’s needs before our own. We are creative in our solutions. We can empathize, actively listen to people. There’s nothing easy about that at all.”

Bartending has changed dramatically in the last decade. The dawn of the craft cocktail era has attracted those with creative and even scientific minds to the profession. The ability to make drinks using liquors and ingredients from around the world is finally treated with the respect it deserves by restaurateurs, customers, and critics alike. Although getting the perfect head on a beer is an art unto itself, engineering a cocktail using sous vide shochu with coconut, cantaloupe juice, yogurt fat-washed soju, and egg white, as Gabe Valladares can do at CookHouse, is something different entirely.

In Baltimore, designer cocktail bars like Rye, W.C. Harlan, The Coral Wig, Southpaw, Dutch Courage, and Kenwood Tavern peacefully coexist with beer bars and corner pubs. They are all important parts of our city’s social fabric, as are the people who work at them.

There are more than 610,000 bartenders nationwide, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statitics. We’re lucky to have some of the best of them right here in Baltimore.

Gabriel Valladares

CookHouse

Saturday nights at 10 p.m., Bolton Hill’s CookHouse transforms from one of the best restaurants in the city to one of the best cocktail bars…anywhere. The man responsible for this metamorphosis, Gabriel Valladares, is just 25 years old, but to sample one of his drinks is to taste the work of a wunderkind.

During the weekly three-hour sessions (and of course during  CookHouse’s regular dinner service), the self-taught Valladares’ creativity is evident in every sip. Each cocktail on the menu is a Gabe original.

Take for example The Cilantro. Valladares, CookHouse’s bar director, is a lover of mezcal, and he had begun to experiment with sous viding liquor.

“Mezcal is Mexican, and I wondered what else was in that realm,” he says. “Cilantro popped into my head, so I sous vided cilantro, a little bit of honey, and mezcal for eight hours. My friend Lane [Harlan of Clavel and W.C. Harlan] inspired me to do my own tepache, which is basically fermented pineapple juice.”

But Valladares wasn’t done. To garnish the drink, he added little pellets cleverly dubbed “lime caviar” on the menu. They’re made by combining sugary lime juice and the chemicals sodium alginate and calcium lactate, an idea he read about in a book published by The Aviary, the cutting-edge cocktail bar in Chicago. When the pellets pop in the drinker’s mouth, they add a kick of acidity to the smoky drink.

“It was a one-and-done thing that came together really well,” Valladares says of the concoction. But that’s not the norm. The ability to accept failure, he says, is a key component to being a successful mixologist.

“I’ve done so many cocktails that literally taste disgusting. They never make it onto the menu. Not everyone is going to like everything you do. That can hurt my ego. But putting your creative aspects [forward] brings people in.”

Judging by the crowds that flock to CookHouse, Valladares’ wins far outpace his losses. A former student at Maryland Institute College of Art, he’s also an avid photographer, and his beautiful shots of the restaurant’s food and drink routinely wow people on Instagram.

“I love when new people come into the bar,” he says. “My goal every night is to blow their minds and give them an amazing experience.”

Kim Vo

Dutch Courage

Kim Vo sees potential ingredients for cocktails everywhere. Over the summer, she challenged herself to begin making drinks with zero waste. This she took quite literally. Vo used corn as the backbone for the drink she calls La Cosecha, which means “harvest” in Spanish. Not only did she juice the kernels, but she turned the cob and all of the husk into a stock.

“When you put them together you get the most powerful corn flavor,” she says.

From there she added mezcal and basil to the stock. Next, she put in a little watermelon. She even pickled the rinds for garnish so they too did not go to waste.

In November, Vo tapped into her Vietnamese roots to create the Snug Bug, her take on a Hot Toddy inspired by artichoke tea. She made a tincture using the artichoke heart and charred the leaves. Then she added carciofo, which is an artichoke-based amaro, and mixed in a cane sugar spirit, plum liqueur, and reduced cider syrup.

“It gets wild,” she says. “It’s toasty. It’s earthy. It’s just perfect for the season.”

The drink demonstrates the scientific way that Vo’s brain works. She earned a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University but gravitated toward the hospitality industry because she treasures the interpersonal relationships.

“Ultimately what I love about cocktail bartending is the connection with people, both the guests and other people in the industry,” she says.

After stints at hotel bars and the late, great whiskey-focused bar Bookmaker’s in Federal Hill, she’s been the bar manager at Dutch Courage in Old Goucher for three years. During her time in the industry, she’s seen the world of upscale cocktails change dramatically.

“Cocktailing was [once] kind of like a very exclusive practice,” she says. “You had to go to a speakeasy or a craft cocktail bar to find a good cocktail. But post-COVID, with Instagram and that whole boom with social media, it’s more accessible.”

She believes that the culture she has helped to create among the staff has contributed to Dutch Courage’s welcoming spirit.

“It’s a completely supportive environment, and it really lends itself to this uninhibited creativity,” says Vo, 33. “The owners are super supportive, and we have a very, very tight staff. And I think, honestly, our guests have the most fun because we’re all very happy.”

Above: Kim Vo behind the bar at Dutch Courage making a Tropic Rush and a Calypso with gin, passion fruit liqueur, and coconut syrup. —Photography by Justin Tsucalas

Charlie Vascellaro

Clandestino

There’s no mystery as to why people enjoy going to the tequila-centric speakeasy Clandestino in Belvedere or, for that matter, any of the other establishments where Charlie Vascellaro has worked over the course of his 20 years behind the bar.

He knows how to throw a party.

“I’ve always felt like, being the bartender, you are the host of the party, which I’ve had plenty of experience doing at home over the years,” he says. “I was always the kind of guy who hosted the parties, and everybody would come to my house, and I would make the drinks for them. When I first started tending bar and I was worried about my relative lack of experience, I used to coach myself and say, ‘Just make them like you make it at home.’”

That policy has served him well. At Clandestino, which he manages and helped open in 2022, he specializes in preparing cocktails with a Southwestern flair.

Vascellaro, 59, who spent much of his childhood in Arizona, originally started bartending because he liked the hours. They allow him the freedom and flexibility to pursue his other passion: writing about baseball. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Banner, Baltimore Fishbowl, and New York’s Village Voice, for which he writes about “the Mets and all of their travails.”

Each year during spring training he returns to Arizona, where he curates museum exhibits about baseball (one on the history of Japanese-American baseball history eventually made its way to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles) and organizes baseball-themed trips for groups of senior citizens. The groups of 35 to 40 people take in games at the spring training homes of the Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants, listen to guest speakers, visit museums, and eat all their meals together. It’s intense, Vascellaro says, but his bartending skills often come in handy.

“You’re kind of a public speaker as a bartender,” he says. “You’re a public persona. So if people have anxiety about public speaking, bartending can get you over that. And I think you’re also a peacemaker. You’re creating an atmosphere. I think the skills that you learn as a bartender definitely cross over in real-life situations quite often.”

There’s another perk of bartending, he says, that works out well for his hybrid career.

“I pick up a lot of writing assignments behind the bar, too. Editors, publishers, come into the bar and I get introduced to them not only as the bartender, but as a guy who does some writing. And before you know it, I’m working for people who were my customers at the bar before. It’s perfect.”

Dan Burks

The Prime Rib

Over the course of his dozen years behind the bar at The Prime Rib, one of Baltimore’s most venerable steakhouses, Dan Burks has developed a somewhat simple philosophy of bartending.

“The customers that come in are generally nice folks,” he says. “A lot of them have been coming in for years and years and we know them, and we like them. It’s easy to give good service to people that you like.”

Burks, 47, has been doing just that since he started bartending in the late ’90s on the Eastern Shore. A music performance major in college, he had a feeling that he would gravitate to the hospitality industry. (“With that degree, you’ve got to eat, sleep, and breathe music,” he says.)

When he found his way to The Prime Rib, he knew he was home.

“I’ve had other jobs here and there, but at The Prime Rib it’s not like we’re slinging beers and shots to a rowdy crowd that is out partying,” he says. “It’s a lot of martinis, Manhattans, and Old-Fashioneds. Anything served in an up glass. I’ve made a million Cosmopolitans. We go through a lot of martini glasses.”

The art of being a bartender lies not just in mixing drinks. It’s also knowing how to interact with customers. At an upscale restaurant like The Prime Rib, that’s even more pivotal. The affable Burks has a natural rhythm and intuition that keeps the mood upbeat yet still gives customers space.

“The people that we know we talk to all the time. But with some folks, you have to gauge whether they’re doing something. Are they buried in their phone? But you get plenty of regulars that want to talk sports. Some folks want to talk politics. And some people you can see that they’re with friends and they’re just catching up and bullshitting.”

On a recent night, a customer paid Burks a compliment that stuck with him.

“We’ve been coming here for a long time,” the man said, “and while we love the food and the atmosphere, we come here for you.”

Above: Dan Burks pours martinis and Old Fashioneds at The Prime Rib. —Photography by Justin Tsucalas

Amie Ward

The Healthtender, Southpaw

Amie Ward loves bartending, and she’s devoted much of her professional life to making sure others in the industry have the tools to love it as much as she does. Ward is the executive director of Safe Bars, a nonprofit dedicated to making bars, restaurants, and other alcohol-serving spaces safe and welcoming for guests and staff alike.

She also owns and runs The Healthtender, a company that provides business owners and those on the frontlines of hospitality with the tools necessary to care for their bodies and minds.

“I started working in bars because those were the kind of people that I liked being around,” says Ward, 42, who has a master’s degree in kinesiology. “I liked talking to strangers for a living. I was taking care of myself, but I saw my peers were not. I created The Healthtender to teach people in the hospitality industry to eat better, take care of their bodies, and talk about the risks, because we have access to excess, we have weird hours, all that jazz.”

Ward started tending bar in 2009, and she says it took her a while to learn to counteract the physical and emotional challenges in the profession. Remembering to hydrate and eat while working a 10- to 12-hour shift (she always keeps nuts in her pockets for a quick snack), avoiding afterwork drinking sessions, stretching, resting—all of it is important.

“Bartenders and people in the industry are like endurance athletes, but we treat our bodies worse than any athlete ever would,” she says.

For Safe Bars, Ward’s work focuses on teaching the staff of any alcohol-serving establishment how to do bystander intervention, deescalation, and intervene in safe and non-confrontational ways to prevent sexual assault, sexual aggression, and other forms of violence.

“My world has mostly transitioned to advocacy work for the hospitality industry, doing a lot of health and wellness for people to make sure that they can stay in this business that we love for so long.”

But because she so treasures the work, Ward still steps behind the bar for the occasional shift at Southpaw in Fells Point.

“I love creating ridiculously over-the-top drinks and really special experiences for people,” she says. “I’m just one of those weirdos who loves the community and loves the job. I still have those moments when I want to be bartending. I fucking love it so much.”

Andre Levon

Clavel

Andre Levon, 37, has been tending bar for nearly half his life. A native of upstate New York, he started working at Turp’s in Mount Vernon before arriving at Clavel nine years ago. After all those years behind the bar, he still savors the relationships he builds with his customers.

“I find myself interacting with lots of different types of people,” he says. “You meet engineers and all these literate people. If anybody in the industry tells you that at this point that isn’t still a part of their job that they dig, they’re [over it] because it still is such a great thing.”

Levon has helped the popularity of the renowned Mexican restaurant’s cocktail list keep pace with its food. He leads mezcal tastings each Tuesday and, along with the team, plays a big role in curating the cocktail list. (He’s also part of the reason that the taqueria has been twice nominated for a James Beard Award in the Outstanding Bar category.)

He starts working on drinks three months prior to a menu change, a process that often includes traveling to Mexico, which is where he came up with the inspiration for the drink Tuba Por Favor. It’s based on the Filipino alcoholic beverage tubâ, which is made from the sap of palm trees and was introduced to Mexico centuries ago.

Levon’s cocktail combines tepache, coconut liqueur, lime juice, housemade kümel, and honey. It’s served shaken in a Hurricane glass.

“It’s a good amount of volume,” he says. “It’ll put a little buzz on but for the most part I designed it to be something that someone could enjoy for a while without getting too drunk.”

Although there’s no mezcal in that drink, it’s clear that the agave based liquor holds a treasured place in his heart.

“Mezcal is, of course, an agricultural product, but mezcal is a cultural product as well,” he says. “We have Mexico so close. We’re on the same continent, you know? And it is so vastly different from us. In a way, being able to drink mezcal connects me to this other culture in a really serious way in language, in art, and in cuisine.

“It doesn’t hurt that it’s delicious.”

Above: Andre Levon prepares a watermelon Santa Sandia at Clavel. —Photography by Justin Tsucalas
This piece appeared in our March 2024 issue. For more great Baltimore stories, consider becoming a subscriber.

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]]> The Best Bites We’ve Eaten in Baltimore Lately https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/best-bites-weve-eaten-in-baltimore-2024/ Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:27:02 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=153877
The falafel sandwich at Mera Kitchen Collective. —@joyell.arvella via Mera Kitchen Collective on Facebook

Here at Baltimore magazine, we pretty much always have local food on the brain. But it’s really at the forefront of our minds this time of year, when our annual Best Restaurants issue hits stands. As such, we’ve established a tradition of asking our staff about the best things they’ve eaten at local dining destinations within the past year. This time around, answers ranged from stuffed sandwiches and enchiladas at casual eateries to crab cakes and plates of pasta at special-occasion spots.

Read on for inspo for your next dining-out adventure, and pick up a copy of our Best Restaurants issue on newsstands to check out more best bites from deputy editor Jane Marion and her team of seasoned restaurant reviewers.

Amy Scattergood, Research Editor
A dish of smoked chicken and black mole at Blacksauce Kitchen, Damian Mosley’s Remington restaurant. Denzel Mitchell Jr., who often cooks there, smoked the chicken and made the mole, which I dearly wish he’d bottle.

Christianna McCausland, Special Editions Editor
The methi murgh (heat level 5) at The Mint Leaf in Cockeysville. Unassuming location, amazing Indian food.

Christopher Myers, Contributing Photographer
Golden West has a great sopapilla enchiladas that is terrific hangover food.

Ethan McLeod, Contributing Writer
The gnocchi at Daniela Pasta & Pastries in Hampden. Unforgettable.

Janelle Erlichman Diamond, Home Editor
Of all the great dishes I had this year (and there were many), I keep thinking about Little Donna’s pierogies—and that perfect bite of red chile garlic oil, lemon and buttery potatoes, and a dollop of sour cream. How you make an old-school pierogi taste so thrilling and crave-worthy is pure magic.

Lauren Cohen, Digital Senior Editor
The big-as-your-face vanilla yogurt bowl at Easy Like Sunday, which is topped with beautiful berries, swirls of honey, and handfuls of house granola. It’s just one of those combinations you can’t recreate on your own no matter how hard you try.

Lorann Cocca, Director of Marketing
Over the summer I had a sweet potato polenta dish from Water For Chocolate and have thought about it almost every day since.

Lydia Woolever, Senior Editor
Hands down the cabbage pancake at Little Donna’s. Such a delightfully surprising dish in a moment when so many menus feel the same.

Marie Bosslett, Editorial Intern
The best thing I ate last year was the rigatoni alla vodka from Tagliata in Harbor East.

Marty LeGrand, Senior Contributing Writer
Literally a bite of a dining companion’s succulent lamb chop at Rudy’s Mediterranean Grill in Columbia. Next time I’ll definitely order my own!

Max Weiss, Editor-in-Chief

This might be recency bias, but a few weeks ago I had the Italian Pork Sandwich special at Chuck’s Trading Post—slow roasted pork with rapini, chimichurri, provolone, and pepperoncinis on a sub roll. Add it to the menu, Chuck’s!

Michael Teitelbaum, President

The torta di melenzane appetizer at Limoncello is magnifico. (Translation: The eggplant Parmesan appetizer is magnificent.)

Mitro Hood, Contributing Photographer
Gertie’s crab cakes from Gertrude’s at the BMA.

Ron Cassie, Senior Editor
Favorite bite this year so far is Mera Kitchen Collective’s falafel sandwich—house-made pickles, cucumber, tomato tahini salad, plus a nice spicy jalapeño dressing—served in a toasty pita. Peak cold weather vegan comfort food.

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]]> Prohibition in Baltimore and The Colorful Story of Undercover Agent Kitty Costello https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/historypolitics/prohibition-in-baltimore-undercover-agent-kitty-costello/ Tue, 05 Dec 2023 19:28:22 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=151104
—Photography by Christopher Myers

It is occasionally reported that Maryland was the only state not to ratify Prohibition. Not true. With temperance support in its conservative counties, Maryland was the sixth state to ratify the 18th Amendment. (Cheers to Connecticut and Rhode Island, the only states to fight for their right to party.) What made Maryland unique, however, is that when the alcohol ban did go into effect, lawmakers in Annapolis did not pass legislation to enforce the federal measure. Call it passive resistance.

Governor Albert Ritchie, who first won election as Prohibition went on the books, was an 18th Amendment opponent throughout his four terms. Of course, so was Baltimore scribe, social critic, and homebrewer H.L. Mencken and, interestingly, Cardinal James Gibbons, who called passage of the ban “a national catastrophe, little short of a crime against the spiritual and physical well-being of the American people.”

Not to be outdone, Rabbi Menochim Weisblatt was charged with the possession and sale of liquor following a raid of his East Baltimore Street home. News accounts mention the discovery of 50 gallons of wine. (Protestants crusaded against alcohol. Jews and Catholics, partial to sacramental wine and their immigrant faithful, not so much. In many ways, today’s rural-urban political divide has its roots in Prohibition and the increasingly pluralistic society of the 1920s.)

The feds did what they could to rein in bootleggers and speakeasies before the “noble experiment” came to a screeching repeal 90 years ago this month, although Prohibition seemed doomed from the start here.

Asked by the head of the Prohibition department, visiting in 1922, if Baltimore was making progress, acting city chief Edward Lindholm said plainly, “I can’t say we are…We knock off a big still today and tomorrow there are two in its place.”

One Prohibition sleuth determined it took the average out-of-towner 18 minutes to track down a drink in the city. No doubt hobbling policing efforts was the grand jury investigation of Lindholm’s predecessor for misconduct. The Belvedere hotel’s legendary Owl Bar deployed ornamental owls behind its bar to tip off patrons to federal agents. According to lore, the owls, one of whom still mans its perch, blinked when it was safe to imbibe.

No doubt also hobbling Baltimore policing efforts was the grand jury investigation of Lindholm’s predecessor on misconduct charges. (In New York, 100 agents, some with direct ties to bootleggers or bootleggers themselves, had been terminated for taking bribes after just two years of Prohibition.) That said, there were plenty of arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct in Baltimore—33,000 plus in 1920 and 1921 combined, more than 35 percent of all arrests—and high-profile federal busts. Just before Christmas 1924, federal agents operating out of Baltimore seized 36,000 bottles of beer—labeled “catsup”—from a Canton railyard.

In an episode that sparked national headlines and ultimately a U.S. House investigation, local undercover special agent Esther Holden, alias “Kitty Costello,” was sentenced to 30 days in jail for contempt and then flouted in Congress for setting “a record of waste and extravagance.”

Evidence gathered by the chameleon-like Miss Holden, who was the daughter of a Baltimore County deputy sheriff and frequently changed her name and hair color, had led to numerous arrests. The Washington Post would describe her as the “red hair former undercover agent…and terror of Washington and Baltimore bootleggers,” who was said to call on “purveyors of intoxicants in a voice that could not be denied.”

Most famously, she was involved in the sting operation targeting known bootlegger Clarence Morsberger, who owned restaurants in Baltimore and Catonsville—where 101-year-old Morsberger’s Tavern, pictured above, bears the family name to this day. Morsberger was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $300 on the condition he padlock his premises for a year after barrels of beer and bottles of whiskey were found. His bartender earned 14 months for serving Miss Holden and another agent gin.

“The Monroe Street restaurant is gone. But there was also a speakeasy in the basement at the current tavern in Catonsville,” says Susanne Morsberger, the family historian. On a recent visit to the bar, a contractor doing some minor work pointed out a “false” wall in the basement, where beer and booze were said to be stashed during raids. “It’s a miracle, after Prohibition,” she says, “the tavern survives at all.”

Miss Holden was held in contempt because she refused to testify in the Morsberger case. Reportedly, she tore up a summons and threatened to kick a U.S. marshal down the stairs of the Washington apartment where she was found, stating she feared for her life if she returned to Baltimore.

Later, in an investigation led by colorful New York U.S. Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia, it was revealed that Holden and another special agent, only identified as a Mr. Yates, had registered as a married couple at a Washington hotel, racking up $532 in “entertainment” expenditures—the equivalent of nearly $10,000 in 2023—over a month of lavish dinners and drinking parties.

A Wisconsin congressman suggested the saga was just one more instance of federal dollars being tossed “down the sewer of Prohibition.”

“I think it was thrown down the gullets of the agents,” shot back LaGuardia.

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]]> Charm City Gift Guide: 100 Items for Every Time of Day https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/styleshopping/baltimore-holiday-shopping-gift-guide-2023/ Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:53:38 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=150695
By Jessi Rutherford

Photography by Christopher Myers
Style & Shopping

Charm City Gift Guide: 100 Items for Every Time of Day

Our annual ode to local holiday gifting is chock full of items to use from the minute you wake up until bedtime—and all those hours in between.

By Jessi Rutherford

Photography by Christopher Myers
November 2023

It's the most wonderful time of the year, so we thought what better way to organize our gift guide than by time of day? We have curated ideas from the minute you wake up until bedtime and all those hours in between. Happy Gifting!

Clockwise from top: Bath towel ($44) at Hunting Ground. Reindeer pom hat ($28) at Wee Chic. Frnch Paris Colorful Cardigan ($100) at Poppy & Stella. SCS Kinto Mini Mug ($20) at good neighbor. Hot Little Biscuit buttermilk biscuit mix ($12) at Becket Hitch. Finding Home Farms maple syrup ($18) at Becket Hitch. Santa mug ($28) at Poppy & Stella. Ritual Kit: Fresh Start crystal set ($30) at Becket Hitch. Wight Tea Co. sage rose and Maryland mint tea ($8) at wighttea.com and various local locations. Dino knit pom hat ($26) at Wee Chic. Perk Up eye patches ($3) at In Watermelon Sugar. Two Minute Mornings journal ($16.95) at The Paper Herald. Como Tea llama tea infuser ($16) at Su Casa. Gold beaded bracelets ($3.50-$8 each) at Girlhero. Men’s supreme buffer ($22) at Best Day Ever. Bacon ornament ($17) at Best Day Ever. Wake the F*CK Up shower seamers ($26) at Poppy & Stella. Divine devotional candle ($19.99) at The Sound Garden.

Clockwise from top: Brodie cashmere sweater ($385) at Sassanova. Teal mini nylon crossbody with coin purse ($32) at Poppy & Stella. Blue pop pencil case ($18) at Wee Chic. Pens ($6.99 each) at The Paper Herald. Secrid wallet ($89.95) at Nova Man. Tech wipes ($8) at Best Day Ever. Reasonable Demands notepad ($11.50) at Becket Hitch. You Look Beautiful glasses tray ($17) at Becket Hitch. (BIG) Timeless Monthly Planner ($19.95) at The Paper Herald. Appointed notebook ($20) at The Paper Herald. Wild Woman perfume oils ($56 each) at Mint & Major. Pencils (starting at $3 each) at Best Day Ever. Camp Hollow panda earrings ($20) at In Watermelon Sugar. Kneads baker’s tie ($10) at Kneads Bake Shop & Cafe. Varsity letter stuff bag ($45) at Meg Fox Aesthetics. Rains rucksack in sky ($110) at Hunting Ground.

Clockwise from top left: Clear water bottle ($25) at good neighbor. Floral Baggu lunch box ($34) at Hunting Ground. Corcksicle 36oz. traveler thermos ($79.95) at Becket Hitch. Kindroot Adaptogens plant lozenges ($20) at Far & Dotter. Norfolk Natural Living garment refresher botanical spray ($15) at Gundalow Gourmet. Leather utility gloves ($100) at Nova Man. Carlton beanie ($50) at Nova Man. Pure Raw Juice gift card (any amount) at Pure Raw Juice. Malvi fluffernutter marshmallows ($6) at Gundalow Gourmet. Mouth Party Caramel (prices vary) at mouthpartycaramel.com and various local locations. Zoe’s Chocolate Co. gold bar ($9.50) and espresso bar ($7.95) at zoeschocolate.com and Kneads Bake Shop & Café. Pinch Me therapy dough ($15) at Poppy & Stella. Hon's Honey specialty honey flight ($32) at and honshoney.com and various local locations. Baltimore Dog Bakery dog treats ($9) at Howl Pet Supply. Yellow berry bowl ($9) at Su Casa. Basil & Neroli botanical hand lotion ($32) at Gundalow Gourmet. Fulton & Roark solid fragrance ($60) at Nova Man. Bite mouthwash bits ($26) at Best Day Ever. No Justice No Peace by Devin Allen ($30) at Greedy Reads.

Pink leopard fuzzy Brooke bag ($195) at Sassanova. Citrus vintage puzzle ($24) at Gundalow Gourmet. Beach House 7 album ($23.99) at The Sound Garden. Pink stone hoop earrings ($28) at Sassanova. Marlyn Schiff CZ heart charm necklace ($102) at Sassanova. Jane Win lucky lapis stone elephant necklace ($278) at Sassanova. The Wine Collective canned Vermútino cocktails ($18 for four) at winecollective.vin. Felted catnip toys ($8 each) at Hunting Ground. Popsicle ornament ($12) at Poppy & Stella. Mini bar books ($20 for the set) at In Watermelon Sugar. Raft citrus rosemary syrup ($15) at good neighbor. Champagne ornament ($18) at Poppy & Stella. Gold Bracelets ($28-29) at Mint and Major. Four Wheels And A Board by Betsy Gordon and Jane Rogers ($35) at Atomic Books. Sorry vintage board game ($44) at Becket Hitch. Fancy sprinkles drink glitter ($20) at The Wine Source.

Clockwise from top left: Cooking class gift card (prices vary) at Baltimore Chef Shop. Antique candlestick ($150 for the set) at Gundalow Gourmet. Pierogi cookbook ($25.99) at Su Casa. Beige cloth napkins ($24 each) and napkin ring ($20) at Becket Hitch. Enamel measuring cups ($36) at Poppy & Stella. Oyster ornament ($17) at Best Day Ever. Measuring spoons ($32) at Poppy & Stella. Twisty candles ($24 for four) at Poppy & Stella. Dimitri unfiltered extra virgin olive oil lemon and herbs infused ($22) at Dimitri’s or various local retailers. Wildflower serving tray ($55) at Misfit Creative Arts Collective. Brackish royal feather bow tie ($225) at Nova Man. Audo Copenhagen salt and pepper mills ($90 for the set) at good neighbor. Green marbled bowl ($18) at In Watermelon Sugar.

Find Me Now dusty blue oversized cardigan ($128) at Hunting Ground. Tooth Fairy friend ($32) at In Watermelon Sugar. Cause Medic CBD relief cream ($60) at Far & Dotter. Calm bath salts ($22) at In Watermelon Sugar. Bunny tooth brush holder ($5) at Su Casa. Herbivore Cloud Milk body cream ($40) at In Watermelon Sugar. Riverside tie-dye thermal ($124) at Hunting Ground. Silk sleep mask and scrunchie set ($24) at Meg Fox Aesthetics and Mount Royal Soap Co.. PJ Salvage bordeaux fuzzy slides ($45) at Necessary Secrets. Pinch self care advent calendar ($55) at Necessary Secrets. Charles Village Painted Ladies candle ($24) at southanncandles.etsy.com and various local retailers. Grant Street long matches ($13) at Su Casa. Herbivore Moon Fruit serum ($60) at In Watermelon Sugar. Patchology beauty sleep hydrogel mask ($10) at Poppy & Stella. Nite Nite patch ($16) at Far & Dotter. Oh What a Night bath salts ($26) at Poppy & Stella. 15 Min Groom Me kit ($20) at Far & Dotter. Cast in Stones pillow spray ($25) at In Watermelon Sugar.

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]]> Six of Baltimore’s Best Home and Garden Tours https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/homegarden/baltimore-home-and-garden-tours/ Thu, 02 Nov 2023 17:25:54 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=149498
—Shutterstock

November: Highlandtown Basement Bar Tour
The tradition of creating elaborate club basements to entertain family and friends in this Southeast Baltimore neighborhood inspired this annual tour, now in its 16th year. Visitors 21 and over sip their way through dwellings tricked out with kegerators, game rooms, and more before ending the evening with a bonfire.

December: Snowflake Tour of Charles Village Homes
Greater Charles Village in North Central Baltimore opens artistically furnished homes, from grand 1890s three-story rowhouses to 1910s two-story porch-fronts, for a day of holiday hospitality benefiting the Village Learning Place and Charles Village Community Association.

December: Union Square Cookie Tour of Historic Homes
Whether you’re a cookie connoisseur, a history buff, or simply seeking a fun-filled day out, the 38th Annual Union Square Cookie Tour of Historic Homes is an opportunity to get to know the historic district surrounding Union Square Park in Southwest Baltimore.

April & May: Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage 
Aiming to preserve and to support the restoration of architecturally and historically significant properties throughout the state of Maryland, the Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage organizes annual state-wide tours highlighting Maryland’s architectural and cultural history. Tour proceeds are disbursed to preservation projects in each county that conducts a tour.

October: Butchers Hill Association House Tour
A National Historic District in Southeast Baltimore City, Butchers Hill is home to about 1,000 rowhouses built between 1850-1915. Explore inside during the Butchers Hill Association’s annual house tour.

On Occasion: Federal Hill House and Garden Tour
The Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage’s Baltimore City tour features Federal Hill. One of the oldest neighborhoods in Baltimore City, it dates back to the 18th century, when it was the center of the city’s bustling maritime port, a hub of industrial growth, and a destination to hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

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]]> Where to Find the Perfect Christmas Tree Around Baltimore https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/homegarden/baltimore-christmas-tree-farm-guide/ Sun, 15 Oct 2023 17:50:30 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=150714
—Courtesy of Gaver Farm via Facebook

There’s something special about finding your Christmas tree at a local farm instead of a parking lot. Maybe it’s the thrill of the hunt, maybe it’s the labor of love that goes into wrangling your family into a holiday memory, or maybe it’s just the ultimate chop local (see what we did there?). Whatever the reason, Baltimore is lucky enough that a handful of the area’s best fresh-cut Christmas tree farms are a quick road trip away.

A SNOWBALL’S CHANCE TREE FARM
Named in part for the Liberty Road snowball stand that it once shared land with, this choose-and-cut Christmas tree farm has been open since 2005. Open for one weekend only, Dec. 3-4, this year, the new location in Woodstock will offer eight and nine-inch pre-cut Fraser Firs or chop-your-own White Pines & Blue Spruces. 10231 Harvest Fields Drive, Woodstock. 

DAVIDSON CHRISTMAS TREE FARM
Although it’s been active for more than two centuries, this family-owned Upperco Farm didn’t start to plant Christmas tree seedlings until the late ’60s. The fields are open seven days per week from Nov. 18 to Dec. 17. On weekends, stop by for a wagon ride, check out the gift shop, score treats at the snack bar, and sift through its 60-plus acres for eight tree varieties, such as the silver-blue Concolor Fir. 1101 Emory Church Rd., Upperco

FROSTEE TREE FARM
The appropriately named Helen and George Winter began planting and selling trees at their Perry Hall farm in 1974. The two have since passed away, but the farm, now run by Paul Stiffler, boasts 15 acres of ready-to-cut trees ranging from Scotch Pine to White Pine, Douglas Pine, and Norway Spruce. The farm re-opens after Thanksgiving. 8926 Cowenton Ave., Perry Hall

GAVER FARM
Owner Michael Gaver was just 17 when he established this Mt. Airy farm in 1978. Today, it holds 70 acres of cut-your-own trees, with varieties such as the sturdy and tall Colorado Blue Spruce and the whisper-soft White Pine. Christmas tree shopping starts Nov. 24. Be sure to stop into the family farm’s cafe for apple cider doughnuts, beef sandwiches, and hot cocoa before you leave. 5501 Detrick Rd., Mt. Airy

GUNPOWDER TREE FARM
Starting Nov. 24, both pick-your-own and pre-cut trees are readily available at this family-owned Kingsville farm. The land is flush with everything from the soft-needled, fragrant Nordmann Fir to the picture-perfect pyramidal Douglas Fir. 12025 Philadelphia Rd., Kingsville

HALE TREE FARM
A native of Montana, owner Jeff Hale first started planting his Christmas trees at the beloved White Hall farm in 1984, six years before it opened. Now, his kids and grandkids help him grow and sell the farm’s prizewinning bounty, which includes Balsam and Douglas Firs, beginning on Black Friday. 4827 Norrisville Rd., White Hall

PINE VALLEY FARMS
Founded by couple Roger and Jane Wolfe some 46 years ago, this family-run farm in Sykesville (opening for the season Nov. 17) contains more than 100 acres of choose-and-cut trees. Here—along with a Christmas barn stocked with hot cocoa and snacks—you can find the Korean Fir tree, which is known to produce purple pinecones. 1150 Fannie Dorsey Rd., Sykesville

SEWELL’S FARM
Opening for the season on Nov. 18, this nearly 40-year-old Carroll County farm sells everything from cut-your-own to small tabletop evergreens to “ball and burlap” Christmas trees—which are dug up fresh from the field and can be replanted after the holiday season ends. It also offers festive table centerpieces, wreaths, and locally made goodies for stocking stuffing. 3400 Harney Rd., Taneytown

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]]> Four Baltimore-Area Tattoo Shops to Have on Your Radar https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/styleshopping/top-baltimore-tattoo-shops/ Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:07:30 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=147383
Dave Wah, one of the owners of Stay Humble Tattoo Company. —Photography by Christopher Myers

The decision to get a tattoo is not one to be taken lightly—the design is permanent, after all. And choosing a shop that aligns with your vision and comfort level is half the battle. Whether you’re itching to add to your ink collection or are a first-timer wondering where to begin, we’ve got you covered with this mini rundown of great local tattoo shops.

Fruit Camp
Art is celebrated in more than one way at this Remington studio. The first floor, an open space washed in natural light, is a tattoo parlor, while the second floor houses private studio space for artists across various disciplines. Inclusivity and accessibility are fundamental to this shop. Operating as a collective, Fruit Camp’s artists freely work within their own style, their own schedule, and their own rate structure. 2656 Miles Ave., fruitcamptattoo@gmail.com

Love Struck Tattoo
Bright, colorful, and filled with lush plants, Annapolis’ Love Struck Tattoo is a uniquely inviting space. The crew of artists is known for being friendly and collaborative. Each artist here handles their own booking and design process with wide-ranging styles, including traditional, realism, and ornamental. The studio also has a resident cosmetic tattoo artist and accepts tattoo party bookings for you and your besties (Champagne and free touch-ups for a year after service included). 29 Maryland Ave., Annapolis, 301-578-6891

Stay Humble Tattoo Company
If you’ve strolled Hamden’s 36th Street, chances are you likely caught a glimpse of the iconic “Stay Humble Baltimore” mural on Chestnut. Inside and up the stairs, you’ll walk into a tattoo shop that feels a bit like the city itself: somewhat small, but bursting with personality. Ditto for the talent—while Stay Humble leans more into classic tattoo styles, each artist brings their own flair to the table. 801 W. 36th St,, 410-235-1234

Black Lotus Tattoo
The full-service Black Lotus is known for its award-winning artist roster and streamlined services. The emphasis is on the art, so there’s no pre-drawn flash to opt for. The shop also offers piercing services as well as tattoo removal through trans epidermal pigment release, a less invasive alternative to lasers. And word to the wise: Bookings, managed by the shop, fill up quickly. 7466 New Ridge Road, Suite 22, Hanover, 410-487-6675

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]]> Five Real-Life Baltimore Haunted House Stories https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/homegarden/real-life-baltimore-haunted-house-stories/ Thu, 07 Sep 2023 14:38:49 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=146852
—Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

There are lots of reasons for ghosts to stick around Baltimore. There are the historic battles (the War of 1812), the famous people from here who made their name in the macabre (Edgar Allan Poe), the notable cemeteries (like Green Mount), and just the simple fact that it’s old (1729)!

Charm City has never shied away from its ghost stories—just look at the number of people on ghost tours and haunted pub walks. But it’s one thing to know a ghost roams your favorite bar, and quite another to share a bedroom with one.

We talked to five people willing to tell us about their true encounters with ghosts, demons, and everything in between. A word of warning: Some of these stories are not for the faint of heart.

UNEARTHLY UPPERCO

Rachael Avara Child grew up with a ghost. It first made itself known by playing the piano in the middle of the night—waking her parents from a deep sleep. When they went to investigate, there was, of course, no one there. That was just the beginning.

Over the next 16 years, her childhood home in Upperco would be the site of the much unexplained activity. In 1994, when her family first moved to the single-family home in northern Baltimore County, Child was four and her brother, Josh, was two. The structure, already 81 years old at that point, was big and sturdy, with three levels, a small porch, and that piano which came with the home.  Over the years, an addition was put on, but the unusual noises were always limited to the original part of the home. “The piano was the intro to everything,” says Child, 34, who now lives in Ft. Lauderdale.

More things started to happen that left her unsettled, but she never felt unsafe being home alone. “It wasn’t something that was trying to hurt us. We think it was a spirit child. Very child-like in nature. Televisions would turn on, the washing machine turned on by itself.” Her brother, maybe because he was the youngest in the house, seemed the most susceptible to activity. “His bedroom had such a weird vibe in there,” says Child, who shared the room with Josh for a few years.

—Courtesy of Rachael Avara Child

Once, Child woke up from a deep sleep feeling someone touch her back. When she turned, she saw two eyes looking at her. “I was probably six or seven—there were glowing eyes at the foot of my bed.”  Even her dad, who was a skeptic about the whole thing, admitted that Josh’s room “didn’t sit well with him.” Her mother, sick in bed one day, woke up to the feeling of someone jumping on the bed. She yelled out, “Please stop. I don’t feel well.” And it did.

During her parents’ divorce, when she was in her early 20s, Child said the activity picked up. Josh heard someone humming a lullaby. The attic door would open when no one was around. Child remembers straightening her hair and out of the corner of her eye seeing a long-skirted figure going by her bed. The cat spun around and stared. “You know something is going on when an animal acts weird,” she says.

Another time, someone pulled one of Josh’s dreadlocks. He whipped around, only to see an empty room. That felt cruel, not playful, and they decided it was time to chat with their ghost. They headed up to the attic—it had been a bedroom and now was used for storage. Dumped on the bed was a bucket of green Army men that hadn’t been seen or played with in years.

“Okay, Mr. Ghost—listen up,” Child announced to the room. “I’m sure you are wondering what’s going on. Our mom and dad are getting a divorce—that’s why Dad isn’t here. And you scared Josh. We don’t want you to touch us. Don’t try and scare us. Give us a sign you understand.” Nothing happened. No flickering light or shadowy figure. They quietly closed the attic door and left.

The next day over breakfast at Porkey’s, Child told her dad what had transpired. “Let’s go see what’s going on,” he prodded. They drove to the house and headed to the top floor. The attic door was open and there, precariously propped on the top of the door header, was a green Army man. “That freaked my dad,” laughs Child, whose father sold the house in 2017. “He got holy water from church and sprayed it all over the house.”

But for her, it was just one more piece of a puzzle she had been putting together since childhood.  “I grew up with it. It almost became normal to me.”

SUPERNATURAL REISTERSTOWN

Renee Feiges Goldschmidt’s demon(s) lived in her Reisterstown townhouse. The home, built in the early ’90s, was calm (well, as calm as it could be with three kids in two years, including a set of twins born at 26 weeks) until about eight years in, when all of a sudden it started. “The very first thing I noticed—and my husband, Jason, kept telling me I was crazy—was the linen closet started feeling creepy to me. Like someone was standing there watching me. I couldn’t see anyone, I just had this feeling.”  Soon the basement also felt extremely unnerving.

One day Goldschmidt was sitting on the sofa in the family room and a photograph of her and Jason that was hanging on the wall flew across the room. Next came the black mist—around the size of a microwave oven—that would float around the house. (Her daughter, was who six at the time, said she also saw the mist in her room.) Even at that point, Goldschmidt didn’t reach out to anyone. “I still thought I was losing my mind.”

Soon there was the sound of footsteps around her bed as she slept and a paralysis that kept her from moving or sitting up. The presence would hold her down, and sometimes it felt like it was grabbing around her neck. Then she saw them. They were ominous child-size aliens. “Sometimes I would wake up with bruises, scratches. Even a few times the five of us are eating dinner and all of a sudden, my arm or leg would start burning and a scratch was forming on my arm.”

Goldschmidt, now 45, started racking her brain for what could cause this disturbance in her home. “I never did a Ouija board or visited a graveyard or anything,” she says. She and her husband did visit West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum—but that was in late 2009. “Maybe something attached to me.”

There’s a photograph in front of her townhouse taken for The Jewish Times (about her micro preemies) that has a face—almost Friday the 13th-esque or a goblin (or maybe it’s just a rock) reflected in the window behind her beautiful family.

—Courtesy of The Jewish Times

Desperate, she reached out to the leader of her synagogue and explained her plight. “He probably thought I was crazy—but he came over and put up mezuzahs on all our doorways and he did a blessing on the house. But that didn’t do anything. That didn’t help.”

Finally, Goldschmidt took to Facebook and outed herself—revealing everything from the figures to the whispering and growling she’d often hear—and pleaded for help. A friend recommended a shaman to Goldschmidt and he came over free of charge and walked around her house. “There’s something here—it’s in the corner of the basement,” he told her. There was a lot of sage and prayers, and Goldschmidt’s body shook as she released something.

“And I was like, this is confirmation for me that I wasn’t crazy. And I told my husband, ‘I told you so.’ Because he didn’t believe me the whole time. So, it’s confirmation that I wasn’t crazy.”

Since the shaman, Goldschmidt hasn’t had any more experiences. “I think whatever it was, he got rid of it.”

HAUNTED HAMILTON

Whatever haunted Sean Paul Murphy’s childhood home in Hamilton has become a bit of an obsession for him. He’s written 20-plus blog posts called “The Haunting of 21 St. Helens Avenue”—which was the house’s original address before the city’s boundary moved and the name of the street was changed—and a book of fiction called Chapel Street, loosely based on his family’s history. “The Conjuring meets Hereditary” the book jacket reads.

Murphy grew up as one of six kids—and moved into the St. Helen’s house when he was 14. The foursquare structure had three levels including an attic. The entity—whatever it was—mimicked voices. It would trick people in the house into thinking they were communicating with someone they knew. That included his mother having a whole conversation with his brother’s friend and hearing his footsteps come up to the attic where she was sewing—only for there to be no one there. His mother used holy water and put salt in the corners. But the hauntings continued.

—Courtesy of Sean Paul Murphy

Murphy, 62, lived in the attic in his mid- 20s. He would hear scurrying on the roof—which could easily be explained as squirrels or mice. But as soon as he opened his eyes it would stop. Then the scurrying became human footsteps.

“I could hear it moving across the length of the room,” says Murphy. “Whatever it was, it’s on the roof, but it can see me. It knew when I was opening my eyes.” His bed would also shake, then it was his mattress. “It felt like a huge 30-foot boa constrictor moving in the mattress. That’s what it felt like. I would look under the mattress to see if there were any holes in it. But even as I was doing that, I was like, this is so illogical, because how would it even get in there?”

“When you go through this, you’re constantly asking yourself if you’re crazy. You wonder whether it’s all in your mind. I want people to know these things happen.”

Then three nights in a row, around 3 a.m., Murphy woke up to find himself attempting to climb out of his rear window, like some deadly form of sleepwalking.

“When you go through this, you’re constantly asking yourself if you’re crazy,” says Murphy, who describes the spirit as a shadow person. “You wonder whether it’s all in your mind. I want people to know these things happen.”

The Murphy family eventually moved out and a new family moved in.

FRIGHTENING FELLS POINT

Laura Kerris shares her Bond Street home in Fells Point with a “little girl ghost.”

Kerris moved into the rowhouse—which dates back to around 1880—in 2005, and threw herself a housewarming/birthday party. “You know you have a ghost here,” one of her friends casually told her nodding towards a corner of the room. “Did you ever wonder why the cat won’t go in this room with you.”

Kerris was shocked. Her cat, Nemoy, an affectionate snuggler, would sit just outside the room when Kerris watched television, and refuse to enter. But she hadn’t mentioned this to anyone. “I was a little bit freaked out,” she says. “I didn’t watch TV for a week.”

Later that week, while working in her home office on the third floor (a newer addition), she heard a thump thump from downstairs and figured a picture had fallen off her plaster wall. But upon inspection she couldn’t figure out what had made that noise. The cats were both on high alert. “Animals are a great judge,” says Kerris.

The noises went on all week. “Maybe they were trying to get my attention,” she says. The sounds got louder and more frequent and then by the end of the week they started to dissipate.

The ghost had made herself known. And they both found peace with each other.

—Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher
EERIE LAKE EVESHAM

Jennifer Keith Ciattei’s first spirit interaction didn’t happen until she was an adult, though she was “definitely a believer in the unseen.” Her mom had died in March 2012, and she was getting ready to spend her favorite holiday without her for the first time.

“She and I always loved getting ready for Christmas—my birthday is December 24—and she made that and Christmas a big deal.” She pauses. “I was really missing her.” It was mid-December and Ciattei, her husband, and niece were all sound asleep when they were suddenly awakened around 3 a.m. by the sound of music.

Years earlier, a friend, knowing Ciattei was such a “Christmas freak,” had given her a “big, kind of corny, snow-globe nativity music box.” It was displayed in her North Baltimore home, but she hadn’t played it that season—hadn’t even wound it once. But now it was playing, “Silent Night,” very, very fast. And it was loud enough for Ciattei and her husband to hear it 15 feet away in their bedroom.

“It was eerie and really cool,” she remembers. Her brain was trying to come up with a plausible explanation to calm her beating heart. They all went back to bed after discussing “it was weird, and it was probably my mother.” A half hour later the music box suddenly started up again at the same volume and pace before falling silent. “It definitely wanted our attention.”

As Ciattei, now 63, lay in bed, she remembers a feeling of wonder, not fear, coming over her. Then on Christmas Eve, Ciattei and her husband were on a walk talking about the music box. She turned to her husband and said, “I would just love to believe that music box was her reaching out to me.”

Almost on cue, it started snowing.

It was—she believes—a sign from her mom saying it was her.

“I’m a big fan of ghost stories at Yule. But this one is true.”

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]]> My Childhood in a Cult: Growing Up in a Controversial Baltimore Religious Community https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/growing-up-in-lamb-of-god-cult-baltimore/ Wed, 30 Aug 2023 17:18:51 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=146667
Farley outside of her childhood home near the Baltimore County/Baltimore City line. —Photography by Christopher Myers

Barefoot girls hold a ribbon and loop around a maypole. Some, styled as the “Little Lambs,” dance for the hundreds gathered at the 15-acre Timonium estate known as The Farm. There are pony rides, potato-sack races, even a live band as people celebrate the end of history.

In faded photographs of the community, I see people who are trying to live their lives halfway to heaven. But that isn’t quite right. We were actually trying to bring heaven into this world. Along with others in the broader Catholic charismatic renewal, we believed that the Holy Spirit was pouring out right before our eyes. Because of our faithfulness, we were witnessing the breakthrough of the kingdom.

I was born into the Lamb of God, one of the dozens of covenant communities to take root in the 1970s when the charismatic renewal first swept the nation. Perceiving the American Catholic Church to be in a state of spiritual decline, Marylander Dave Nodar, his wife, Cheryl, Father Joe O’Meara, and a few others envisioned a kind of New Jerusalem in Charm City. They settled on the Westgate and Rock Glen neighborhoods off Edmondson Avenue on the City/Catonsville line. By the late 1980s, approximately 250 families occupied the two-story homes in those neighborhoods or on their periphery.

From the start, leaders encouraged Lamb of God’s members to eschew the modern world. Families were to limit television, secular news reading, even charity work. In Nodar’s view, offered to The Baltimore Sun in 1984, do-gooders meant well, but they “tended to fall into Marxism.” It was better to focus on one’s soul and the group than to become involved in “humanist” causes.

A policy notebook adopted from a parent community in Michigan stipulated that women (even higher-ranking “handmaids”) were to submit to their husbands, bear as many children as God willed, and refrain from masculine duties, such as spiritually directing children beyond the age of six. Men, in turn, were not to become too involved in domestic work or the more mundane routines of child-rearing. I don’t remember these specific rules, only knowing that feminists were miserable and that my mother loved me more than working moms loved their children.

On Sunday evenings, we convened at Woodlawn High School, UMBC’s event center, or some other place for prayer meetings. A music team worked the crowd into a zeal, then slowed the beat for adults to speak in tongues—ancient Hebrew, I was once told. “Slain in the spirit,” some fell to the ground and convulsed. Some went forward to deliver prophecies. There really was a sense of spontaneity, though it seems many of the divinations had been pre-screened by Nodar.  An unidentified community member later told Baltimore magazine in 1994, “He’d decide if it was from God.”

Not long after the story ran, the community dissolved amid an archdiocese investigation around their finances (no legal charges were ever filed) and cult-like tendencies, then faded from public memory.

When I close my eyes, I can see and hear those prayer meetings. If I close them really tight, I can even slip back into their imaginal realm, outside of ordinary time and into a kind of deep time. Charismania is wonderful before it is terrible—a swooning into the sacred.

CHARISMANIA IS WONDERFUL BEFORE IT IS TERRIBLE—A SWOONING INTO THE SACRED.

As children at the community-run school in Halethorpe, we celebrated our religion’s Jewish roots. On Christian Heroes Day, we dressed as Mary and the apostles. Some of us, wanting to show off, called Jesus “Yeshua.”

We heard relentless stories about Christians’ persecution. A Holocaust lesson centered on Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch woman imprisoned for hiding Jews. It will be years before I understand exponentially more Christians were part of the Third Reich than victims of it.

My mother helped to vet the books in the school’s library, which included books like Little House on the Prairie and The Courage of Sarah Noble. These stories of early settlers made me feel even more chosen—a super-Christian. But I swiftly moved on to approved adult titles at home.

One day, I was absorbed in a volume of Chicken Soup for the Soul when I came across my mother’s marginalia. “NO,” she had written for my benefit in the white space, along with a note explaining why the author’s conclusion was all wrong. Part of me will always be nine years old, reeling from this blow. Her later perusing of my diary and listening to my teenage phone calls—these did not sting as much as this first, thunderous notice that even while reading alone I was under surveillance.

Family photo of Pope John Paul II’s visit to the region.
The author, at 7, dressed as Mary.

My best friend, “Lydia,” whispered with me about which of our peers’ parents left marks when they spanked them. The threat of violence pervaded the children’s sphere. A wooden paddle hung in the school headmaster’s office and in many of the homes in “the cluster.” Mostly, kids’ own dads did the job. They could deliver more force than our mothers, while serving as stand-ins for our heavenly father. When they explained that they only hurt us out of love, any confusion was subsumed by allegory.

I didn’t know it, but a Catholic woman in the Westgate neighborhood had been complaining about us to the archdiocese. Almost from the moment it took over her block, the Lamb of God seemed to Patricia Whitman like the proverbial whitewashed tomb: beautiful on the outside, but inside, full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.

“It wasn’t Jim Jones, it was one step below,” she’ll tell me three decades later, going on to explain how leaders manipulated some members to remain committed while “pruning the vine” of others. “They’d threaten that if people left, they wouldn’t have spiritual covering, meaning the devil might pop out and get them at the grocery store. They were in danger of losing God’s grace.”

As little girl, I was fond of Fr. Joe, who came over for dinner and squeezed my hand under the table, but Whitman distrusted the man whose collar gave the community a veil of legitimacy. She’d heard he made girls and women uncomfortable. On a beach trip, she was told, he’d walked in as some girls were undressing. She was privy to things because she was a confidante for those who’d been shunned by Nodar and his associates, or who were contemplating leaving. Her front porch was many neighbors’ only safe place to be.

Between 1983 and 1987, Whitman wrote a series of letters to Archbishop William Borders conveying her concerns about the Lamb of God’s cult-like tendencies, including its “view of women as submissive and subordinate creatures,” and citing scandals in covenant communities in other states. He urged charity toward her fellow Catholics and claimed to have no authority over the group.

Then, in the early ’90s, rumors began to spread that some community money was missing, and Borders’ successor, Archbishop William Keeler, summoned Whitman downtown to talk. Only after their meeting did she realize he had picked her brain to see how much she knew, not because he wanted to help the people in the community. He seemed worried she would go to the media.

Neither Borders nor Keeler honored her requests for confidentiality. It was never long after mailing her concerned letters about the Lamb of God community that members would linger outside her gate to pray, one even sprinkling holy water in her yard. One local priest threatened to have her excommunicated if she didn’t quit her crusade.

The financial controversy pertained to the $1.9-million sale of The Farm to developers. Some members, who tithed up to 10 percent of their income to the community, wanted to know: Where did all the money go? In 1992, former members John and Marie Cignatta were so perturbed by this question and other matters that they penned their own letters to Keeler, pleading with him to intervene. He agreed to formally investigate the community, then invited Nodar to apply for official status as an archdiocesan organization, subordinating the group to church authorities.

If Keeler hoped to avoid negative press, he was surely disappointed to see the exposé this magazine published in February 1994. In “The Cult Next Door,” Patrick J. Kiger luridly details how community tensions exploded into a “suburban holy war.” He quotes an ex-member on the “Stalinist” system of surveillance that had people reporting heterodoxy up the chain, also spilling ink over Nodar’s reputed perks, which, even before The Farm’s sale, included a free home and community-paid services ranging from plumbing to the babysitting of his children.

That was the year my family left Baltimore for the hour-north town of Hanover, Pennsylvania. If my parents were relieved to leave the community behind, they didn’t let on. When they claimed to be “getting away from crime,” they didn’t seem to mean their co-religionists’ crimes. My brother and sister were unfazed, but I cried, as I didn’t want to leave Lydia.

In those days before social media, it may have been inevitable that our childhood friendship wouldn’t survive the distance. As the years passed, I thought less and less about Lamb of God. I had no idea that, while the school remained, the community had largely dissolved, nor that Nodar had formed a new evangelization ministry. Even though I struggled for words to describe Lamb of God to my new school peers, I didn’t think of it as anything more than a group of like-minded families that my parents found. There was too much continuity before and after the community for me to view it with suspicion.

The parish we attended in Hanover was animated by the very same fantasies, especially pertaining to women. In fact, it was in a religious education class there that I learned that feminists were not only miserable, they were eminently rape-able. Unmarried women had no virtuous men to protect them, and contracepting women—well, they “asked for it” by disavowing their fertility and thereby objectifying themselves. Anyone who doubted this could read Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which foretold of a hellish world for women following the advent of the pill.

It got to me, this exhortation to marry and have a house full of babies “or else.” This was so, even though, by the early 2000s, the newspapers were reporting on rampant clerical sex abuse, and the tone of some laymen’s voices when they spoke to their wives was enough to raise the hair on my arms. There was also unremitting talk about sex: who was having it, who wanted to have it, who dressed like they wanted to have it. I was then a virgin, but I felt so ashamed. I needed Lydia more than ever, but I settled for eating as little as possible. I couldn’t be a Delilah if I disappeared.

Reflecting on the interregnum between the established order and revolution, the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1939, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” My dad drew upon a similar idiom to account for the way I was becoming more sullen and defiant. He took to remarking he once had a happy little girl, but aliens came and abducted her.

Spiritual abuse is such a quiet violence—a violence of the shadows—it was decades before I found the words to contradict him. By then, I’d left the Church, married one of the heathens, and born two children. Still, my father listened. He said he was sorry for not protecting me from the toxic elements of Catholic culture.

“THEY’D THREATEN THAT IF PEOPLE LEFT, THEY WOULDN’T HAVE SPIRITUAL COVERING…”

For all our conflicts, my father and I have never been estranged, and so I’m at ease telephoning him in 2020, after I’ve read about Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s People of Praise, to insist, “We were in a fucking cult!” No, he says, it wasn’t that. I do more research and circle back: “Mom was a handmaid.” He replied that she wasn’t and anyway, Lamb of God didn’t really use labels.

Still wanting answers, I joined a Facebook group for current and former members of covenant communities. It’s here that I see that Fr. Joe has been removed from ministry after three women accused him of “inappropriate touching.” I dial Dad again. He’s heard about it, but the language is so vague—it could mean anything, he says. My mother chimes in that Fr. Joe was always affectionate. These days, that can be misconstrued.

The archdiocese won’t release to me records pertaining to Keeler’s investigation of the community, but I find a slew of digitized documents about Lamb of God, including Whitman’s outgoing and incoming letters, at the University of Michigan. I call this woman, now 79, and listen as she talks about the community and the authorities’ tacit endorsement of it.

“It really made me question my faith,” she says of the latter. “I had to remind myself that my strength in God is what counts.”

Not long after our conversation I read more explosive news in The Baltimore Banner: Fr. Joe has been identified as #155 in the state attorney general’s report on child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He reportedly kissed children on the mouth and would try to move his hands up girls’ legs toward their genitals when a dinner guest at their homes. A housekeeper told of him talking about the size of her breasts. One woman described him tracing the outline of her bra, and another reported “a fondling regimen, inappropriate touching, and digital penetration.”

I text the story to my parents, but they don’t reply. When I stop by their house later that day, I notice The Sun’s pages on the table. I ask my dad if he’s read the Banner piece, and he says yes. He’s disturbed, though he needs to investigate the publication’s credibility.

A few days later, he and my mother come over for dinner, and we talk about Fr. Joe. There’s no question on anyone’s mind that he’s done grave wrong. At one point, my dad goes outside to join his grandchildren at play, and my mom offers that she did not like the way Fr. Joe would kiss her head, though it never occurred to her to object.

Farley with her father at a Lamb of God event.

I wonder if Lydia has seen the news and if so, what she thinks of it. After years of meaning to do so, I reach out and ask if she wants to have lunch. After I send the message, I wonder if she’ll find it strange. It’s been so long; at this point, we’re really just the kind of friends who like each others’ social media posts. She quickly replies, saying how often she thinks of me. She’d not heard about Fr. Joe, so I send her some articles.

When we meet, I am startled by her voice. It’s not as I remember it. I let the sting wear off before making the observation. “I was thinking the same thing,” she says. “We don’t have our little girl voices anymore.”

Having found this common ground, or perhaps having named what is gone, we quickly fold back into each other. We share our scars, our dangerous memories. We acknowledge how impossible it was to move on. I tell her I’m thinking of writing about the community. She takes a deep breath, and I can see how heavy it all is.

Driving home, I think of the Valentine’s Day card I recently found wedged in a stack of old photographs. “To Audrey: We thank God for you and the happy way we feel loving you. Dad.”

Then my mind drifts toward the women who came forward about Fr. Joe. I wonder exactly how many of them were in the Lamb of God and how close they remain to its people, images, rituals. Do their children attend the school that is still around? Or is the community more of a spectre, something that only finds them in the dark?

It occurs to me, at the very least, each one of these women must have retained hope, as I have, that a new world really is at hand. Justice, democracy, the Kingdom of God, whatever she calls it—it’s coming.

Audrey Clare Farley is a writer, editor, scholar of 20th-century American culture, and author of two books. She is a first-time Baltimore contributor.

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]]> Basement Bars to Help Escape the Summer Heat https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/basement-bars-to-help-escape-the-summer-heat/ Tue, 01 Aug 2023 15:46:00 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?p=11787 Continued]]>

Sure, rooftop bars are all the rage once the summer scorchers start to set in. But if there’s one thing we remember from grade school science class, it’s that lesson about how heat rises. If you’re looking for a chill—and likely less crowded—substitute to the sweaty sky-high spots, these basement bars are ideal hideaways.

Anchor Bar: Beneath the bustling streets of Fells Point sits this full-service bar at the historic Admiral Fell Inn. It was recently taken over by chef Ashish Alfred, who also operates Duck Duck Goose and the new Osteria Pirata on either side of the subterranean space. Although it has changed hands, Alfred made it a point to preserve the charm of the historic Tavern at the Admiral, which still employs many of its longtime staffers. Escape the hubbub and sample one of the bar’s “long forgotten recipes,” including Manhattans, martinis, Irish coffees, and the “Knot Your Average Mule,” which fits in with the nautical theme and combines Tito’s and ginger beer with blackberry, orchid, and lime.

Avenue Kitchen & Bar: Hampden locals have seen this eatery on the Avenue change hands multiple times within the past decade. (It was home to the beloved Dogwood Restaurant and Le Garage before opening as Avenue Kitchen & Bar in 2017.) But despite the shift in concept, the general layout has remained the same. Snag a table in the downstairs dining room—equipped with dim lighting and plenty of exposed brick—to enjoy worldly dishes, craft cocktails, and weekend brunch.

Bluebird Pub: After a brief stint as a European cafe years ago, the space that sits below the Bluebird Cocktail Room in Hampden is now a handsome whiskey bar that operates on Friday and Saturday evenings. Decorated with dark woods, the candlelit space serves local beers (try the Space Jellyfish from Nepenthe Brewing Co. around the corner), killer Manhattans and Old Fashioneds, and a pub menu that lists snacks like spicy dill peanuts and a fancy grilled cheese.

The Brewer’s Art: For more than 20 years, regulars have enjoyed being able to choose their own adventure at this Mt. Vernon brewpub. Upstairs, they can feast on elevated bar fare in the posh dining room with soaring ceilings. But in the cavernous basement below, patrons sit under brick archways to enjoy the house-brewed beers (think Beazly, Resurrection, and the like) paired with orders of rosemary-garlic fries and soft pretzels with beer mustard.

Matthew’s Pizza: As a result of its reputation for having some of the best pizza in town, this Highlandtown institution is typically packed to the gills. If all of the tables are taken, slip downstairs on Friday and Saturday nights for ridiculously cheap wine, whiskey, beers at the basement bar. And no matter where you settle, always always order the crab pie.

Sugarvale: Retreat from the sunny sidewalks by stepping down into this buzzy cocktail room in Mt. Vernon. The offerings rotate with the seasons, but you can always count on the expert bartenders for a strong drink when you need it. This summer, cool off with shaken sips like the “Alien Love Call” (Stillwater saison, lychee-washed pisco, rose, cardamom, and lemon) or stirred options like the “Semi-Nefarious,” combining Bar Hill gin with chamomile vodka and allspice dram.

Venice Tavern: With roots dating back to 1933, this windowless watering hole is easily one of the oldest still standing. Husband-and-wife owners Frank and Mary DeSantis opened the Highlandtown dive bar soon after Prohibition was repealed, and it’s been cracking open cold ones ever since. (Fourth generation owner Damion DeSantis is expanded the legacy with a second Venice Tavern in Little Italy in August 2019.) Be sure to hit the ATM before stopping by the cash-only hangout, which boasts a classic chalkboard menu and age-old pool table.

 

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]]> Station North Books is Baltimore’s Most Eccentric Book Shop https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/station-north-books-baltimores-most-eccentric-book-shop/ Mon, 17 Jul 2023 18:17:48 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=143841
Ned Sparrow among his 6,000 or 7,000 books. —Photography by Micah E. Wood

On the north side of a side street around the corner from Baltimore’s Charles Theatre, half-hidden by potted plants, milk crates crammed with vintage LPs, and piles of books atop folding chairs, is the red door to Station North Books. The windows on either side are filled three-quarters high with haphazard displays of books, Christmas lights, picture frames, and more books, not so much stacked as packed against the glass, as if the shop was run not by a bookseller but a book-hoarder, which is probably accurate.

“I have an accumulative streak,” says Ned Sparrow, 58, who opened the shop a half-dozen years ago, after a career as an English professor at nearby Maryland Institute College of Art.

Open the door, go down a narrow passageway hemmed in by bookshelves and tables loaded with volumes—new and used, paperback and hardcover, antique and simply well-read—and you’ll find Sparrow, likely sitting in the crowded back room of the 800-square-foot shop, wedged into a chair near signed copies of novels by John Updike and Cormac McCarthy. He keeps his older books toward the back as well, handy as it were, “close to the guitar and the fire extinguisher.”

Until recently, there was also a sign on the front door that said, “Going out for business,” which engendered concern among some of the city’s literati. To be clear: The shop is not closing, at least not anytime soon. It is a grammarian’s joke.

“I was reading the want ads,” says Sparrow, “and one of them said, ‘Going out for business.’ And I thought, ‘That’s a really dirty trick.’ And then I’m like, ‘Well, nobody’s coming in.’ And some of them did come in because of that.” He has the grace to look somewhat sheepish. “I’ve been an abecedarian and a pedant for a long time. I felt bad tricking people, kind of, but I also felt like, eh, it’s okay.”

A tall man with a mess of wavy hair and an infectious grin, Sparrow turns to make an espresso on a tiny, pump-driven espresso machine jigsawed into a network of books up against a rear wall. A demitasse appears, somehow, from a shelf that seems only to hold more books.

His friends say that the literary clutter goes with the territory.

“[Before he opened the bookstore], his house looked like a glorified book quarter. I can remember going up there, and you sort of had to carry your own light to go through the books because there wasn’t enough light to see everything,” says Edward Whitfill, who has known Sparrow since 2006 and who ran Ukazoo Books in Towson for 14 years until it closed in 2021. “He had this attic that was so jammed, you could barely go through it,” continues Whitfill. “So I was happily surprised when he finally made the move and decided to start offering those books to the public and not just online.”

Among the tight shelves at Station North Books, a slow-growing operation which took its initial steps about seven years ago, there seems to be an almost unimaginable range and depth of offerings. There are the literary classics like Henry Fielding, James Baldwin, and Vladimir Nabokov. There are cookbooks, New Age books, self-help books, a section on Tarot, “schlocky beach stuff,” as Sparrow puts it, 200-year-old Bibles, a signed Oliver Sacks, and—a nicely Baltimorean touch—a 1935 Poe’s Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

“That seems less organized than it is,” he says as he points to another wall of titles. “Everything up here is signed. So that Ishiguro is signed.”

He also has Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein first editions. Sometimes, he intentionally misfiles things just to amuse himself. For example, Ulysses is stocked under “Psych,” he says, “just for giggles.”

There are items besides books, odd bits and pieces that befit Sparrow’s treasure-hunt approach to the job: art by his former MICA students; a cast-iron, corn-cob-shaped muffin tin; taxidermy, including a massive black bear’s head, mounted and hanging up on one wall, shot by his grandfather up in Michigan; more of what he calls “the Luddite things,” like more bins of vinyl and The Hobbit on cassette tape. “Some of those things just arrived when I was chasing books, sometimes in boxed lots,” he says, as well as other oddities, like a fur hat and a dive belt, “just because.”

Ned Sparrow beneath the bear his grandfather shot.

Then there are the beautiful things, the antique finds that are not, as they might be somewhere else, displayed under glass with massive price tags. “The most special, oldest one is De Cryptographia, which I don’t trot out,” Sparrow says of the first-ever book on cryptography, in Latin and dated to 1517, that he found at a church yard sale some years ago. “They said, ‘Yeah, we tried to sell that last year. Nobody bought it.’ And I said, ‘Well, how much is it?’ I didn’t realize what it was.”

He bought the book for $40—all he had in his pocket at the time—and a basket of honey mushrooms that he’d just foraged. (Sparrow is a first-rate mushroom forager, and supplies Chris Amendola, the James Beard Award-nominated chef of Foraged restaurant, which is a few hundred feet around the corner from the bookshop.) “It’s worth $10,000,” he says of the yard sale find. “Or at least, the last one went at auction for $10,000. I might get more if I give it to Sotheby’s.”

Ned Sparrow—his real name, though it sounds like that of a minor Henry V character—grew up in Grosse Point, Michigan, and came to Baltimore in 1987 right out of Princeton to teach middle school at St. Paul’s School for Boys in Brooklandville. He drove down from New Jersey in his grandfather’s Ford F-250 pickup, a truck with a hunting cabin camper and a compromised muffler. “People would sometimes stop me at intersections,” he says, “and say, ‘Help is on the way.’”

After a few years teaching literature to prep-school kids, he spent a year at the Hopkins Writing Center, getting a master’s under the tutelage of John Barth, Madison Smartt Bell, and Grace Paley. He went back to Princeton for a Ph.D. in English, specializing in continental modernism (“Joyce, Woolf, Fitzgerald, James, Stein”). Then he came back to Baltimore and got a job at MICA, where he stayed for the next 20 years, until two years ago.

“I taught narrative illustration, great books, great short stories, a class called Modern Marrying and Other Bonds,” says Sparrow, who has also taught at Peabody, Goucher, and Stevenson. Between the books he inherited from his grandfather, his parents’ books, and the books he’d acquired over a lifetime spent studying and teaching, Sparrow accumulated a library.

“Around [the year] 2000 my ex said, ‘We’ve got a lot of books here, you should sell some.’” He and his family lived in Lutherville at the time, in an old house that he’d filled with volumes. So he started selling on eBay, then began cataloging the titles and selling on Amazon; he also sold some at the Antiques Emporium in Frederick. “It was my quasi retirement plan,” he says. “Books were everywhere, including in the master bathroom; behind my wife’s perfumes were, like, all of the Modern Library.”

He figures that at the peak of his online sales, he had around 10,000 volumes.

Sparrow's eclectic collection of used, new, rare, and antique books.

In 2016, Sparrow began selling a few books out of a little coffee shop called Café Sage at 34 E. Lanvale Street—his current location. Not many books, what he characterizes as “excess inventory,” but when the coffee shop closed, Sparrow, who knew the landlord, agreed to take over the lease. His books migrated, and now he says he has between 6,000 and 7,000 in the shop, with maybe another 4,000 in a warehouse “of sorts” in Towson, where he keeps mostly titles from 1970 forward.

He still goes to estate sales, but less frequently, maybe every fourth weekend as opposed to every weekend. Sometimes people send him pictures of books, asking him what they’re worth and if he wants them. If they pique his interest, he hops in his Subaru wagon. “A German Bible from the 1800s, unless it’s signed by Kaiser Wilhelm, I just give them a rough idea [of the price], then show up.” Others bring him volumes. “I take donations, and people do get to a point when they don’t know what to do with them. So they give them to me.” In turn, he will give readers deals, especially if they’re students or teachers.

“I used to just get everything. I was like, well, I need another copy of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. And of course I didn’t.”

Sparrow surveys his small, crowded kingdom. A lamp stands on a few volumes, a duck decoy perches on one stack, a teapot on another. He likes to sell books, because that means he’s “putting the book in somebody’s hands,” the ultimate goal. But sometimes what he likes most is the ongoing treasure hunt. Finding that second copy of Henry James, for example, gives him hope that if he sells it, he can find a third.

So, yes, it’s about the hunt, but it’s also about what Sparrow calls the fellowship. This is the group of other booksellers, a group as rarefied as their books, a guild that is both worldwide and as close as a narrow Baltimore street. There are about two dozen independent booksellers in Baltimore these days, including Royal Books, run by Kevin Royal Johnson, which is less than a mile up Charles Street from Station North Books. Viva Books, run by Viva Stowell, is about a mile south, and both booksellers trade books, customers, and camaraderie with Sparrow.

 

“NED INSISTS THERE IS A VERY CAREFULLY ORGANIZED SHELVING SYSTEM.”

 

 

“Ned would come in to deal with customers who wanted to sell collectibles we had already passed on, because we were dealing with volume,” recalls Whitfill, the former Ukazoo Books owner, who still collects books but limits himself to four of his own bookshelves. “He goes for the strange and somewhat macabre, the unusual,” Whitfill says of Sparrow’s proclivities.

Mikita Brottman, an author and MICA professor who teaches courses on Poe, the uncanny, and esoteric thought, comes by Station North Books often. “Sometimes to contribute a box of unwanted volumes, sometimes to see what I can find,” she says. “Sometimes just to hang out with Ned, talk about books, and see what he’s got.”

She’s not interested in collectibles or first editions, Brottman says, only to read, and she likes that Sparrow saves books he knows will interest her—and that he lets her bring her dog in the shop.

“All kinds of interesting people drop by—friends, strangers, writers, poets, teachers, students,” says Brottman. “I like the fact that it’s so chaotic in there. Ned insists there is a very carefully organized shelving system,” though she’s not quite sure about that. “Sometimes it does feel as though everything is on the verge of tipping over and burying Ned in an avalanche of books, but he doesn’t seem worried.”

On a recent day, Sparrow cataloged some of his favorite things: a Robert Burns book bound with green leather, with raised bands and a deckled edge; a 1780 devotional book in Spanish made of vellum (animal skin) and worth, “I don’t know, a couple 100 bucks.” He pulls out an old Bible from an early U.S. printing, circa 1870, the size of a deck of cards, and describes how folks once liked to carry the books in their breast pockets, as they’d been known to stop the occasional bullet.

Sparrow doesn’t sell on Amazon anymore, though he’ll still move a few books on eBay. Mostly he relies on walk-ins and on Instagram, @nedstationnorthbooks, where he posts pictures and details of books, along with Venmo and other contact information. He also likes to post selfies of folks with their just-bought books, another way of working the bookshop fellowship in our virtual age. He has a database, and pages on bookshop.org and biblio.com, though as for the exact contents of his shop, “The stuff around here is in my head.”

Sparrow reflects on his three-room library. “It’s liberating for me to look at a book and say, ‘Yeah, we could look it up [the book’s value]. Or you could give me 20 bucks.’ And it’s kind of Russian roulette, because then you look it up and you say, ‘Look, the cheapest one out there is $400. And I just sold it to you for 20 bucks.’”

And sometimes the transaction works out in his favor; he’s fine either way. Because, as he’ll be the first to tell you, his math is that of an English professor, and what is apparent from the sidewalk is that Sparrow does what he does for the books themselves, and for those who love them.

“There’s nothing like presence,” he says, of both the people and the titles in the shop. “And then coming across something that is next to the thing you’re looking for. It’s not big economics, but the lights are on, there’s that.”

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]]> Sustainable City: Six Orgs Working to Make Baltimore Cleaner and Greener https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/baltimore-city-sustainable-environmental-organizations-fighting-climate-change/ Thu, 06 Jul 2023 14:00:22 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=143448

By Christianna McCausland

Photography by J.M. Giordano

TRAVEL & OUTDOORS

Sustainable City

Climate change is having an impact, but organizations are working to make Baltimore more resilient, cleaner, and greener for all.

Edited by Christianna McCausland

Photography by J.M. Giordano

July 2023

AST WINTER WAS THE FIRST WITHOUT SNOW in recorded memory, beating out 1949 when just .7 inches fell. February saw days in the 70s. These balmy interludes are not anomalies; research by the University of Maryland shows that average temperatures in the state have risen by about 2.5°F since 1900. Everything from the number of broiling days to storm intensity and flooding have increased. Our seasons are becoming less distinct and milder.

This adds up to a major challenge for a city like Baltimore. Covered in miles of asphalt and concrete, the city becomes a heat island on warm days. With sea levels projected to rise by as much as 1.6 feet by 2050, waterfront areas will deal with more flooding and property damage. Saltwater incursion into freshwater systems and agriculture will be problematic. Severe storms will lead to more runoff, erosion, and degradation of both soil and water.

And given Baltimore’s history of redlining, poor neighborhoods of color will continue to be disproportionately hit by global warming. Lacking trees and parks, they blaze on hot days; and heavy metals left behind from years of industry contaminate the soil. Baltimore is a city where life expectancy, access to nutritious food, and other health issues are often dictated by your ZIP code, a disparity writ large by climate change.

But amidst the doom and gloom there’s reason for hope. Just last year, global organization The Nature Conservancy launched a project focused on Baltimore’s Patapsco River Watershed, and Baltimore was one of only three cities nationwide awarded a $25-million federal grant to enable scientists, academics, and researchers to develop climate resilience strategies here.

City officials have also been moving toward a more sustainable future for years. The latest incarnation of the city’s Sustainability Plan, published in 2019 by the Baltimore Office of Sustainability (BOS) and anchored by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, sets forth bold benchmarks to make the city more resilient, help residents adapt to changing conditions—and to do so in a way that embraces racial equity and social justice.

“The Earth itself is incredible,” says Ava Richardson, director of BOS. “The Earth has been here for billions of years, and she will continue to be here. Our goal is to ensure that we are here and that we are able to live with high quality of life as her conditions change.”

Sustainability is a term that often gets bandied about without a clear definition. Richardson says it really comes down to preserving the natural resources we rely on. “We want to ensure that future generations have access to clean air, clean water, that they have a tree canopy that improves quality of life so that they are not living in a city that’s too hot in the summer months, especially if those summer months become longer and longer.”

We can already put a few things in the win column. Baltimore has adopted carbon emission reduction plans in line with the Paris Climate Agreement and nearly hit its goal to reduce emissions by 25 percent by 2020 (coming in at 23.2 percent). The city is committed to carbon neutrality by 2045. It’s estimated that the city’s ban on plastic bags has kept 12 million of the flimsy things out of the environment and trash wheels in the Harbor have collected over 2,300 tons of debris to date. The city is working to implement the Baltimore Green Network Plan to link existing green space with new parks and reimagined, verdant vacant lots to create sustainable corridors for people and wildlife.

Yet there’s more to be done and it starts at the individual level. Richardson says we must look closely at our consumer habits and waste less. “For many of us, we throw things away not necessarily considering where ‘away’ is or how much waste we produce in a particular day,” she says. Consider the lowly cigarette butt. One-third of the billions of cigarettes sold in the U.S. annually are flicked on the ground. Non-biodegradable, they wash into waterways, becoming the most common marine litter in the world.

Simple changes, like eliminating single-use plastic, driving a little less—single occupancy driving is a large contributor to air pollution—recycling correctly, and managing thermostat temperatures, do make a difference.

“I want everyone across our city to feel empowered and to know that your actions matter,” Richardson states. “We will need millions of actions from hundreds of thousands of residents across the city and the small micro actions that you take on a daily basis do contribute to our climate goals.”

There are many organizations working to make Baltimore more environmentally sound. Here, we highlight a few that are moving the needle on improved stewardship of the land, air, and water.

Opening spread: volunteers tend to hidden harvest farm’s garden on calvert street, downtown.

Pocket Park Protectors

Baltimore Green Space is securing today's land for tomorrow's well-being.
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hink “land conservation” and huge tracts of open space will likely come to mind. But in Baltimore, you could walk right by a piece of preserved land and have no idea. The land conservation trust Baltimore Green Space (BGS) currently stewards 62 acres, much of it pocket parks or small urban forest patches. These little spots of green that pop up amid expanses of endless concrete play an important role in the city’s future sustainability.

“There’s a myth that there’s no real nature in the city,” says executive director Katie Lautar, who explains that, on the contrary, since the fall of Baltimore’s Rust Belt industries, abandoned lots of land have had decades to go completely wild. “We have herons living in the tiniest space you can imagine, and larger urban forests filled with endangered species, saplings, and streams.”

BGS was born out of one woman’s fight to protect her own pocket park from development. Since then, BGS has worked to protect existing green spaces that are being cared for by their community from the threat of development. Although BGS recently conserved the 54-acre Masonville Cove Urban Wildlife Refuge, most of its projects look more like Hidden Harvest Farm, pictured above, a half-acre community garden in Greenmount nurturing fruits, vegetables, even bees. Or Springfield Woods, 3.5 acres of 100-year-old forest just a short hop away from the rumbling traffic of The Alameda. Or the remarkably tiny Brentwood Commons, a patch of park less than a block off North Avenue and barely the size of a handful of rowhouses.

These tiny but mighty green spaces are essential to Baltimore’s future. They offer shade, yes, but also cool air and surface temperatures by moving water from the ground into the atmosphere while also absorbing carbon emissions.

Additionally, green spaces are important shelter areas for migratory birds—Maryland is centrally located on the Atlantic Flyway, used by millions of birds annually—and absorb stormwater so it doesn’t flood streets and rush into the Bay carrying trash and pollutants with it. From a quality-of-life perspective, there are numerous studies that show a bit of grass and a few trees improve both physical and mental health in humans.

While BGS works with the city to transfer land into conservation, “The majority of the vacant land in Baltimore is privately owned,” says Lautar, including more than 20 percent of the city’s current tree canopy. That leaves much of Baltimore’s green patchwork vulnerable to development.

Still, Lautar believes we’re moving into a better moment for conservation. As part of its advocacy work, BGS pushed for passage of the Greenspace Equity Program. Recently signed by Gov. Wes Moore, it supports green space in underserved communities, making it easier to acquire small plots of land. Lautar says preserving these spaces is essential to community health and well-being; many are neighborhood hubs, places for concerts, picnics, birthday parties, and more. Others are beloved for their serene natural beauty.

“We have over 800 green spaces and over 1,000 forest patches, so at least 2,000 green space assets we can invest in to make them more accessible, to create capital improvements on, and to employ community members in the care of,” she says.

“From an environmental perspective,” she continues, “we are really well-positioned to change the paradigm of how we think about cities making themselves climate resilient.”

What you can Do

Earth Movers

Engage with and share a green space

Replace asphalt with permeable pavers or plants

Consider planting a green roof

Purchase from local growers

Plant native species (even in containers)

Seeds of Change

Urban farms grow more than produce inside city limits.

RICHARD FRANCIS, known to all as “Farmer Chippy,” pictured below, oversees 10 acres of land, cultivating everything from kale and mustard greens to herbs and peppers. He also has a flock of Rhode Island Red hens. But his garden isn’t laid out on pristine acreage; it’s carved out of city blocks on a stretch of Park Heights Avenue between Pimlico Racetrack and Druid Hills Park, an urban farm called Plantation Park Heights.

Farmer Chippy’s love of the land goes back to his upbringing in Trinidad and Tobago, but he’s been cultivating his little corner—or, more accurately, corners—of the city since 2014. He started squatting on an abandoned lot growing herbs and has expanded by purchasing and leasing one lot at a time. He now has two large hoop houses in addition to acres of raised beds maintained by 25 volunteer farmers. He calls it “AgriHood Baltimore.”

“We don’t just grow food and sell it, we grow people, we grow community, we nurture families so they stay together,” he says. He’s particularly interested in youth outreach, noting that the average age of a farmer in America is about 60. “Anyone can put up a farm; what we need is more farmers. This is a farmer-training institute, right here in the ’hood.”

As of 2019, there were 20 urban farms like Plantation Park Heights in Baltimore. Farms play an important role in the city’s sustainability. The green spaces and plants support biodiversity, help manage stormwater runoff, and mitigate the impact of heat islands. They support a circular system, too, where food waste can be composted and returned to soil in garden beds.

But the impacts are greater when it comes to food security, nutritional education, and community engagement. Plantation Park Heights sells its produce and eggs at Druid Hill Park and Johns Hopkins Hospital’s farmers markets, conducts cooking demonstrations at every farmers market they go to, offers training and workshops at the farm, and, each Thursday, gives away 200 boxes of fresh produce. “Urban agriculture brings people together to grow food in our community, for our community,” Farmer Chippy states.

Overstory Tellers

The Baltimore tree trust is growing and maintaining our urban forest.

tep outside. If there’s a tree there, appreciate it not only for its beauty but also for the role it plays as part of Baltimore’s vast urban forest, thousands of arboreal acres that create a life-giving leaf canopy—the lungs of the city.

While Baltimore is home to the third-largest urban wilderness in the U.S. (Gwynn Falls Leakin Park), its forest is still not as big as it needs to be nor equitably distributed. Baltimore Tree Trust (BTT) is just one organization helping to grow the city’s tree canopy from its current 28 percent coverage to its goal of 40 percent, while ensuring trees get to neighborhoods in greatest need.

Trees have innumerable benefits. Studies show that tree-lined neighborhoods tend toward higher community engagement and lower crime. Trees slow stormwater runoff and create habitat for wildlife. They’re also critical in the fight against warming temperatures. Without shade from trees, neighborhoods scorch, experiencing temperatures at least 10 degrees warmer than their leafy counterparts. In this extreme heat, air quality—and human health—deteriorate. Natural resource consumption soars as residents who can access air conditioning shelter indoors.

“The science is there,” say BTT executive director Bryant Smith. “There are so many health problems tied to lack of tree canopy connected to heat-related issues that if we don’t target the neighborhoods that don’t have a high tree canopy rate, we’re creating an unsafe environment for those residents.”

Tree canopy maps show that while affluent neighborhoods have as much as 50 percent canopy coverage, that plummets to as low as six percent in underserved areas. Yet some people do not want a tree outside their house. (Those who do can request trees, here.) They fear property damage or mess from fallen leaves.

“Urban forestry does not just include trees,” says Smith. “We’re building a forest in a place where there are structures, buildings, people. So how do we, in a smart way, plant ‘right tree, right place?’ There needs to be education, community buy-in, and partnerships to not only get trees in the ground, but to maintain them.”

Everyone can help the city’s canopy. Simple acts of kindness like clearing tree wells of weeds and litter and watering your sidewalk trees in summer’s heat make a difference. Well cared for, an urban tree can live 60 to 80 years.

Smith says it’s a good time to be in urban forestry, with more investment than ever before. The Tree Solutions Now Act, for example, plans for five million trees to be planted in Maryland, including 500,000 trees earmarked for underserved urban areas. President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes $1.5 billion to increase urban tree canopy nationwide.

BTT started out planting a few trees in East Baltimore; now they plant 6,000 a year. They’ve created an impervious surfaces removal arm that can do the work of cutting concrete sidewalks to make tree wells, clearing asphalt from vacant lots, and grinding stumps. Importantly, BTT’s career development arm, the Neighborhood Forestry Initiative, trains urban arborists so there will be professional stewards to care for the future forest.

What you can Do

A Breath of Fresh Air

Eat a plant-based diet (reduce food system-related emissions)

Plant a tree

Compost kitchen scraps

Get a free home energy audit

Curb your drive time

GOLD MINING

Baltimore Compost Collective wants to turn waste facility pollution into black gold.
FROM LEFT: A RESIDENT GOAT; MARVIN HAYES.

BALTIMORE HAS COME a long way in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, but according to the John Hopkins University Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Lab, there’s one sticking point—the Wheelabrator incinerator.

A HANDFUL OF COMPOST AT FILBERT STREET COMMUNITY GARDEN.

Located in South Baltimore, Wheelabrator’s emissions have not changed since JHU began monitoring it in 2007, and it is the largest source of GHG in Baltimore. Landfills are no better, generating potent methane, which traps heat and is largely responsible for global warming. All this air pollution is a public health problem; the BOS 2019 Sustainability Plan states that the city’s hospitalization rate for asthma is 2.5 times higher than the state average.

But so long as the city generates trash, it needs to go somewhere, right?

Marvin Hayes has a different solution: Starve the incinerator, feed the soil. As executive director of Baltimore Compost Collective, Hayes is practically evangelical about educating anyone who will listen about how common waste can be transformed into uncommon soil.

“People haven’t been educated here in the city about composting,” says Hayes. “That’s my job, to go out and tell them they can make a decision to divert their organic material from going into the landfills and incinerators.” He adds that “wind does not segregate or discriminate,” so air pollution from waste facilities in underserved communities is everyone’s problem.

The Collective distributes five-gallon buckets to clients, picks them up once a week, and takes them to the composting center located at Filbert Street Community Garden. A quarter of what we throw in landfills can be composted. Composting naturally breaks down household scraps—yesterday’s pasta, half-eaten apples, this morning’s coffee grounds—into what gardeners call “black gold,” the dark, rich humus essential to plant growth. Compost from the Collective remediated the soil at Filbert Street, enabling what was previously a dumping site to go from toxic to a neighborhood oasis with raised vegetable beds, a greenhouse, bees, fowl, and goats.

The Collective has 300 curbside clients and Hayes is collecting as much as 1,500 pounds of waste a week, more than he can manage. He takes the excess to a composting facility in Upper Marlboro, but he’s raising money and working with the city to expand his operation. “I want to build a large-scale, inclusive composting facility for Baltimore so we can have municipal, curbside composting for every resident in the city.”

Pollution Solutions

Gunpowder Valley Conservancy Safeguards the Headwaters that Feed the Bay.
LOCH RAVEN RESERVOIR IN THE GUNPOWDER WATERSHED SUPPLIES MUCH OF THE CITY’S DRINKING WATER.

ooking at the Inner Harbor or boating out of Bowleys Quarters, it’s hard to believe the water there has been affected by what someone has done hundreds of miles away. Yet that’s the case with many of the watersheds that feed into the Bay. The Gunpowder Valley Conservancy (GVC), a land trust and watershed conservation organization, works to protect the Gunpowder watershed that begins at its headwaters in York, Pennsylvania, travels through networks of rivers and streams through Baltimore and Carroll counties, then empties into Middle River and, ultimately, the Chesapeake Bay.

Along the way, that water picks up everything we dole out: pesticides from agriculture, yes, but also fertilizer from lawns, litter, road salt, motor oil, and other contaminants. While Baltimore has real problems—leaking sewage pipes, dumping—GVC’s executive director, Kim Pause Tucker, says it’s easier to finger point at these bad actors than to look at how we as individuals impact water quality.

“A lot of people, if they don’t see a stream near them, don’t think they’re part of the watershed, but eventually all water goes into a storm drain or seeps into the water table,” says Tucker. While there is a Gunpowder Riverkeeper who is a steward of the actual water, GVC is focused on protecting water by protecting land (they have more than 2,000 acres of land in conservation easement, an agreement that permanently limits uses of the land in order to protect it).

That’s because much of what affects water quality takes place on the shore. GVC has planted a lot of trees, over 34,000. Deforestation causes erosion, filling streams with sediments that degrade the water quality and can pollute the environment for submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV). According to NOAA, healthy SAVs upstream reduce water acidity downstream, not to mention providing food, nutrients, and habitat. They’re also super consumers of carbon dioxide. Despite their importance, in the early 20th century nearly 90 percent of the Bay area’s SAVs disappeared. The population has been clambering back ever since.

Streams and riverbanks filled with healthy plants (riparian buffers) and tree-lined city streets keep streams and stormwater runoff cool as well. “If the temperature of streams is too warm, even just by a few degrees, that can impact aquatic species or cause algae blooms,” says Tucker. Tucker adds that we need to be smarter about land development, too, adaptively reusing structures already on the coast rather than developing virgin riparian areas.

More than a land trust, Tucker says GVC is a connector—connecting people to the environment and to resources. GVC staff leads volunteers on tree plantings and stream cleanups, distributes rain barrels, and runs an adopt-astream program.

Its Clear Creeks program is a citizen-based initiative that works with communities to install bayscapes (native plant gardens), rain barrels and rain gardens, and to implement micro-bioretention buffers (similar to rain gardens but treating larger volumes of runoff, like from parking lots). Working with a homeowners association of 740 townhouses in Middle River, GVC installed 137 trees, 10 bayscapes, four rain gardens, eight rain barrels, and utilized several microbioretention buffers. The project is now an award-winning case study for successful municipal stormwater management.

“Humans are not separate from the environment,” says Tucker. “We have to think about what compromises we want to make. Do we use road salt more sparingly? Where can we consume less? Also, we need to make noise about this in our communities. If you identify a problem, elevate it to a conservation organization or local officials. I find that people do want a good environment and want to protect it.”

What you can Do

Crystal Clear

Responsibly dispose of hazardous household waste (e.g. paint, oil)

Clear debris from storm drains

Install rain barrels and gardens

Stop/reduce pesticide/fertilizer use

Maintain septic systems

WATERSHED DEFENDERS

Defensores de la Cuenca is building NextGen Latino and Spanish-speaking environmental leaders.

THE LATINO POPULATION in Baltimore doubled between 2010 and 2020 to over 40,000 people. A Pew Research study recently noted that climate change is a pressing concern for the majority of U.S. Latinos and that many see the effects of it in their communities. Yet there appears to be a gap between awareness and activism. If Defensores de la Cuenca, or Defenders of the Watershed in English, has its way, that’s going to change.

Latinos often come from cultures where reuse is part of everyday life, as is a close connection with nature, making it a community ripe to pick up the mantle of environmental leadership. But according to Abel Olivo, pictured above, Defensores co-founder and executive director, “The communities that are most impacted are not at the table, and there’s a reason for that. It’s historical exclusion, but also the structures and systems have been set up to make this work inaccessible.”

Olivo explains that even well-intentioned programs rarely take into account what matters in Spanish-speaking communities. Defensores programs are always free, fun, family-friendly, in Spanish, and take place at times that aren’t during work and church hours. “We’re asking these participants for their most precious commodity—their time,” says Olivo. “Time is food on the table, it’s rent, it’s a car payment; all that has real impact to community members on the margin.”

Over a year ago, Defensores began its Baltimore-based community-centered outreach, like water-quality investigations, picnics, and hiking excursions, but the end game is to bring the Latino community into Defensores’ paid programs to engage them in the economic engine of environmentalism. In July, in partnership with Patterson Park Audubon Center, Defensores will launch its La Academia de Defensores paid adult training program. Through in-person and virtual workshops, up to 15 participants earn a living wage while learning about watershed-related issues. At the conclusion, they implement a capstone project relevant to their community.

“In terms of climate change and resiliency, we need to better equip this community to be a part of the workforce, to be part of the conversation,” says Olivo. “If we continue to sideline or ignore the Latino and Spanish-speaking community, if we continue to ignore their need to access green space, to improve air and water quality, it will result in a sicker populace.”

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]]> Shaping Transportation for Tomorrow https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/special/shaping-transportation-for-tomorrow/ Tue, 30 May 2023 21:26:33 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=special&p=142151 Continued]]> How do you get around? Do you drive, use transit, bike, or walk? Maybe you rely on a combination of these and other modes. However you move from point A to point B, you’re probably making use of the transportation system. Roads, rail lines, bus stops, bike lanes—this infrastructure didn’t just happen. Everything from your neighborhood sidewalk to the Bay Bridge had to be planned, designed, and built. Now ask yourself this: How do you want your community’s transportation system to work in five years? What about in 25?

The Baltimore Regional Transportation Board (BRTB) is developing plans for $74 billion in investments to the region’s transportation system through 2050, and has released a set of drafts for you to review and weigh in on. You can read the drafts in full or use an interactive project map to learn more at publicinput.com/Resilience2050.

“This is a very exciting moment,” says Mike Kelly, executive director of Baltimore Metropolitan Council, a planning organization that supports and staffs the BRTB. Kelly notes that drafting Resilience 2050 began over a year ago, with BRTB members representing communities across the region building consensus on goals to guide the plan. He adds, “We’re grateful to work with people who are dedicated to supporting the health and resilience of our communities.”

Your comments can help shape our region’s transportation system for decades to come. The Resilience 2050 long-range plan anticipates potential impacts of factors such as population growth, emerging technologies, and climate change. The plan is fiscally constrained, and explores how we can best use the anticipated amount of available funding to bring our transportation system fully into the modern era. Reducing emissions, improving safety, and boosting connectivity can help our communities flourish and thrive. You can help pursue this vision.

Do you wish it was easier to get from Essex to Ellicott City? Are you wondering if we’re ready for self-driving cars? Would you like to see less traffic on I-795 or US 50? Share what you think, and your comments can inform the development of specific projects, as well as the BRTB’s future work. “Thank you so much for engaging in this step of the planning process,” says Sam Snead, director of the Anne Arundel County Office of Transportation and chair of the BRTB. “We really look forward to reviewing your feedback.”

Feedback from typical transportation users—from the person riding the bus to the daily commuter on the highway—throughout the planning process helps support progress toward improving our region’s transportation system. As projects move toward implementation, the BRTB works with state and local sponsors to secure funding and undertake more thorough planning and design. Along with Resilience 2050, the BRTB is also sharing a draft 2024-2027 Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), which includes $4.2 billion for these more imminent projects. You can use the interactive maps to find out more about projects near you, as well as possibilities which could reshape transportation in the region.

The BRTB is seeking comments from members of the public by June 20. Members will consider comments ahead of a vote on whether to approve the Resilience 2050 long-range plan, 2024-2027 TIP and associated Air Quality Conformity Determination on July 25. You are also welcome to join the BRTB at public meetings in Bel Air, Baltimore, Ellicott City, Glen Burnie, Stevensville, Towson and Westminster. For more meeting details, and to learn more about the plans and how to comment, please visit publicinput.com/Resilience2050.

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]]> The List: May 2023 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/cant-miss-baltimore-events-festivals-concerts-exhibits-may-2023/ Mon, 01 May 2023 18:18:44 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=140410
—Courtesy of The Brand Guild

5/19-20: PREAKNESS
With ladies sporting statement-making hats, citrusy black-eyed Susan cocktails, a rowdy infield, and a sea of speedy horse hooves on a quest for glory, Preakness weekend is as synonymous with Baltimore as blue crabs—and a treasured springtime ritual. Now in its 148th year, the second jewel of horse racing’s Triple Crown will sweep into Pimlico Race Course on May 20, preceded by Black-Eyed Susan Day races on May 19.

For the second year in a row, the infield celebration has been reimagined as Preakness Live, a festival reflecting Baltimore’s dynamic art, cuisine, and culture, this time featuring Grammy Award-winning singer Bruno Mars. As a bonus, Preakness ticket holders have the option to take part in two new luxury experiences, featuring gourmet eats, premium beverage packages, preferred parking, executive restroom access, and top-notch racetrack viewing spots. Pimlico Race Course. Times vary. $203-900.

5/2: PAINT YOUR PET
Pre-register ahead of time to paint a (pre-sketched by a pro) portrait of your furry friend in Locust Point. Diamondback Brewing. 6:30 p.m. $40. 

5/3: BILLY IDOL
The “Dancing With Myself” singer and punk icon makes a stop in Baltimore this month. Rams Head Live! 8 p.m. Starting at $95. 

5/4: TINDER LIVE!
Host Lane Moore projects the dating app onto a giant screen and swipes profiles before a live audience. Baltimore Soundstage. 8 p.m. $20-30. 

5/4-8: WORLD DANCE FESTIVAL
Spend four days at Hilton Baltimore with dancers and instructors from around the globe. Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor. Times vary. $140-269.

—Shutterstock

5/5-6: CHARM CITY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL
In its tenth year, the beloved jamboree puts acts like Caleb Stine, Cris Jacobs, and The Steel Wheels in the spotlight. Union Craft Brewing. Times vary. $59-169. 

5/5-6: FLOWER MART
This annual Mount Vernon bash brings lemon sticks, small vendors, and big blooms out to the monument. Mount Vernon Place and Washington Monument. Times vary. 

5/5-6: SUPER SCIENCE SLEEPOVER: REVENGE OF THE FIFTH
At the Science Center, tap into the “dark side” with an IMAX documentary, rocket launching, and a chance to build a hovercraft. Then snooze in the exhibit halls at lights-out. Maryland Science Center. 5:30 p.m.-9 a.m. $45-50. 

5/6: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON 50TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW
Join Towson radio station WTMD for an homage to the iconic Pink Floyd album with band Several Species. 34 Market Place. 7:30 p.m. $20-35. 

5/6: FREE COMIC BOOK DAY
Starting at noon, visit Atomic Books in Hampden to browse close to 50 free titles, and take one home. Atomic Books. 12 p.m. 

5/6: HIGHLANDTOWN ADULT PROM
Relive the best night of your high-school-aged life as you boogie to hits from the ’70s on. Tiffany East Catering. 7-11 p.m. $70. 

5/6: KINETIC SCULPTURE RACE
Feast your eyes as effervescent, human-powered floats take on Charm City at this annual AVAM event. American Visionary Art Museum. Times vary. 

5/6: SPRING PUNK ROCK FLEA MARKET
Go shopping at Ottobar for retro trinkets, vinyl, jewelry, clothing, and potentially cursed artifacts. Ottobar. 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

5/7: I LOVE SOBO DAY
Celebrate South Baltimore with local makers, food vendors, community resources, and a load of fun for little ones. Baltimore Museum of Industry Pavilion. 9 a.m.-2 p.m..

5/9: LIZZO
Joined by guest Latto, the “Juice” singer will make a stop at CFG Bank Arena with her woodwind chops and fierce vocals. CFG Bank Arena. 8 p.m. Prices vary. 

5/9-14: SIX THE MUSICAL
Groove with Henry VIII’s six wives and watch as they recount historic heartbreak at the Hippodrome. Hippodrome Theatre. Times and prices vary. 

5/10: 33 1/3: THE BEACH BOYS: PET SOUNDS
Join local music lovers to talk 33 1/3 Volume 19: Beach Boys Pet Sounds and revisit the iconic album. Atomic Books. 6 p.m. 

5/12: COFFEE SHOP CONCERT SERIES FEATURING FOLA
John Tyler hosts this Friday night experience at Hampden cafe Good Neighbor, with vocals brought by Fola. Good Neighbor. 6:30 p.m. Free-$5. 

5/12: LIARMOUTH BOOK SIGNING
Baltimore filmmaker John Waters will sign copies of his debut novel at Atomic Books. Atomic Books. 7 p.m. 

5/12-14: BALTIMORE BIRDING WEEKEND
Take guided bird-watching field trips all over Charm City as part of this award-winning springtime event. Patterson Park Audubon Center. Times and prices vary. 

—Shutterstock

5/13: PLANT DAD, MICAH E. WOOD, NAE
These three dynamic, young Baltimore musicians bring their talents to the outdoor stage at Current Space. Current Space. 6 p.m. $12-15. 

5/14: ANITA BAKER
The vocal powerhouse who brought us “Sweet Love” hits the CFG Bank Arena, marking more than 40 years in showbiz. CFG Bank Arena. 7 p.m. Prices vary.

—Shutterstock

5/14: IMANI WINDS
The two-time Grammy-nominated wind quintet brings innovative melodies to Baltimore. Shriver Hall. 5:30-8:30 p.m. $10-44. 

5/18: MUSHROOM GROW KITS WITH BALTISPORE
Tap into the mysterious and tasty world of mushrooms, and receive materials to grow your own at home. Enoch Pratt Free Library. 6 p.m. 

5/19-20: HOT BITS
In Highlandtown, this trauma-informed, sex-positive, queer porn film fest honors underrepresented bodies. Watch short erotic films, catch live performances, and check out on-site vendors. Creative Alliance. Times and prices vary. 

5/20: BLACK CHERRY PUPPET SLAMWICH
Black Cherry Puppet Theater’s famous “Puppet Slamwich” variety show brings whimsical adult content to Current Space. Current Space. 5-11 p.m. Price TBD. 

5/20: CRANKIE FACTORY
The old-time art of storytelling using scrolls of artwork in a lighted box brings its magic to Monkton. Manor Mill. 7 p.m. $20. 

5/20: OLD PRO OPEN
The East Coast’s largest mini golfing tournament returns to Ocean City with crisp local beer and cool prizes. Old Pro Golf. $30. 

TO 5/21: HARVEY
This take on the classic play features a man and his best buddy: an imaginary rabbit. Everyman Theatre. Times and prices vary.

5/21: FESTIVAL OF DOGS
Watch as gifted local pups show off their talents and compete with other furry friends. Plus, catch a Yappy Hour with live music, food, and beverages. Proceeds benefit Johns Hopkins University Museums. Evergreen Museum & Library. 2-6:30 p.m. $10-50. 

5/21: BALTIMORE BIRTH FESTIVAL
In Patterson Park, find local support outlets to help with all things pregnancy, postpartum life, and parenthood. Plus enter a raffle for the chance to win some parenting and baby gear. Maryland Families for Safe Birth. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Free-$30. 

—Shutterstock

5/24: BROWN LECTURE SERIES: STACEY ABRAMS
The political force, lawyer, author, and activist speaks about her latest thriller, Rogue Justice, at Enoch Pratt. Enoch Pratt Free Library. 7 p.m. Price TBD.

5/25-28: DELFEST
The family-friendly, down-home music festival returns to Cumberland with acts including Kitchen Dwellers. DelFest. 10 a.m. $35-500. 

5/26: BLINK 182
The band behind hit “All The Small Things” stops in Baltimore as part of their anticipated world tour. CFG Bank Arena. 7:30 p.m. Prices vary. 

5/26-29: BALTICON 57
The four-day science fiction lovers’ bash brings authors, publishers, live streamers, cosplayers, and more to Baltimore. The Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel. $34-95. 2-4 p.m. 

5/27: BALTIMORE BUBBLE PARADE
In its seventh year, this Riverside Park Party features bubble-blowing, ice cream, funky DJ beats, fun photo-ops and costume competition fun. Riverside Park. 12:30 p.m. 

5/27: BREW AT THE ZOO
Endless libations, live tunes, food truck eats, and adorable critters mark The Maryland Zoo’s biggest annual fundraiser. The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. 1-7 p.m. $30-100. 

5/30: BEWARE THE WOMAN
Award-winning author Megan Abbot chats her latest spooky fiction work in Remington. Greedy Reads Remington. 7 p.m. 

TO 7/16: THE CULTURE
With upwards of 90 works of art, this chatter-generating BMA showcase commemorates the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. Baltimore Museum of Art. Times vary. Free-$15. 

TO 9/4: AFRO-FUTURIST MANIFESTO: BLACKNESS REIMAGINED
With works by Monica Ikegwu, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, Felandus Thames and others, this Reginald F. Lewis Museum showcase explores Blackness in relation to such concepts as technology and freedom. Reginald F. Lewis Museum. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $9-12. 

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]]> Book A Variety of Events with National Charter Bus https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/special/book-a-variety-of-events-with-national-charter-bus/ Fri, 28 Apr 2023 20:17:53 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=special&p=139879 Continued]]> Springtime brings bursting blooms, longer days, and the sun makes its long-awaited reappearance in the skies. Aside from the wealth of fresh air, the season also welcomes cheery events we all look forward to. Weddings, proms, and graduations are just around the bend. Whether celebrating starry-eyed nuptials or sending your daughter off in a dazzling dress for one last hurrah in high school, transporting party guests is always on the mind of planners.

National Charter Bus Baltimore caters to precisely those needs, adding to the ambiance with decked-out rides that allow for seamless, stress-free transportation to make those big moments even more enjoyable. A ride with National Charter Bus marks just the beginning of the night’s festivities. When renting a coach, expect affordable, private group transportation for any event or occasion.

Each ride can be tailored to the specifics of your event. Accommodate guests for corporate happenings, weddings, field trips, or travel needs like official government transportation and airport pick-ups and drop-offs. Each and every bus is designed for passenger comfort, packed with premium amenities like reclining seats, climate control, onboard restrooms, Wi-Fi, power outlets, ADA-compliant features, and more.

This spring, hundreds of Baltimore brides are scrambling to add those final touches that make tying the knot so magical. Take some of the stress off your big day by letting National Charter Bus care for the transport for all your special guests. National Charter Bus relieves out-of-town wedding guests of navigating unfamiliar areas and assures the bride and groom that everyone will arrive together and on-time. Plus, it assures that location changes for the reception or to hotels run smoothly. There’s enough to perfect when planning your wedding. You worry about walking down the aisle and let National Charter Bus take the reins on transportation.

Looking forward to gathering coworkers for a corporate event? All bases are covered when transporting your employees to and from holiday parties, client meetings, dinners, and more when booking a bus with National Charter Bus. That way, employees get the chance to relax on their way and can save their energy for the mingling and networking bound to take place at their destination.

You can also book a bus to visit the treasures of the city. Create a customized bus tour and visit local landmarks for a peek into state history and culture like the Inner Harbor, American Visionary Art Museum, Fort McHenry, and Lexington Market. It’s as easy as hopping on a National Charter Bus ride and getting whisked along for a day of exploration.

The best part is, you’re not limited to Baltimore. National Charter Bus travels up and down the East Coast. Take a day trip to Annapolis or New York City with your best pals. You can even spring for Boston or head all the way down to Florida. Wherever you’re heading, National Charter Bus will get you there without the usual stress of coordinating and navigating your way to your destination.

Follow your favorite sports team or transport a child’s team to an out-of-state tournament. Parents can relax knowing a professional driver is delivering the team in one piece. Plus, there’s plenty of room for anything from soccer goals to lacrosse pads with premium spacious storage on each bus.

Imagine a road trip without the hassle of driving. Sit back and relax with friends and family. Get some much-needed sleep before and after your vacation or event. Catch up on reading, watch your favorite TV shows, or listen to that podcast you’ve been meaning to tune into. The luxury of National Charter Bus allows for much-needed me time usually lost to the road.

Call National Charter Bus at 1-844-755-0510 to speak with an experienced representative (available with 24/7 assistance) to secure your booking now. Or visit https://www.nationalbuscharter.com/ for more information.

For Maryland bookings visit https://www.nationalbuscharter.com/maryland-charter-bus-rental or https://www.nationalbuscharter.com/baltimore-charter-bus for Baltimore-centered experiences.

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