WHAT YOU SEE: A lot of my furniture is from the ’50s and ’60s, or recreated in that style, and I collect random relics from that time period. I’m a nature girl, so lots of fresh flowers and plants spread around the house, mixed with botanical-themed fabrics and art.

HOUSE-TORY: It was built in 1929, and one of the previous owners was a bit of a carpenter and created the built-in shelves and island. A friend of a friend bought it in 2016, and she now lives on the West Coast, so I’ve been delighted to call this home for the past four years. I love sitting in the living room on a sunny afternoon. The west-facing windows let in beautiful light through the dining room and make the plant collection shine. And my couch is exactly the right size for my pit bull, Betty Mae, and me to curl up on and relax.

MAXIMILLION: I’m definitely not a minimalist. I like things neat and orderly, but with color and kitsch. I’ve collected things that reflect my interests over the years, like retro beauty magazines and pinups, weird taxidermies, posters from shows my friends have performed in, and local art from folks in Baltimore.

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS: My “Duckvine” taxidermy, a duckling modeled after Divine in Pink Flamingos. I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t even eat animals, but this was a gift and is one of my favorite things. My “Queen of Eggs” sash and tiara; I won the infamous Deviled Egg Pageant in 2022 and it’s basically the pinnacle of success to me. I’ve been riding that high ever since. My “Baltimore Burlesque” collection, including autographed Blaze Starr photos, and entry tickets to the Two O’Clock Club she once owned. And my collection of over 70 plants. They are a labor of time and love and money, but I’m extremely proud of them.

IN THE ART STUDIO: I’ve been making all different kinds of art my entire life, and right now I’m in a dried florals phase. This was originally born out of my inability to waste literally anything, even dead flowers. I like to pick up odd nature bits while walking the dog, too, like dried seed pods or anything that catches my interest. Having this room to rearrange and suit my artistic whims is such a blessing.

GREEN HOUSE: I’ve always been barefoot outside playing with nature; it’s how I was raised. Both my parents are gardeners, and that appreciation of plants never left me. The life and vibrancy they add, their various shapes, colors, really transform a room, making it feel more serene to me. And the act of caring for them is scientifically proven to benefit your brain.

Daria Souvorova does not like to be idle. Prior to the pandemic she would routinely host 25 people for monthly dinners at the home she shares with her husband, Nicolas Charon, their rabbit, Zaetz, and a shy chinchilla named Nimbus.

The meals were originally organized around cultural themes, with attendees sharing food from their respective backgrounds, though eventually it morphed into Souvorova researching new regions of the world and turning out perfectly executed three- to five-course meals. She called these gatherings Chez Nous—“at our place”—and even self-published a cookbook of the same name detailing menus and planning processes for cooking for a crowd. 

The meals were also a way to keep her agile mind and talented hands busy. So, when the pandemic lockdown began, she was at a loose end.

“I like filling my time and learning new things,” she explains. “I’ve never been good at just sitting.”

An art teacher in the Baltimore County Public Schools system, Souvorova, now 35, had three weeks with nothing to do as schools sorted out online classroom teaching methods.

A sourdough aficionado from well before the pandemic, she decided to use the downtime to fiddle with the hydration of her bread, keeping a beautiful journal of her efforts where she combined her artistic sketches with notes on her recipe tweaks. All this tinkering led to more bread than she and Charon could consume. She put the offer out on neighborhood website Nextdoor that her Charles Village neighbors were welcome to take her imperfect loaves off her porch.

“People would come and take the bread and then they started asking if I had more bread and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll have more bread tomorrow,’ then I thought it would be fun to make sourdough croissants since I had all this dough lying around, then people wanted more than I had planned to make so I started promising them things,” she says. “If you’re already making the time to make a batch of croissants anyway, it’s not that hard to make a bigger batch.”

She started finding tribute payments on her porch—butter, wine, plants—and nearby Carma’s Cafe gave her a large bag of King Arthur flour at a time when that was a difficult commodity to come by.

She gave her baking some structure, posting a menu of items she was making on Facebook and Instagram once a week that would be available for pickup on Saturdays. When lockdown relented enough that people could socialize in small groups outdoors, she dragged her couch onto her front porch to meet people picking up her baked goods on Saturday evenings.

“People from the neighborhood came and I got to meet them, pet their dogs—it replaced the socialization of the dinners.”

That socialization was vital not only for Souvorova, but for others in the community. Amber Simpson met Souvorova at a party before COVID-19, but, as an ICU nurse, she had to endure a difficult self-isolation during the worst of the pandemic.

“I was casually stalking her baked goods for a while,” she laughs. Simpson was one of the first people to be vaccinated, at which point she asked Souvorova if she could come, masked, to the Saturday pickup on her way home from work at Union Memorial Hospital. By then, Souvorova was making other little treats, like pizzas from the leftover dough, and Saturday evening pickup had become an informal, outdoor dinner gathering.

“It was the first time I’d socialized with anyone in close to a year,” says Simpson, struggling to put into words how profound it was to be able to see people, even briefly, after such a long quarantine. And she continues to go to this day, almost every Saturday. “It’s a really wonderful group, almost a family, that’s grown up around those Saturday nights.”

What began as a way to off-load extra baked goods is now a cottage food business, an official designation under the Code of Maryland Regulations that allows a home baker to sell certain items direct to consumers.

Souvorova posts a menu each week on social media (@cheznousdinners) and at her newly launched website, thebusybeaverbakery.com, and costumers place orders for pickup from her porch—still on Saturday evenings. People asked about baking workshops, so she’s begun hosting those for small groups, converting her dining room into a classroom to teach others how to make her trademark croissants. 

Somehow, she manages to fit it all in with her teaching schedule. Before she leaves for school on Fridays, she preps all her doughs in a small but functional kitchen in her Charles Village rowhouse. The kitchen was already installed when her husband purchased the home, but she quickly went after it with a hammer when she moved in. “It’s one of the only times we came close to a real fight,” she says.

But her demolition quelled any furor when the successful result was revealed. She installed reclaimed 19th-century barn-wood open shelving, balancing the heavy cantilevered beams on chairs while she affixed them to the wall. She swapped out the existing range for a Kucht model she already owned. Her impressive collection of copper pans hangs near the range, some found at Home Goods, others lugged home from trips to France. When the cottage business really took off, she invested in a small second electric oven by Moffat.

When she returns home from school on Friday afternoons, she starts hand-laminating the dough for her croissants, which takes much of the evening. She starts more dough before bed. On Saturdays she wakes at 6 a.m. and begins baking. It’s an intricate schedule to get all the various loaves and pastries baked at the right time and temperature.

Souvorova stages and photographs her bakes on her large dining room table. “It feels like a ritual because I decorate them and actively draw on the breads and then I arrange them on the table and take pictures of them before I bag them up,” she explains. “It’s like a performance piece, just only for me.”

The dining room table has pride of place in the circa-1910 home she’s shared with Charon for seven years. This is where meals have been shared, where pastries are bagged for pickup, and where people gather for workshops. It’s the heart of the home.

Shafts of light filter down onto its surface from stained glass windows, and the walls here and elsewhere are covered with paintings, a few of her own, but most the work of her George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology students.

A lover of all things beautiful and beautifully crafted, it’s no surprise that Souvorova has expertly displayed unique collectibles from Murano glass and fine china to tribal masks, fossils, and objets d’arte she and Charon pick up on travels or that she finds in flea markets.

“I spent one summer in Germany going to all the museums and I noticed that they had cabinets of curiosities everywhere, so I went to Ryan’s Relics and bought myself a fleet of cabinets and have been shoving little things in there, which makes me very happy,” she says. “They aren’t necessarily valuable things, but they are cool stuff that someone with incredible skill took time to make.”

Part of Souvorova’s love of good food comes from her European roots. Born in Belarus, she immigrated with her family to North Carolina when she was nine and eventually the family moved to Germantown, Maryland.

Coming to the States speaking no English and thrown by the middle-class norms of the U.S., having come from a Soviet country, Souvorova struggled to make friends. She thought making pastry would win people over. While she says that proved an ineffective way to connect, it did cement her passion for food and feeding people.

But much of what motivated her to bake was her inability to find the things she wanted to eat. Her husband, a Frenchman, shared that struggle. So, she made the things they wanted: European-style bread loaves, sourdough croissants that have a unique tang and texture, baguettes that are crisp outside and pillow-soft on the interior.

While her repertoire has expanded, those are still the cornerstones of her baking. She is emphatic about the quality of her ingredients. She orders stone-ground artisan grain flours from Janie’s Mill in Illinois and is particular about her blends. Popular items in regular rotation include her traditional sourdough loaf and the sourdough loaf made with lemon zest, herbes de Provence, and Kalamata olives, as well as double-baked almond and chocolate almond croissants. 

The canelés de Bordeaux, a house specialty, are her husband’s favorite and particularly tricky to make. Souvorova says it took her seven years to get them just right. Even finding the special copper molds they require was both time- and money-intensive, as she had to track them down online in France.

Each mold is coated with butter and beeswax before being filled with a milky batter that cooks into a cake with a delicate, almost custardy center. When they are on offer, they are incredibly popular, as is another special, Portuguese pasteis de nata, silky custard tarts in puff pastry. Souvorova is an accomplished forager and in spring it’s not uncommon for unique items like ramp buttermilk biscuits to appear.

Simpson explains that Souvorova is incredibly welcoming and interested in bringing people together.

“At the same time, she has very high standards,” she says. “She spends a lot of time perfecting her various crafts…most people would reach a level of mastery and be like, ‘Okay, I’m good.’ She’s constantly pushing the envelope.”

Souvorova didn’t set out to become a baker. She is trained in fine art and art history, did her graduate degree at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and a yearlong artistic residency. She worked in galleries in New York City and wanted to teach figurative painting.

“I started applying for jobs and wasn’t able to find any tenured positions in colleges or universities; those are disappearing in the arts,” she explains. Instead, she took a position at the Carver Center magnet school, teaching advanced art courses.    

Still, her artistic background infuses everything she does, from the exceptional scoring on her sourdough loaves to the exquisite sketchbooks she maintains, recording her own drawings alongside recipes, notes, and menu plans.

The inability to find—or afford—the things she likes is a motivator for Souvorova that goes beyond pastry. “That’s very much a part of my personality, that I want the thing and I can neither afford it nor find it, so I have to find a way to make,” she says with a laugh.

She loves, for example, designer clothes and handbags. Her mother sewed their clothing growing up and Souvorova often tailored her own clothes when she struggled to find the plus sizes she needed.

“When I graduated from high school I went to New York and was working in a gallery, and all the ‘gallery girls’ are beautiful and had nice clothes and nice clothes didn’t fit me,” she says. “I started out altering clothes, taking the extra fabric from the bottom of a dress and adding it to the back or I’d make clothes when I found good fabrics.”

Even after she lost weight for health reasons and moved to Baltimore from upstate New York, she still couldn’t find clothes that fit her shape, not to mention her exacting standards. “I went to the mall and nothing looked buyable,” she says.

When her husband gifted her a Hermès scarf, she really wanted a silk trench coat to match it. She finally found A Fabric Place, the family-owned designer fabric shop on Falls Road in northern Baltimore City, and has become an enthusiastic customer.

She devoted herself to studying classic French designers, sometimes using patterns, sometimes making her own designs, or combining bits of both. She has now sewn a complete wardrobe for herself and hangs her creations lovingly in a room she’s converted into her walk-in closet. Similarly, when she wanted but could not afford a fancy handbag, she taught herself leatherworking and hand-saddle-stitched her own designer-inspired bags.

“Daria is fabulously dressed, with a great eye to fashion,” says Kirsch Jones, a longtime friend and early attendee at the Chez Nous dinner club. “She’s deeply invested in the things she likes to do and extraordinarily talented in so many ways,” he continues, noting that she is extremely well-read and has a beautiful singing voice, no doubt something she owes to her mother, a pianist and opera and vocal coach.

He reports that her energy is inexhaustible, relating a story from before the pandemic when Souvorova and Charon helped in an effort to plant trees along the streets of their Charles Village neighborhood. “After hours of hard labor that was enough to exhaust any of us, her next words were, ‘What’s next?’

“Her creative output is constant,” he continues. “Some people are just born to an ongoing creativity and in her case, it’s shown in these beautifully executed but widely varied creations.”

A perfect showcase for her many talents was her summer 2022 wedding in France to Charon. Simpson, who was in the wedding, says that while most people who plan a destination wedding at a chateau would hire a planner to manage the details, Souvorova made the cake, hand-painted the wedding favors, and yes, even made her own wedding dress.

“She made the most complicated parts of her own wedding and did it impeccably well,” says Simpson.

Dedication to craft and an intense work ethic are traits Souvorova can relate to. But she doesn’t aspire to owning her own bakery. Carpal tunnel in both hands would make daily baking too physically demanding and her commitment to using the finest ingredients could make her baked goods, on a large scale, cost prohibitive. Plus, “I have so many interests—leather goods and sewing and painting and metalsmithing and jewelry-making,” she ticks off.

In other words, the world is big and there’s so much left to figure out.

The forest green, light blue, and dark red exterior of Sandy Sparks’ rowhome isn’t the flashiest on her block, but the calming palette undeniably catches the eye. In fact, nine years ago, a panel of judges agreed, awarding the Charles Village resident a $1,500 prize for “best showpiece” in the neighborhood’s now-25-year-old Painted Ladies contest.

“You really have to keep after the painting,” says Sparks of her Guilford Avenue home. “It’s important to feel good about where you live. It makes life more satisfying.”

For two decades, this house-painting contest helped reinvent the residential aesthetic of Greater Charles Village and the surrounding Abell, Old Goucher, and Harwood communities. Today, the Painted Ladies—a moniker lifted from famous blocks in San Francisco—have become iconic for North Baltimore. They’re also ubiquitous, with their image posted everywhere from local airport and subway station ads to tourism brochures, real estate mailers, and government reports.

In their St. Paul Street rowhouse, painted in primary colors since 1995, Steven and Linda Brown Rivelis, pictured above, recount how the original contest came to be. One night in 1997, the Rivelises and neighbors Dawna Cobb and Lisa Simeone were mulling how to get other residents to add new hues to their homes. (Simeone was the group’s trailblazer, having painted her 31st Street home in muted pink, blue, and white in 1988.)

“It was a time when crime was on the rise, people said they were having trouble selling their houses, and we wanted a way to excite people about living in Charles Village,” recalls Cobb, who lived on 30th Street until 2016.

During the 1990s, these rowhome blocks were a contiguous shade of muddy brown—rumor has it Bethlehem Steel employees took home the plant’s brown primer as free housepaint.

“It led to a conversation of, ‘These are old Victorian homes, so why don’t we paint them in bright Victorian colors?’” says Linda. “That’s one [way to interest people], but if you incentivize it, that does more.”

That incentive would be cash. The group cold-pitched the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based national youth charity, and convinced them to contribute a whopping $20,000. Cobb and Simeone also canvased the neighborhood, leaving photo books about San Francisco’s Painted Ladies on doorsteps to drum up interest.

It was an immediate hit. Launched in 1998, inaugural awards included the most vibrant porchfront, the most colorful flush-front facade, and the best front door, with winners receiving posters and plaques to put in their windows. By the end of 1999, some 40 houses had been painted, and by 2001, there were nearly 60, with other categories added over time, like best house trim, railings, and facelift.

A variety of donors have helped carry on the tradition, with funding hailing from the Charles Village Community Foundation and the local Goldseker Foundation. The last competition was a decade ago, and there are no current plans for another resurrection—after a quarter-century, Charles Villagers don’t need a financial incentive to adorn their houses in bright colors; it’s simply part of the neighborhood culture.

Still, the contest will get a revival of sorts this summer, with the Painted Ladies serving as the theme for the annual Charles Village Festival. The June 3-4 event will include a history booth to showcase the houses, as well as a guided walking tour.

Simeone, who’s since repainted her home a spirited medley of lavender, coral, and buttery cream with a reddish pink door, says the tradition has shown what beautification can accomplish at the neighborhood level.

“Beauty is incredibly important in people’s lives,” she says. “It’s not going to replace a decent wage or a roof over your head; it’s not going to get rid of crime. But I cannot stress enough that beauty is an essential element for humans, for communities to thrive.”

If you’ve never been to a ramen shop, the new Kajiken would be an excellent place to start. And if your idea of fun is a big bowl of noodles drenched in porky goodness, you have someplace to be.

A long counter bar fronts the stoves, helmed by cooks tending vats of boiling water. Low weather systems move above the pots, into which the noodles are dropped and lifted with impressive dexterity. The entire crew will call out as you enter and exit—cries of “Irasshaimase” (welcome) and “Arigato gozaimasu” (thank you very much) like cheerful incantations.

And then there are the bowls of noodles, in this case an iteration of ramen called abura soba or mazesoba, which is not soba at all but the thicker version of ramen noodles, served with a variety of accompaniments and without broth.

Kajiken is the first U.S. location of a popular Japanese abura soba chain that began in Nagoya and which now numbers some 100 locations worldwide. Ramen and its variations have been essential for a long time in Japan; tsukemen, or dip ramen, became popular about 10 years ago in American cities, and abura soba has also made the jump, especially to college towns.

This was the draw for Charles Village, with its Johns Hopkins students, many of whom on a recent day seemed to be busy eating noodles. Kajiken specializes in various toppings for those noodles, so you can experiment with things like mentaiko (fish roe), umeboshi (Japanese plum), and menma (bamboo shoots), or add what you especially like (tomatoes, cheddar, soft-boiled eggs) to make an idiosyncratic mash-up. This can be a lot, especially as the restaurant doesn’t allow substitutions, and the abura soba versions—a basic, with chashu (discs of roast pork), menma, scallions, and nori; curry; carbonara; beef and onions; a cold version; and a vegan iteration—already come with plenty of ingredients.

You will be instructed to stir everything up with your chopsticks, as the absence of soup means that the tare, which is the concentrated sauce, has been installed at the bottom of your bowl. Be sure to dose your bowl with rice vinegar and chile oil, which give some extra flavor and, more importantly, a hit of acid to counter all the pork, pasta, and oil.

There are other items on the menu, notably more traditional tonkotsu ramen, made Hakata-style, as well as donburi rice bowls, and an impressive list of appetizers. Kajiken has very good versions of gyoza, or pork dumplings; and karaage, or fried chicken. And best of all, there is takoyaki, fried balls of dough embedded with octopus and topped with shaved bonito, curls of dried fish that wave in the heat and make the dish look disconcertingly like a terrarium. (Don’t be deterred—it’s delicious.)

There’s no booze or hot tea, but there is salted plum soda, a sour-salty-sweet drink that’s worth trying. There is also a surprisingly robust dessert menu, including ice cream, yuzu cheesecake, and wondrous slices of deep green matcha crepe cake. Your best bet is an order of taiyaki, a fried cake stuffed with adzuki bean paste and built in the shape of a fish. It’s a common street food in Japan and the perfect conclusion to all those noodles.

KAJIKEN, 7 E. 33rd St., 443-835-4617. HOURS: Daily, 12-3 p.m., 5-9:30 p.m. PRICES: Small plates: $6-8.50; abura soba and ramen: $11-15.

Carmen Brock and her house felt like strangers in the summer of 2020. Brock, the beloved owner of home goods shop Trohv, had spend the past 14 years living and breathing her store on the Avenue, which often meant ignoring her Victorian-style rowhome on Guilford Avenue, in the heart of Charles Village. It was merely a place to rest her weary head.

When, due to the weight of the pandemic, Trohv closed for good in August 2020, suddenly Brock, who was a Baltimore City middle school teacher before opening Trohv, found herself only being at home. And a reintroduction began.

“It really was a refuge—with the shop and even when I was teaching, I just wasn’t here that much,” she says.

But when Brock found herself unmoored, it was her home that she craved.

“I’m truly head over heels for the comfort that your own space can bring you,” she says. “It’s not just comfort, it’s also a place where I was experiencing loneliness and heartbreak. A safe, tender place where I could mourn Trohv. It felt like it held me.”

When Brock and her ex-husband bought the house in 2002, the housing market was “bananas,” she says. It was the fourth house they put a bid on. “I was so happy that I got it. The community here really takes notice and care of each other.”

The house, built in 1914, had good bones. “I was so drawn to the skeleton of this place, and I love sharing walls,” says Brock, who grew up on a cattle and tobacco farm in Kentucky. “I know that can be annoying when it comes to gatherings or parties, but I actually really love it. I had never been exposed to rowhomes before.”

The home was in incredible shape when she first moved in, and the original wood floors are still a gorgeous honey color with an impressive inlay border throughout her family and dining room. Tucked in the middle of the block, the 2,000-square-foot home also gets bathed in natural light thanks to three skylights scattered throughout.

While Brock’s house is not a Trohv showroom, “there is definitely a relationship there.” She describes it “almost like a sibling relationship in a way. If I was picking or buying or searching or rummaging for the shop and I found something that felt really special and I just absolutely fell in love with it, I would keep it.”

One of the best things about Brock’s home is its deliberateness. Every piece has a personal connection to Brock, and her design philosophy seems to be “worth the wait.” She got her very first coffee table 10 years after she moved into her house. She buys things piece by piece over months, years, even decades, as opposed to trying to outfit a room all at once, which she knows is not the norm.

“It’s not necessarily the approach people want to take,” she admits. “But that’s how I’ve put my house together. I just didn’t have a coffee table until I found the one that I wanted.”

Brock and her coffee table met at the Brimfield Antique Flea Market in Massachusetts, an annual show that spills out over acres of land. The table, one of 15, looked like a gallon drum and a barrel had a baby. In fact, it wasn’t a table at all. It had giant arms on it and had been used for preserving cans in a big factory. Brock went ahead and bought all 15, then loaded them onto a huge truck, drove them back to Baltimore, rolled them into Trohv, removed the arms—“I took a welding class in high school”—and sold 14 of them. The fifteenth went into her house. It now sits in her front room, nestled between her couches. It’s so heavy she often jokes it conveys with the house. “I don’t expect to move it—but it’s fine.”

Brock’s house was also completely rugless until a trip to Morocco in 2019, where she bought six rugs. “Half went to the shop and the other half stayed here.”

All of Brock’s stories are like this—an adventurous tale that ends with a special purchase, all told in her soothing drawl.

“My friend and I were staying at this ashram thing and there was a rug in our room, and I just asked the guy if he’d be willing to let me pay for it. And was he was like, ‘Yes, it’s disgusting. It’s been here for like 20 years.’” In the end she shoved three rugs into a suitcase and took the other three in her carry-on. “Isn’t it ridiculous,” she chuckles. But the thing about Brock is you don’t feel like it is. It feels like it’s always worth it for the right piece.

There’s the coat rack in the front entrance of her home with “New York School of Art & Design” messily written on a piece of green tape that’s still stuck on the side. “It’s definitely one of my favorite things,” she says. “I think that if it could talk, just the minds and ideas that have brushed past this, even by osmosis, I want to learn from that.”

Brock loves the idea of owning things that have existed in a previous life. “It’s had a life longer than me.”

As she stands in her bedroom, Brock points out that the positioning of her home—the top of a hill facing west—means this room gets pretty good sunsets. “It took me several years to notice it,” she says.

“It took me several years to notice a lot of things in this house.” The summer that Trohv was closing, “I must have watched 60—no kidding—sunsets that summer. I don’t know if it was the wonder of it, the silence of it. It was part of getting me through.”

Brock, who is working at the soon-to-open Church Bar in Old Goucher and just started offering “home consultations by Trohv,” is getting steady on her feet again.

“I feel like I’m in a better place,” she says. “I don’t know if I’m in a good place, but better—which I’ll take.”

Her house has helped get her to that better place. She says everyone assumed that, as the owner of a home goods store, she enjoyed her own house, “but I enjoy it now more than I ever have. And that is a surprise to me.”

One of the things that brings Brock the most joy is the artwork scattered throughout the house—on the walls, the stairwell, hidden in the bathrooms. All are deeply meaningful and connect her to a specific moment in time. There’s a piece by Katie Pumphrey, called “Fever Dream,” that hangs in Brock’s office. She bought it in 2017 when her dad died, and she was feeling adrift. There was something about the piece that “fit” her grieving.

“I love it and I love thinking about my dad. It doesn’t bring me sadness at this point, it brings me such joy to think about him.”

A charcoal and graphite piece by Lee Nowell Wilson, showing a woman trying to fold herself into a cardboard box, heaving at the sides, represents the loss of Trohv. And the giant 4-by-5-foot painting that hangs in her dining room instantly took Brock back to her childhood of chasing bumblebees around the farm. It was done by Jordan Kasey, a MICA grad who now lives in New York.

“This is from 2007—she graduated in 2008. This is one of my favorites.” The piece—the thing she would grab if her house caught fire—is of a young girl doing a handstand. Her cheeks pink, her mouth slightly agape. “It feels soft and approachable and tender and playful,” she says.

But Brock loves asking her guests their interpretation of each piece of art, too. “I dated this guy once and he came in and was like, ‘Carmen, your house is like a museum.’ And I think he meant it as a compliment, but I also feared there was maybe this non-cozy quality to that. And I hung my hat on that probably a little too long. I do think he meant it in a nice way. But I want people to come in and throw their shit around—I do.”

It’s taken 20 years, but for now Brock’s house finally feels like home—her home. Each time she departs, she steps onto the porch, doorknob in hand, and stops for a second.

“When I leave the house—this is literally what I say—‘Thank you. I love you. Please be safe when I’m gone. And thank you for your hospitality and love.’”

James Beard Award-winner Toni Tipton-Martin never set out to amass more than 1,450 cookbooks, 450 of which were written by African Americans. It just happened.

“I never intended to be a collector,” she says. “But the African-American cookbook collecting began dominating my life when I started to hear stories that validated what I knew in my heart and soul but couldn’t prove: that African-American cooks had been knowledgeable and skilled. Those were stories that were not being reported.”

She found a veritable treasure trove of such books and recipes through her research and just kept going. She now stores many of those cookbooks in her recently purchased Charles Village home, a 120-year-old fixer-upper that she shares with her husband, Bruce Martin, a Naval Academy grad.

Her road to Baltimore—and her life as a writer, archivist, historian, and broadcaster—was hardly a straightforward one. She started out as a food writer in Los Angeles; accepted a job in Cleveland, becoming the first Black food editor of an American newspaper; took a two-decade hiatus to raise her four children; and spent 10 years researching a groundbreaking project.

And that doesn’t include the most recent highlight on her C.V., as a recipient of the annual Julia Child Award that came with a $50,000 grant she’s using to expand her current nonprofit to help aspiring food writers. Oh, and she’s also editor-in-chief of the folksy Cook’s Country magazine and hosts segments for its public television show as part of the America’s Test Kitchen franchise in her renovated parlor, or library as she calls it.

It’s safe to say that Tipton-Martin, 63, has managed to stretch a 24-hour day in awe-inspiring ways. “There’s an old saying that you can sleep when your time is up,” she shares during a Zoom call from her home office. “I’m really excited by the work.”

On this particular day, she was especially thrilled to find out Target was promoting her 2019 award-winning book, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, for Black History Month. “I’m so proud my two-year-old book is worthy of inclusion,” she says.

Tipton-Martin also wrote The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (2015), a revolutionary, James Beard Award-winning compendium that took a decade to research and write. But her interest in cookbooks started much earlier, when she was a food and nutrition writer for the Los Angeles Times in the ’80s and early ’90s, and continues to this day. The oldest book in her collection, The House Servant’s Directory, dates back to 1827.

As Tipton-Martin’s African-American collection grew, she realized the books could be organized into chronological sections and social themes—from the early 19th century through 2011—which led to The Jemima Code. She included original recipes, menus, and household tips along with her critiques of the various books, but The Jemima Code is more a reference book than a cooking guide.

Her goal, as she set out to prove there was know-how behind the jolly Aunt Jemima caricature, was to show that the African-American authors understood the constructs of cooking and home management and weren’t just relying on natural instinct.

When she finished writing The Jemima Code, Tipton-Martin wanted to continue honoring the little-known authors and began translating their recipes for today’s kitchens in her book Jubilee. To decide which recipes to include, she cooked several versions of a dish, settling on one that would work for a modern cook. Sometimes, she would adapt or create a new recipe, based on the original. The result was a collection of comfort-food recipes, including main dishes like barbecued pork shoulder, buttermilk fried chicken, and shrimp Creole.

Tipton-Martin doesn’t know the exact number of cookbooks she has. A dozen boxes of books are still unpacked in her basement. But she keeps the modern-day cookbooks on shelves in the library and in her office. The rare editions are stored in a climate-controlled facility. As she talks about her books and accomplishments, it’s evening now, and she’s winding down from her busy schedule, settling into a desk chair, wearing a blue-gray, crewneck pullover and thick-rimmed glasses, her silver-streaked mane pulled into a long ponytail. She has a calm, thoughtful demeanor.

“I can’t imagine how she’s juggling all of it,” says Nathalie Dupree, a Southern doyenne, chef, and award-winning cookbook author based in Raleigh, North Carolina. “She has so many people reporting to her now.”

Dupree, who was a speaker during Tipton-Martin’s virtual Julia Child Award presentation in November in Washington, D.C., praises the journalist for her contributions. “She really was the forerunner of so much of the writing about African Americans and about doing research on their contribution to the food world,” says Dupree during a phone conversation. “And I can’t say it enough, she was the only Black woman in the industry of food editors for a long time.”

Tipton-Martin considers Dupree a mentor. She credits her with helping her understand the synergy between Black and white women in American kitchens. “The story isn’t as one-sided or as mean-spirited as it is often portrayed,” she says.

She also subscribes to Dupree’s pork-chop theory, which uses a cooking method as an analogy for people, mostly women, supporting each other. Dupree and food scientist Shirley O. Corriher developed the premise when both were carving out careers in Atlanta in the mid-1970s. Dupree explains, “If you have one pork chop in the pan, it goes dry. If you have two pork chops in the pan, the fat from one feeds the other. If you face the fact there is going to be room in the pan, you make room in the pan. All the women I have mentored understand this.”

 

“…SHE WAS THE ONLY BLACK WOMAN IN THE INDUSTRY OF FOOD EDITORS FOR A LONG TIME.”

 

Tipton-Martin and Dupree met at the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization focused on the food cultures of the South, while Tipton-Martin was the group’s acting president and Dupree was on the board. “I’m one of her mothers,” Dupree says with a laugh. “She wasn’t from the South, and we would talk about the South a lot.”

Tipton-Martin’s work at the Alliance helped her to re-enter corporate America after taking off 22 years to care for her family, though she kept a hand in the business as a freelance writer and editor, mostly to pay for the books she was seeking. The first obscure tome she acquired was Eliza’s Cook Book (1936), which she purchased in an online bidding war for $400.

Her children are grown now—Brandon, 40; Jade, 39; Christian, 29; and Austin, 25. They are scattered around the country, but she works closely with Brandon, a graphic designer, who is partnering with her on her next venture, an African-American cocktail book.

There’s no pub date yet for the book or for a memoir she’s penning. “I write a couple of sentences of each one every day,” she says. Tipton-Martin says she’s gotten bogged down with contractor issues at her five-bedroom, 2 1⁄2-bath rowhome, which is one of the colorful 19th-century “painted ladies” in North Baltimore.

The house had been abandoned when she and her husband bought it at auction, but they were seduced by its original character and details like pocket doors, transom windows, a back staircase, servants bells, and retrofitted gas lights. “We’re historic preservationists,” she says. “We salvaged everything we could.” She’s also become a regular shopper at Second Chance, the South Baltimore salvage warehouse. “If I need something, it’s the first place I go,” she says.

While the couple bought the house in 2018, Tipton-Martin didn’t move in permanently until last year due to contractor issues. Her husband’s job in sales brought them to the area. “We could have lived anywhere in the region,” she says. “We settled in Baltimore by choice.”

One of the favorite parts of her neighborhood is the 32nd Street Farmers Market in Waverly. “It’s carnival-like, people having such a good time together, gathering, and reuniting,” she says. “It’s more than a place you go shopping for food. It’s a marvelous example of the potential of the city. I really like that.”

Her wanderings have also taken her to Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area in Baltimore County, where she and her husband like to hike; La Cuchara restaurant in Woodberry; Whitehall Market in Hampden; and, to satisfy her “taco-junkie” cravings, Tortilleria Sinaloa in Fells Point.

Along the way, Tipton-Martin and her husband became fans of David and Tonya Thomas, first at Ida B’s Table, the soul-food restaurant they operated in Baltimore, and now at their event space and catering business, H3irloom Food Group. When the Thomases invited Tipton-Martin to a Valentine’s Day dinner, she didn’t hesitate, even though she was working on deadline.

“I turned off the computer, grabbed my boo, and went,” Tipton-Martin wrote on Facebook. “Great ambiance, delicious food, and special friends.”

The Thomases, who also are exploring African-American foodways, cherish the friendship. “Toni Tipton-Martin is one of the greatest food writers and archivists of our time,” says David Thomas. “She is considered one of the pioneers in the food world,” adds Tonya Thomas.

The couple look forward to what Tipton-Martin will contribute to the city’s food scene. “Toni will bring credibility and legacy to Baltimore,” David Thomas predicts. “It’s really having this firebrand, this legend, who descends on Baltimore and understands the work that needs to be done.”

As a teenager, Tipton-Martin, who grew up in Southern California, briefly thought about living abroad to take advantage of her fluent French, but instead decided to major in journalism at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1981. She worked part-time at a community paper, The Wave Newspapers, where she was assigned to the recipe section.

“I started watching more food television, which is how I became enchanted with Julia [Child],” she says. “Julia was talking about doing stories on food that were close to her heart.”

Tipton-Martin began to see how personal food could be, how wrapped up it was in identity and culture. She landed at the Los Angeles Times in 1983 as a nutrition writer. But it wasn’t until Ruth Reichl became food editor in 1990 that she was able to stretch her skills as a writer.

“I saw some of her copy, and I went to her and said, ‘Do you really want to be writing about nutrition? You’re too good,’” says Reichl, a former restaurant critic for The New York Times and editor of Gourmet magazine, who now writes a newsletter, La Briffe, for the online platform Substack. “We finally had some diversity [at the Los Angeles Times]. It was such an opportunity to be able to be covering food, not from a middle-class, white perspective, but from a much larger perspective.”

Tipton-Martin remembers the nudge well. “When Ruth came on, she was so generous of spirit and encouragement, and essentially asked me what I wanted to do with my work,” she says. “I said I didn’t know. She said, ‘Go out to the streets of L.A. and don’t come back until you know.’”

After three days, Tipton-Martin came back with story ideas, specifically ones that did not contain recipes, a watershed moment for the Los Angeles Times. Reichl wasn’t surprised. “I had this great resource in this really bright, really good writer who was very ambitious to do other things,” she says. “And for an editor, what more can you ask?”

 

“TIPTON-MARTIN BEGAN TO SEE HOW PERSONAL FOOD COULD BE, HOW WRAPPED UP IT WAS IN CULTURE.”

 

Opportunity soon came knocking for Tipton-Martin in the form of a food editor position at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. “I was very proud of her,” Reichl says. “I thought it was sad for us. But I always wanted my people to go on and do bigger things.”

After five years at The Plain Dealer, Tipton-Martin left the industry until her youngest child graduated from high school. When she returned to the workforce, she knew her calling was in a different type of food journalism, though she’s thankful for her experience. “If it hadn’t been for my journalism skills, The Jemima Code wouldn’t exist, and those stories wouldn’t have been told,” she says. “It was very much like putting together an investigative piece.”

She realized that the information she sought about African-American cooks could be found in cookbooks, where she could glean their cooking techniques and also gain insight into their lives. “At the Southern Foodways Alliance, I encountered more and more scholars who were exploring that work,” she says. “It piqued my interest and caused me to start looking for sources of my own.”

Tipton-Martin turned to scholarly works like Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (2002) by Janet Theophano and Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (1999) by Doris Witt, and took a seminar at Radcliffe College about the methodology of interpreting a cookbook author’s words and meanings. By the time The Jemima Code went to the publisher, she had compiled 160 essays about Black cookbooks.

Perhaps there has been no bigger impact on her career path than the death of her father, Charles Hamilton, who was 56 at the time, in 1995. He died from injuries sustained in a car accident. “My dad was, I use the word murdered because I mean that, killed in Los Angeles in a hospital by an unsupervised intern,” she says. “His life was disregarded by the hospital. It became important to me to find a way to speak on behalf of the voiceless.”

She formed a nonprofit, the SANDE Youth Project, to fulfill her vision of improving community health. “Pain and grief gave me purpose,” she says. “A good reporter, someone delivering good news, can bring healing to a community.”

Southern writer Dupree has watched her mentee become a mentor over the 20 years she has known her. “I don’t think a lot of the young women who have moved into prominence would be there if Toni hadn’t been paving the way,” she says. “She made it look easy.”

Jamila Robinson, who became food editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2020, credits Tipton-Martin with having an impact on a career that has led her to become a Black leader in a newsroom. She also sees Tipton-Martin’s trailblazing path as encouraging for the future.

“I find that to be inspiring because we can find opportunities to make sure that other Black journalists see food as a pathway in journalism,” say Robinson, who is also the committee chair of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards. “Toni Tipton-Martin created a pathway for others to stand on. I stand on her shoulders.”

One month after “Black Lives Matter” was painted along Linwood Avenue in Patterson Park, a new ground mural—and message—is being added to the ongoing conversation about Black lives in Baltimore.

On Friday, July 17, dozens of volunteers joined organizers with Baltimore Safe Haven, a nonprofit dedicated to providing a higher quality of life for transgender people, to transform the intersection of North Charles Street between 21st and 23rd streets with colorful street art that reads: “Black Trans Lives Matter.”

“Our message is clear: We can’t breathe,” says Iya Dammons, founder and executive director of Baltimore Safe Haven. “Over the past ten years, there’s been at least one transgender woman killed on the streets of Baltimore every year. We have not been breathing, and [the mural] symbolizes that we are in a state of emergency and we need help.”

Designed by artist Jamie Grace Alexander, the mural comes on the heels of last month’s Black Trans Lives Matter march and rally—the city’s first large-scale protest for the Black, trans community which brought about 200 supporters downtown. (A photo from the momentous demonstration, taken by Baltimore’s own Devin Allen, made it onto the cover of Time magazine last month.) Both events represent local efforts to incorporate Black trans lives into the Black Lives Matter movement.

“We’re not erasing the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re including ourselves in it,” Dammons says. “We come peacefully. We want people to take from the mural that all Black trans women, and trans women period, are in solidarity with the movement.”

Before paint hit the pavement on Friday afternoon, local LGBTQ activists, city officials, and Baltimore Safe Haven representatives spoke to the crowd about the increased need for visibility and resources within the trans community.

When Jabari Lyles, director of LGBTQ affairs for the mayor’s office, addressed the group, he said that progress for Baltimore’s Black trans community doesn’t end with painting streets.

“We know that, although this mural is a really great visible symbol for the intention to do more [for the Black trans community], this is still not enough,” Lyles said. “We have to continue to hold this government accountable—we’re talking about housing, jobs, services, and education.”

Dammons and her team hope that the mural serves as a constant reminder of the movement to protect and provide for one of the city’s most vulnerable populations.

“[The mural] symbolizes that my life matters,” says Josiah Camore, facilities manager of Baltimore Safe Haven. “I’m looking forward to seeing everybody come together to support us and this movement.”

After the colorful addition to the Charles Village streetscape is finished and the volunteers have all gone home, Dammons will continue on with her life’s work of providing members of the city’s LGBTQ community, especially those in survival mode, with everything from safer sex kits to hand sanitizer and face masks. Dammons says it’s the same reason she stands at the forefront of the Black Trans Lives Matter movement—to give Black, trans people the support they need.

“Oftentimes, people say, ‘Black lives matter,’ but they don’t always include the lives and voices of Black trans people,” Dammons says. “We’re taking back our authority.”

There is a bit of a grand irony to the streetscape project that has been going on in Charles Village and the area surrounding—and facilitated by—the Johns Hopkins University campus for much of this year. The construction, when finished, is meant to draw more people to the area, provide more parking, streamline car traffic, and improve visibility and walkability for patrons.

But if you talk to local business owners, there might not be much for these patrons to see by the time the initiative is finished in December.

“If all the small businesses go out of business, box chains are going to go in, rent will go up, and there will be no local flavor and nothing interesting in Charles Village,” says Sara Autrey, whose shop Get Shredded Vintage on St. Paul Street was one of the many businesses affected by fencing, loud jackhammers, and concrete dust flying at all hours of the day. “You can invest as much money as you want into a streetscape, but if the businesses that are the attraction to come don’t survive, it’s a big waste of money.”

It’s a sentiment that Autrey says is shared among her neighbors on all sides—for a large part of the summer, there was fencing in much of the area surrounding St. Paul and 33rd Streets. This was both an inhibitor for normal customers, as well as a deterrent for foot traffic.

In a neighborhood that also saw a number of restaurant closures—including Ledo Pizza, Pizza Studio, longtime sushi spot Niwana Restaurant, and Fells Point spinoff Red Star Charles Village—within the past year, the impact of construction has loomed large.

“We’re all despondent,” Autrey says. “It’s very hard to hold onto business when nobody’s coming and you’re having to work three times as hard.”

Another business that felt the impact was Carma’s Cafe, located just down the street from Get Shredded, which typically triples its seating with outdoor tables during the summer. A gourmet hot dog cafe extension called Carma’s Doghouse closed midway through the summer when owner Carma Halterman said it stopped making sense to sell to a nearly empty streetscape.

“Cement dust wafting across your gazpacho is not appetizing,” Halterman says. “It was so loud that customers couldn’t have conversations. They physically worked on my corner for a long time.”

Though this construction was not a secret (plans and meetings were held and made public beforehand), some of the work went on longer than planned this summer, adding additional strain.

While the worst is behind them, Autrey and Halterman fear the damage might already be done. “I’m looking at the culture of Charles Village and what will be left when construction is done,” Halterman says. “I’m not sure I’m gonna be left when it’s done.”

Halterman does see some silver linings in the construction plans. Namely, she’s pleased that there will be more street lighting at night around Charles Village that will encourage people to stay in the area longer.

For his part, Eddie’s Market of Charles Village owner Jerry Gordon feels that these types of growing pains are just something to adapt to. He acknowledges that his business was hit hard, as well, but sees the project as a net positive for the community at large.

“It’s going to be a very attractive area,” Gordon says. “I’m looking forward to the future where people are going to say, ‘Let’s go down to Charles Village and hang out.’”

If you’re walking down St. Paul Street in Charles Village, you might be distracted by the mannequins decked out in bright, bold outfits arranged artfully on the sidewalk. Just down the steps behind them is a quaint vintage shop known as Get Shredded Vintage. Quirky and daring, these vintage pieces are ones you’ll want to snag. We sat down with owner Sara Autrey to get the scoop on this hidden gem.

What is the meaning behind the name Get Shredded?

“Get Shredded,” before it was a store, was an interview series that I started where I would book a show and interview the artist before they played kind of, like, Stephen Colbert-style—if I may compare myself to the great Colbert. Basically, I wanted to get audiences more connected with artists that they either love or don’t know, and strengthen the connections in the Baltimore art scene. I chose the name because, when you’re at a show the artist is shredding, and the audience is getting shredded, I really liked my interpretation of what that meant. It sounded rock and roll.

How did you get started collecting vintage?

I did a pop up at the Current Space Art Market where I sold clothes, and I sold almost everything. And people kept asking me, “Do you have a location because we love all of this stuff,” and I didn’t. So, it planted this idea, you know, if people are interested in this, I’ll keep an eye out. I thought it was cool to carry it over to the vintage shop when I actually got the space because I have a lot of local artists and makers stocked in the shop and, like the interview series, it’s connecting people to Baltimore artists and creating those stronger connections.

How do you decide what pieces to add to the store?
It’s, basically, artists’ work that I love, and then things that inspire me: I like texture, I like color, I love interesting shapes, bold pieces, and classic cuts. Anything that kind of pushes the envelope will usually be what I’m gonna snatch.

Why shop vintage?
It’s really fun to look and find pieces that are totally amazing that people don’t want anymore and kind of bringing new life into them. And vintage is awesome because it’s not mass-produced, so chances of wearing the same thing as somebody to the same party is greatly diminished. And vintage is made better because a lot of it was made in the USA with worker unions—there was a level of quality going into it that is really hard to find today in fast fashion.

What’s your most favorite find currently in your store?
I have a lot of men’s clothes that I’m currently obsessed with, but I have to say—this pretty blouse. I found it on an online estate auction.

Are there any tips you would give to someone who is just starting to explore the vintage shopping scene?

Go through everything! When I’m shopping through other people’s stuff, I do a once-over and go to the things that super pop off the rack at me, and then I do the deep, deep rounds. Because if you scan through and don’t pull things out and look at them, it’s overwhelming because all you see are all these colors and textures. You’ve got to see the shapes and try them on. Vintage lies—some things look tiny and fit, and some things look giant and are too small.

How would you describe Baltimore’s style?

Baltimore’s style isn’t definable because there are so many different chunks that it’s hard to say. But I would say it’s really adventurous. One day I can dress like a skater boy, and the next day I’m like decked out about to play a show, and it’s all fine —which I really appreciate.

Get Shredded Vintage is celebrating its one-year anniversary this Saturday, May 4, with a pop-up party of local makers.

It’s Malacka in Charles Village is a one-stop-shop for fun, flirty, and bold fashion pieces that are sure to make a statement. Malacka Reed started her career as a makeup artist and has become motivational speaker, author, and style icon. We caught up with the Baltimore native in an exclusive interview to peak into her life as a boutique owner and a source of inspiration for her 200,000+ Instagram followers. Learn about her sense of style, her favorite trends, and how she inspires in-store and online customers.

How would you describe the style of your store?
My store is a boutique so it’s not what I would call one-of-a-kind pieces, but very different pieces. I like to cater to women of all sizes and all ethnicities. Even women of the Muslim faith shop with us for our oversized dress collection, which is super dope. We’re a boutique that’s really into fun, effortless fashion.

What are your favorite fashion and makeup trends currently?
I love the oversized collection we carry and that women are feeling comfortable wearing oversized dresses, sundresses, and don’t always need to have on something that’s body-con to feel sexy. I also love that people are being a bit more free with their style of dress now. People are really dressing for themselves and not just following a trend.

We’re kind of moving away from wearing eyeshadow. We’re into the fresh dewy or matte face. I love that the eyebrows are coming down again, we’re moving back into the natural brow.

What was your inspiration for opening up your own store?
I really needed to do it! I started as a makeup artist, then I came out with my own cosmetic line and I moved into the fashion industry. In the middle of all of that, I became an author and a motivational speaker. So it was important that I opened up my own space to be with my customers and make sure I inspire and uplift them from the inside out.

What do you love about having a store in Baltimore?
Baltimore has truly made me who am. I feel like if you can make it in Baltimore, you can make it anywhere. I love that we’re raising the frequency here in our city, more positive women are opening businesses, and we’re also giving back to our community.

What kinds of trends or styles can we find in your store?
A little bit of everything. You’re gonna find bodysuits, rompers, sequins, feathers, pearls, ballroom skirts, high-waist pants, or even low-rise.

How has social media played a role in expanding your business?
I love my followers to the moon and back. Social media plays a big role because you get to put your clothes on and show how people can look in them! If it wasn’t for social media, I could honestly say that my business would not be what it is.

Tell me about the makeup section of your store.
Skai Ryan cosmetics is the name of my makeup line and has been around for about 10 years now. Right now, we are re-launching our makeup because we kind of moved away from it when we opened the store. It was important to raise the fashion baby and let people take us seriously there.

How do you like to start your day before coming to the studio?
Well, I have a 10-year-old daughter, so I make sure she’s ready then I go into a meditation. The most important thing is prayer and meditation. When I pray, I’m talking to God and when I meditate, I’m listening to God.

What is your go-to outfit and makeup look for everyday wear?
Leggings! For me, when I get to work, I have to put on the clothes and model them! I’ve found it crazy for me to get all dolled up, come into work, and then I’ve got to get undressed.

On another level, a cute off-the-shoulder blouse, oversized dress, or high-waist jeans and a bodysuit.

Our Top Picks:

PekoPeko Ramen opened earlier this year in a fancy new student apartment building near The Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus. It appears to have caught on with not only undergraduates but with Charles Village residents, too.

I love ramen and I’m ready to defend it against claims that it’s just another food trend. Some things trend for good reason, and ramen is nourishing, fast, comforting, and filling. I wish there had been a ramen shop near my college campus. Ramen works very well as a group dining activity, but it’s also perfect for solo eating. The young owner of PekoPeko Ramen, Hopkins alumnus David Forster, knows this, and he’s outfitted PekoPeko with a spacious kitchen-front counter for single diners. (Extra credit is earned for the coat-and-bag hooks under the counter and for the numerous outlets for phone charging.)  

Forster lived from age 6 to 18 in Tokyo, one of the world’s great food cities, where he became enthralled with Japan’s ramen-shop culture, which has enormous youth appeal. Opening a noodle place near Hopkins, Forster says, felt like a winning idea.

And PekoPeko is a winning little restaurant, beginning with the uplifting interior space, which has the clean contemporary lines of a museum cafe. Music is played at comfortable levels, and the service is friendly and attentive.

The menu has been kept compact with a centerpiece of six ramen options. But it includes a few choices—rice bowls and appetizers—that will appeal to other folks. I really loved the Shaki Shaki salad—a cool, crunchy mix of napa cabbage—as well as the gyoza dumplings, plumply packed with minced pork, cabbage, and ginger. 

PekoPeko specializes in Tokyo-style ramen, notable for its use of long-simmering chicken broth as opposed to the pork broths seen elsewhere in the U.S. The particular broth specialty is the shoyu-style, which has a soy sauce base. This is the place to start at PekoPeko to discover how well-executed the ramen is here. 

You can see the care that’s gone into preparing the scallion, seaweed, and bean sprouts, and you can taste the deep flavor that comes from hours of simmering. But do move on to the TanTan bowl, with its aromatic broth of garlic oil, spicy chili sesame sauce, and ginger. 

A few things to know: PekoPeko is pronounced to rhyme with gecko-gecko. The name is a kind of onomatopoeic phrase roughly meaning “grumbling stomach,” according to Forster. Also, PekoPeko doesn’t take cash.  

---

›› PekoPeko Ramen 7 E. 33rd St., 410-635-1216. Hours: Tue.-Sun. 11 a.m. to midnight. Appetizers: $4-8; entrees: $10-13; desserts: $2-6. 

“You can’t rush greatness,” is how the owners of Taste This—a postage-stamp-sized soul-food take-out spot on Harford Road—responded recently to an Instagram follower wondering when the eatery’s long-gestating second location in Charles Village was going to open. It’s also the restaurant’s foodie philosophy, as Taste This cooks all its mouth-watering proteins to order, a rarity at to-go operations where convenience is often valued over proper preparation. But since the Charles Village location finally opened in late October, more diners than ever are becoming hip to Taste This’s interpretations of slow-cooked Southern staples.

The menu, created by co-owners Craig Curbean and Dante Davis, offers an array of soul-food dishes, everything from barbecued chicken salad and smothered pork chops to barbecued ribs, wings, and baked potatoes loaded with decadent toppings. Basically, if you can picture it served at a summer picnic, it’s available.

We cut right to the chase and ordered the fried-chicken platter, which featured three fried wings served on a bed of buttery yellow rice along with two sides, all for just $7.95. (Other platter options include salmon, catfish, and spiced shrimp.) The chicken’s crispy golden skin and juicy, tender meat was addictive, so much so that we would have liked more of it! We’d happily pay an extra buck or two if it means the addition of a thigh or breast.

Out of the eight available sides—including collard greens, yams, string beans, potato salad, and garlic mashed potatoes—we opted for the mac and cheese and the more virtuous grilled asparagus. The mac and cheese was a dense hunk of gooey noodles, and the asparagus—slick with olive oil, generously peppered, and sprinkled with Parmesan—was an extravagant way to get in our daily serving of veggies.

On another visit, we tried The Canton ($14.95), a baked potato loaded with crabmeat, shrimp, butter, mac and cheese, cheddar cheese, and Old Bay. The cheesy-meaty-starchy trifecta probably took years off of our life, but it was worth it.

Speaking of over the top, Taste This serves breakfast until noon with options like red velvet pancakes and shrimp and grits, plus a house-made dessert of the month, which can range from peach cobbler to rice pudding. Whatever and whenever you order, it will likely be worth the wait.

---

›› Taste This: 4915 Harford Rd., 443-388-8478 and 102 E. 25th St., 443-563-2845. Hours: Tues.-Thurs. 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., closed Mon. Prices: $1.95-14.95.

Sunny Disposition: I would say my home’s aesthetic is best described as thoughtfully random. The sofa is from Ikea and was left here when I moved in; and the yellow sofa cover was on Craigslist. The pillows are actually from my bedroom but the pattern was great.

Humble Abode: I like to look at and live with things that make me smile. I loathe pretension and the idea of not being able to roughhouse for fear of breaking something. My things are things, even if they are things that I enjoy looking at or sitting on.

Diamonds In The Rough: I have a terribly awesome habit of dragging random stuff home from flea markets, junkyards, even the side of the road and then deciding where it goes or who to gift it to.

Creative Collector: As far as artwork goes, there’s a piece from Costa Rica, a little drawing from Paris. My good friend, Matt, did the praying mantis piece above the couch.

Full House: I don’t like dead space, it’s probably not so feng shui of me, but I like to be visually engaged. If there is empty space on my wall, it is just because I haven’t found the thing that goes there yet.

Plant Therapy: My favorite things are the plant stands. I love seeing things grow and flourish. I talk to the plants and name them and haven’t been committed yet.

Personal Space: People are often impressed by the speed with which I can make a space mine. I sometimes switch things out with something I feel is more me at that moment and let the other piece go to a good home. I don’t deliberate too much on things; I go with instinct and sturdy nails.

As you trace the footsteps of Baltimore’s literary luminaries—Poe, Mencken, etc.—on the Maryland Humanities Council’s Mt. Vernon walking tour—you move from brownstone to brownstone. Range farther afield and the city’s diverse architecture becomes apparent, from narrow row houses to Guilford’s stately mansions.

---

Penrose Street

The classic photo of women and children scrubbing their marble steps—a trademark of Baltimore architecture made possible by the high-quality white marble quarried in Cockeysville—was shot by renowned Baltimore Sun photographer A. Aubrey Bodine. Done properly, the ritual marble stoop cleaning process included scrubbing with a pumice stone and Bon Ami powder.

---

Canton Row Homes

In the early 1900s, the neighborhood’s row houses were home to Irish and Eastern Europeans who worked at the port and canneries.

---

Guilford

Each home in this old-money neighborhood possesses its own distinct charm.

---

Old-School Artforms

In 1913, a Czech immigrant grocer named William Oktavec painted his screen door. Soon, neighbors requested he paint their front window screens, and over time, the folk art became synonymous with Baltimore’s blue-collar, Formstone-sided row houses.

(Photo by Anna Pasqualucci)

---

Charles Village

The now-ubiquitous “Painted Ladies” of Charles Village have only been around for 16 years, dating to a neighborhood painting contest inspired by the famous Victorian homes of San Francisco.

---

That was then, this is now

Billie Holiday’s Street

At Durham and Pratt streets, there’s a new, four-story mural of Billie Holiday, who grew up on this Upper Fells Point block. Leading to her childhood home down the street is a mosaic of the blues singer in full voice——white plates forming the iconic gardenias she wore in her hair. The work, which portrays waves of sound morphing into bluebirds as the piece moves toward her former front door, is part of a larger effort to memorialize “Lady Day” in her former neighborhood.

(Photo by David Colwell)

When the vacant corner spot that once housed the venerable M &
J’s Soul Food at 25th and St. Paul streets began to show signs of
activity earlier last year, we were giddy with anticipation for the
comfort foods it promised. Finally, Georgia Soul Food opened in August
and has already amassed a loyal following. Some hardcore enthusiasts may
decry the absence of soul-food pillars like hog maws and feet as
heresy—the menu being a fairly vanilla roster of home-style dishes—but
what Georgia does, it does well. The menu is straightforward with
sections for chicken boxes, fish baskets, side dishes, desserts, and
drinks. An “Everyday Meal” ($9.99) includes a main dish, like a turkey
wing, two sides, and cornbread, and can be embellished with à-la-carte
items that are almost anachronistically priced—for example, tilapia for
$2.29, a pork chop for $2.19, and a fried chicken breast for $2.69.

On the restaurant’s website, georgiasoulfood.com,
the new proprietors promise satisfying Southern soul food culled from
the recipes of six generations and three families. And they follow
through. The collard greens—always a reliable barometer—offer plenty of
smoked neck flavor with a little bit of a kick. The other sides are
impressive, too, from the flavorful mac and cheese and green beans to
gooey candied yams. The usually humble baked chicken is outstanding,
seasoned from the skin right down to the bone, and the fried chicken and
fish are crispy and juicy. Salisbury steak with rice and gravy is a
sleeper hit, and the fried pork chop (get it with gravy) is down-home
delicious.

Whether you choose to carry out or sit in the sunny,
cozy dining room, steal yourself for a lengthy wait (usually at least 30
minutes) for your food. Call ahead for to-go orders, and, for dining
in, expect earnest but not exactly polished service. If your sweet tooth
hasn’t already been sated by the yams, you can count on desserts like
banana pudding and sweet-potato pie to do the job.

We liked the
peach cobbler, but, for a truly monumental sugar buzz, wash down your
food with some cherry Kool-Aid. There is so much sugar in it that it
actually feels heavy—but then, that is the proper soul-food way.