Hamilton-Lauraville – Baltimore Magazine https://www.baltimoremagazine.com The Best of Baltimore Since 1907 Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:30:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Hamilton-Lauraville – Baltimore Magazine https://www.baltimoremagazine.com 32 32 How The Lot on Harford Road Went from an Old Gas Station to a Community Playground https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/the-lot-harford-road-hamilton-lauraville-community-event-space/ Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:30:35 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=144191
—Photography by Matt Roth

At this point, it’s hard to imagine that an abandoned gas station once stood at 4500 Harford Road. Gone are the asphalt rubble and old auto repair shop from the site’s former life, replaced by weekly farmers markets, summertime concerts, and, most recently, a modern building and landscaped lot that invites the community to gather and play.

The $600,000-plus overhaul is crucial to bridging the commercial stretches of Hamilton and Lauraville, says Daniel Doty, executive director of Hamilton-Lauraville Main Street (HLMS), pictured above, which has worked for the last eight years to make this project possible and help transform a once high-speed and at times blighted corridor into a more walkable, inviting, thriving thoroughfare for local residents and businesses.

“It’s like a magnet,” he says, “where you have this one nice thing that demonstrates that the community does care, and it helps lead to more.”

In early June, more than 50 observers gathered to celebrate the newly unveiled renovations of “The Lot,” as it’s colloquially known. The auto shop has been transformed into a community event space, while a lively abstract mural has been painted inside the former garage, which is surrounded by a freshly mulched lot with perimeter plantings, city-installed bicycle racks, and picnic tables.

“I want to have beer gardens and concerts and movie nights and all that stuff right here,” says HLMS board member and local resident Tom Creegan, joking about the “selfish” reasons he pitched in on this project, including helping to install the new poles that will soon hold sunshades and lighting.

Even with 400-plus hours donated by volunteers, it’s taken a variety of funding to make The Lot happen—which it almost didn’t. The project began in 2015 with a plan to convert the site into a commercial kitchen incubator. The idea ultimately proved too costly, and by the time Doty took over in 2021, work remained stalled. With community input, HLMS pivoted toward developing a multi-use space with the help of the locally owned TrueBuilt Construction and landscape architect EnviroCollab.

The year ahead will bring more landscaping as well as installations of play space equipment, permanent seating, and, potentially, a stage. Meanwhile, other neighborhood momentum is underway, like recently installed bike lanes, painted crosswalks, and a 146-unit apartment building.

“This is very purposeful, deliberate, and conscious place-making,” says Doty. “It’s really fulfilling to see this project that almost died get turned around—and, I think, end up as something even better.”

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]]> Petal Pushers https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/bramble-baking-co-rises-in-hamilton/ Thu, 20 Jan 2022 15:54:00 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=116016

With its first brick-and-mortar shop, Bramble Baking Co. blooms in Hamilton.

By Amy Scattergood

Photography by Julie Hove Andersen
Food & Drink

Petal Pushers

With its first brick-and-mortar shop, Bramble Baking Co. blooms in Hamilton.

By Amy Scattergood

Photography by Julie Hove Andersen
January 2022

at Bramble Baking Co. bakery in Hamilton, strewn like footprints from a happy childhood: gomphrenas and marigolds, nasturtiums and mums, scented geraniums and roses. They’re drying upside-down above the window into the bakery’s open kitchen, in buckets near the refrigerated case—loaded with the popular biscuit breakfast sandwiches, one of the few bakery items not bedecked with flowers—and in vases and bottles around the cozy dining room. Petals trellis up the sides of baker-owner Allie Smith’s small-batch cakes—some the size of hubcaps, some of kitchen timers—and scatter across the tops of tiny carrot Bundt cakes.

Opening Spread
Bramble staff, from left, Carrie Beha, Emma Kinney, Jaime Hacker, and Allie Smith.

But such artistry was not born overnight. In fact, in October, just a few weeks after Bramble opened as a tea-proper, brick-and-mortar-and-sugar bake shop, Smith, 30, closed the doors she’d spent five years working to open. “We’re learning how to bake even better for ya! Thanks for your understanding,” read a yellow construction-paper sign taped to the front door of the building, home to two previous bakeries (Batch Bake Shop, Hamilton Bakery), along a busy stretch of Harford Road.

Smith had pressed pause, scheduling a training and production day on a bright Wednesday to give the staff—most of whom started in September—time to reset, hone their already considerable skills, and come together as a team as they racked up trays of the popular baked goods. Clearly, the spot has since hit its stride.

Bramble’s calling cards come in the form of egg-yolk chocolate-chip cookies, chocolate tahini babka knots, purple sweet potato pies with toasty meringue, apple cider scones, chocolate cakes with cinnamon buttercream and salted caramel, and more—many festooned with flowers.

Inside the 2,100-square-foot bakery—which began life as a home-based cottage bakery and took hold in Baltimore’s farmers’ markets—one wall houses a burgeoning locavore marketplace. Cornflower-blue shelves are stacked with containers of spices from Burlap & Barrel and Diaspora Co., teas from Wight Tea Company, soaps and jars of raw honey from Hon’s honey, and gorgeous ceramic plates, made by Emma Kinney, the baker’s flower specialist, who also works as a florist. (Being able to effectively multitask is a given at any bakery, as is, for many bakers, a long and interesting resumé.) Bramble merch comes in the form of pretty mugs with the bakery’s signature tangle.

From top: A stack of rye-cocoa cookies; Emma Kinney holds fresh flowers; Bramble Baking Co. owner Allie Smith at work; custom decorated birthday cakes adorned with flowers; marigolds sit in a vase on the table; the bakery in sunlight
“We’ve put flowers on every cake since we opened the bakery. There was a synergy that made sense.”

“I started as a holiday vendor, and so I had to pick a name and become a thing,” says Smith.

She’s talking origin stories: of the bakery and its contents, of the community she’s assembled to run it, and of the direction they’re collectively working to travel toward. Because as the physical doors to Bramble finally opened, Smith has also been redefining the business model—moving toward a co-op structure—as well as the kitchen community itself, hiring a diverse staff of people who are similarly interested in living and working outside of conventional definitions. The goal? To create terrific baked goods and—simultaneously—a safe and happy working space.

Finished cakes brimming with blooms.

“My grandmother has a lot of lovely, comforting recipes that we still use in our home. But they're very Betty Crocker, like mayo-chocolate cake,” Smith says. At Bramble, she continues that tradition, but with elevated recipes that include: voluminous biscuits, botanically inspired cakes, homespun cookies, and earthy hand pies—all mostly made entirely by hand—inside a pastry case that often doubles as a flower garden.

“We’ve put flowers on every cake since we opened the bakery,” says Smith, recalling Bramble’s early days in the farmers' markets, where utilizing every bit of available produce is as much of a good habit as it is in traditional kitchens. “There was a synergy that made sense.”

Blond wood tables and mismatched chairs fill the dining room, still take-out only. Plans for cake-decorating workshops, done before the pandemic, were also put on hold, though the staff did manage to hold one on a farm. Inside the production kitchen sits an old deck oven, defunct since a previous bakery iteration, now the steampunk-style shelf for a row of wooden bannetons, or proofing baskets. Next to it are the two stacked Blodgett convection ovens that bake most everything in the bakery.

A bucket of fresh flowers at the ready.

The kind of vegetation you might get on your baked goods depends, naturally, on the whims of the season, the garden, the baker. In the fall, when Smith and Kinney favor fruits and vegetables along with the flowers, the cakes and pastries bear currant tomatoes, Jupiter grapes, husk cherries, sometimes wild raspberries on the vine.

Most of what’s in Bramble’s pastry-case comes in the form of a weekly bucket from Hillen Homestead, an urban farm wedged into a reclaimed site a few miles away from the bakery. The bakers trade a bucket of Hillen owner-farmer Maya Kosok’s scrap stems for a box of bakery items, a barter system built of sweet peas, celosia, and sage.

A whisk of apple cider Swiss buttercream; Smith decorating a frosted mini cake; a tray of just-baked buttermilk biscuits for the breakfast sandwiches; an array of baking pans; the oatmeal cream pies.
“It was fun to be in art museums parallel to baking. It’s a great place to soak up inspiration.”

In winter, Bramble concentrates on sturdier blooms, pressed petals, and preserved vegetation. “Our cakes become very viola-heavy,” says Smith. “Sometimes we do a pressed, fresh mélange,” says Kinney, which might include hydroponic, indoor-grown flowers, as well as those the staff presses and dries.

Smith, a Maryland transplant, started baking in part as a way of getting attuned to the local growing season. “When you move to a completely new region of the world, you’re often a little unmoored,” she says. Smith, who was raised in upstate New York and went to grad school for museum studies in Boston, relocated to Maryland for a job as an education coordinator at The Walters Art Museum in 2016. “I had a lot of time in my evenings, so I started baking obsessively, to keep myself occupied, and it became a way for me to become more familiar with mid-Atlantic produce.”

Smith used her income from the Walters to get that foothold and then began honing her baking skills at a commercial kitchen sharing space with a small catering business. In 2019, Bramble became Smith’s full-time job. “It was fun to be in art museums parallel to baking,” she says. “It’s a great place to soak up inspiration. The jury is still out on whether I’ll call cake ‘art’ or not.”

In those early days, Smith and her partner, Robin Rhodes, a full-time musician who plans to help with more events at the bakery when COVID-19 restrictions further lift, would take Smith’s baked goods to farmers’ markets, first the Cross Street market, then the 32nd Street market in Waverly. It was there that many of Smith’s current staff first encountered both baked goods and baker, including longtime staffers like pastry chef Jaime Hacker.

“I want to make rustic rye croissants and not matcha foam,” says Hacker of the career trajectory that brought her from culinary school to a series of restaurants where she found herself following trends rather than baking what she wanted. Hacker was the first person to join Smith’s team—Kinney, the second, came on just before the pandemic—and had been at a crossroads in her career.

“I have this classical French training, worked at enough [restaurants] to realize how toxic the industry was,” says Hacker. “I was thinking about what else to do with my life, and I reached out to Allie via Instagram to see if I could bake with her for fun.”

Bramble’s croissant program began with Hacker, who’s doing a tutorial on the laminated pastry for others in the kitchen. “I’m going on maternity leave in a week and a half, so I’m trying to teach everybody how to do this,” she says, feeding sheets of butterstacked dough through the machine’s roller, like laundry. Nearby, sheet pan racks are loaded with warm buttermilk biscuits and the roasted purple potatoes for pies, waiting for the next stage in the bakery’s production schedule.

Rahma Haji, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Maryland’s Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, would wake up early on Saturday mornings to make it to the market stand in time to get babkas, one of Bramble’s specialties. “People love pastries,” Haji says. “That’s literally how I started.” Now Haji spends those weekends behind the counter at the bakery, working front-of-house and further advancing personal pastry skills. “I love to bake; there’s an element of experimentation.”

The same can be said for Smith’s evolving business model, which Smith describes as “ambiguous by design.” This could also describe many of those who have gravitated to her kitchen.

“Bramble has grown into a more queer- and women- led space as we’ve grown our team,” says Smith. “Lots of women, but lots of non-binary folks. We’ve prioritized and will continue to prioritize a work environment that has care at its center, and I do think that there’s a certain queer sensibility and a feminist sensibility that allows us to stay true to that. I’m not sure how the two will inform each other yet, but that’s how we’ve naturally grown.”

Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about giving back-of-house food service professionals their due, both financially and in terms job contentment. “I entered the food world when there was beginning to be this reckoning about that, and there’s more and more each year,” says Smith. “The pandemic created space for the folks in lower places to be heard.”

Drew Koshgarian arrived for her first day at the bakery with her own rolling pin. Koshgarian says that she wouldn’t have applied for a job at Bramble if Smith hadn’t included a focus on collaboration, responsibility-sharing, and respect in the job description. “Everybody’s become more aware of how things work when everybody feels valued,” says Koshgarian, who worked in bakeries in Los Angeles (and also did improv and stand-up comedy there). “It was wildly antiquated,” Koshgarian says of the restaurant industry. “Allie comes from an art history background; everybody in this kitchen is interesting.”

Clockwise from top, an old flower press; a frosted mini cake with currant tomatoes and dried flowers; fresh fruit and flowers; decorating a cake; the pain au chocolat; pressed flowers for decorating.
“The kind of community that Allie’s trying to create is very inclusive—in any possibly use of the word.”

Like Hacker and Koshgarian, Dayna Palmer logged time in the restaurant industry. “I focused my career in chocolate for the last six years, but this is the first time I’ve worked in a bakery since culinary school,” says Palmer. “The kind of community that Allie’s trying to create is very inclusive—in any possible use of the word.”

As she speaks, Palmer pours buttermilk into a well in the center of the butter-flour mixture for biscuits—the bakers produce 48 of them on weekdays, selling out in hours. She was the person who added chocolate bon bons to the bakery’s holiday repertoire, which also quickly sold out.

But no matter what delicious treats Smith adds to the menu, flowers will always be Bramble’s signature.

“Part of using flowers is honoring their temporary beauty,” says Kinney, as she carefully stores flattened petals and herbs in binder pages.

With additional flowers—all are non-toxic and/or edible—to feed the sweet workflow coming in from Two Boots Farm, Belvedere Farm Flowers, and Locust Point Flowers, there’s enough to load into an old wooden flower press, donated to the bakery in its nascent days.

“It’s very therapeutic,” says Felicity Lugay, a front-of-house staffer and Towson University special education major, as she lifts mum and tulip petals, leaves of salvia and sage. “When we run out of space [on the flower press], we just use some books,” says Kinney as Lugay brings some thick cookbooks (The Cake Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum; Roxana Jullapat’s Mother Grains; Claire Ptak’s The Violet Bakery Cookbook) down from the bakery’s shelves.

Kinney instructs folks to refrigerate their cakes, to keep them out of the sun for the sake of both flowers and buttercream—Smith keeps a blowtorch beside the KitchenAid to help control the temperature of the finicky frosting as the layer cakes are assembled—and recommends that fresh flower cakes are best given, and eaten, as soon as reasonably possible. This is not generally an issue.

Carrie Beha, who—like most of the Bramble staff—moves between front-and back-of-house work, also first learned about the bakery through the farmers’ market. Beha started working as a teenager and never went to college, instead eventually transitioning to a job at Moon Valley Farm, in Woodsboro, one of Bramble’s suppliers. “My heart lit up,” Beha says, after seeing the post on Good Food Jobs about Bramble. Of the bakery’s wider social project, Beha says: “Hopefully we can keep that balance. I think that’s going to be the best part of Bramble—and the hardest part.”

Because despite the garlands of flowers and the warm cookies, working in a bakery is not easy. The demands are high, and the hours are long: Smith starts work at 1:30 a.m. on Saturdays, and on the weekends someone is at the bakery starting at 2:30 or 3 a.m. “The only way to make this kind of work sustainable, when it’s so against our circadian rhythms, and places a lot of demands upon your body, is really to be honest with yourself and with each other,” says Smith. She spreads buttercream on a mini pumpkin layer cake, turning the cake stand around like a clock. “The pinnacle of honesty that we’ve been able to figure out for ourselves, is working toward this collaborative environment.”

Good sourcing, whether local or otherwise, has always been one of Bramble’s priorities.

“It was really important to me to work with local farms and local ingredients,” says Hacker, whose stellar rye croissants, using stone-ground rye flour from Castle Valley Mill in Doylestown, PA, are a masterwork, simultaneously buttery and flaky, and earthy from the whole grains. (All Bramble’s milk and buttermilk come from South Mountain Creamery in Middletown; the pie dough is made with flour from Small Valley Milling in Halifax, PA, and Migrash Farms, near Randallstown; those biscuits are made with with Plugra butter.) “Allie understands how important that is, when I had so many chefs who said, you’re lucky you get any flour at all.”

It’s not difficult to see how Bramble’s workplace setting translates from production table to pastry case. “The stuff I’m doing here,” says Hacker, “is some of the best stuff I’ve ever done.” “Kindness made me want to work here,” says Haji later, sitting outside on the bakery’s sun-drenched bench, summing things up with a baker’s deftness. “It’s great to be a part of something and feel valued, to be in a community. It puts everything into perspective.”

Because depending on where you are in the world, brambles can be roses or weeds, blackberries, even Arctic brambleberries—hardy and resilient, often grown in neglected spaces. And utterly beautiful, not unlike bakers themselves.

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]]> The Corner Shop https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/homegarden/tortuga-hamilton-lauraville-shop-from-owner-julie-bent-is-curated-goodness/ Mon, 25 Oct 2021 14:00:59 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?post_type=article&p=113135
Owner Julie Bent at Tortuga. —Julie Hove Andersen

Tortuga owner Julie Bent has lived a thousand lives since graduating from college with a degree in visual arts in 2000.

“I think parents get nervous about their kids going to art school, but one of my professors explained that you learn so much about yourself and how to express ideas and how to defend ideas,” says Bent. “Anyone who comes to art school could leave and go on to do anything.”

Bent proved that time and time again, first with a job in graphic design at a design firm just outside Washington, D.C. “It was related to my field…but with health insurance,” she says with a laugh. She came to realize that she actually liked juggling multiple projects.

“Every project was new and different, and then we’d be shifting to the next project,” she says.

Then, two things happened: Thanks to a co-worker, she met her husband, Max. And she took a two-week book designing class in Venice through the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. Inspired by all the textiles and colors in Italy, she says, “It woke up the artist in me.” When Bent returned home, she realized she wasn’t tapping into her full creative potential at work and left the company within a few months.

By April 2006, Bent and Max married and within four months moved to Baltimore.

“I’m so glad we did,” says Bent. “Gosh—we were just trusting something.”

They landed in Waverly in 2006 and were able to collectively catch their breath. Bent started doing some dyeing and screen printing of goods and selling them at HonFest while dabbling in freelance design to pay the bills. Max was working as a teacher and producing music.

“We were able to find our creative sides again,” says Bent. “D.C. was more hustle and influence and stimulation and pressure. Once we got to Baltimore people were a lot more balanced and doing what they love, whether it was music or art.”

For Bent, that meant enrolling in Baltimore City Community College’s fashion design program. While there, she learned draping and pattern-making and spent hours hunched over an industrial sewing machine perfecting her craft.

“It’s a secret gem of a program,” says Bent. She spent two years “unlocking a lot of my creative side” and being inspired by the fashions of the 1920s—but with her own minimalistic spin. She created shift dresses, asymmetrical hems, color blocking, cool cut-outs, playing with fabric combos and intimately learning about the shapes and angles of the body.

During school, Bent worked part-time at the popular Hampden boutique Shine Collective and produced her first collection. After graduation, she approached fellow creative, Aimee Bracken, who owned Form Boutique, about doing a collection together. The private label “Form” was a collaboration between them.

“It was my minimalist, streamlined mindset and knowledge of how to make it happen and her knowledge of customers and aesthetic, which was a little more tailored and structured with little feminine details,” says Bent. Within weeks, the hybridized collection sold out. And while Bent was interested in continuing her design work, the fashion industry is complicated. “It’s challenging to do fashion not on a large scale,” she says. Smaller batches meant more upfront cost and risk—something she wasn’t ready for.

So, encouraged by friends to become a wardrobe stylist within the film/television industry, she pivoted once again.

“It was a great fit,” says Bent. They’d tell her, “Here’s what you’ve got to go find…now go figure out how to make it happen.”

Initially, she worked on commercials for the Maryland Lottery, M&T Bank, and Verizon. Later, as more projects opened, she joined the film industry union including Netflix’s House of Cards, which spent five seasons filming in Baltimore. She then worked on Veep, a political satire that aired on HBO—spending a few days a week on set and more time in the costume office shopping, returning, unpacking, tallying, and doing inventory.

When large-scale movies would film in D.C.—like On the Basis of Sex, based on the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg—Bent would often head up a Baltimore team. There was a point where she could have pushed forward in the film industry and made it a life-long career, but she knew it was almost impossible to create a healthy work/life balance.

Instead, Bent realized she could take all her favorite things from each chapter of her life—graphic design, fashion design, movie wardrobe styling—and start something new.

In 2014, Bent and Max moved from Waverly to Hamilton-Lauraville. She would pass empty storefronts as she made her way from her home on Southern Avenue to Zeke’s Coffee café. Slowly, businesses started creeping up Harford Road closer to her house.

“I could feel this shift in momentum here,” says Bent. When Zeke’s moved to their current retail shop in the 4700 block of Harford, Bent knew it was time to make the leap. “I felt this buzz going on here. I didn’t have anything together except I knew I wanted to have a store.”

An abandoned Nationwide insurance building a few storefronts down from Zeke’s—which once housed Maryland State Senator Cory McCray’s campaign office—seemed like it could work.

Bent started with a holiday pop-up shop in December 2018. She filled her vintage camper—in the parking lot behind the building—with jewelry and a few pieces of ceramic and was delighted at the reaction. She called her shop Tortuga—the Spanish world for turtle.

“There’s a lot of symbology behind the turtle,” explains Bent. Turtles are known for their longevity, for being wise, and are also seen as a protector of Mother Earth. She also loved that they carry their home on their back. “Turtles are self-contained,” a trait we can all learn from, says Bent. “The more we become connected with ourselves the better we can reflect all that stuff on the outside.” Her brick-and-mortar shop opened in October 2019.

“I don’t love the term lifestyle store,” she admits. “I usually call it a curated shop of independent designers.” She loves to curate jewelry and home goods and has been getting more into wellness: “Everything you’re putting in and on your body,” she explains. That last part she feels most strongly about.

“I’m really disciplined about researching my brands and deciding if they meet all my parameters of materials and quality and manufacturing,” she says. “Who is making them, will they last a long time, and are these people innovative?”

The light-filled corner shop is simple, clean, and beautiful. There are plants and crisp white walls, so as not to compete with the products that range from jewelry to wellness items (incense cones, aromatics, herbal remedies), bags and wallets, candles, and textiles.

The shop closed during the pandemic for four months and Bent adapted once again, quickly opening an online resource for her shoppers. She also took time to refocus on what was important. She add- ed more home goods, like blankets and pottery, and upped her wellness game. “I love how it’s taking shape,” she says. “It feels a lot more well-rounded.”

Now just past Tortuga’s second birthday, Bent is looking to expand her shop’s reach both with her customers and her suppliers. In both cases it’s about sharing the journey of the shop. “I want to dig deeper into my ‘why’ and show more of that on a larger scale,” says Bent. When someone picks up an item in her shop, she wants them to understand the why behind the price—“it’s because of the materials that were used, because of the person that spent time making it, and because that person is becoming a business.”

As Bent walks back into her shop on a brilliant fall afternoon, Dolly Parton’s voice drifts from the outdoor speakers at the Wax Atlas Record and Stereo Exchange across the street. The sun is shining, neighbors wave hello, and she dreams of one day hitting the road to connect with her makers and designers scattered throughout the country. But for now, Bent is focused on the city and introducing more people to her business.

“People generalize about what Baltimore is or isn’t, but there are so many dynamic people here,” says Bent. “For me, it’s about connecting the dots to the people who really are going to get Tortuga right away and value it and appreciate it.”

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]]> Open & Shut: Matchbox; The LVH; Good Neighbor https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/open-shut-the-lvh-fire-rice-good-neighbor-cafe/ Thu, 17 Oct 2019 16:05:00 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?p=17552

COMING SOON

Merriweather District Announces Three More Eateries: The Howard Hughes Corporation has been hard at work finding regional restaurants to fill its brand new Merriweather District in Columbia. Following the news that beloved Washington, D.C. coffee shop Busboys and Poets would be moving into the development next year, Howard Hughes recently announced three more tenants that are following suit next summer. The first will be a new location for D.C.-based pizza hotspot Matchbox, which focuses on wood-fired fare and brunch. The team behind Ashburn, Virginia’s acclaimed Sense of Thai St. will also expand to the area with a new concept called Dok Khao Thai Eatery, and owner Satish Gunisetty of Indian restaurant Rangoli in Hanover will open a globally inspired spinoff called Clove and Cardamom. The district is part of Downtown Columbia’s massive revitalization plan, which will include 14 million square feet of new development when completed.

The LVH: Soul food fans’ lives were forever changed when Taste This Baltimore came onto the scene in 2014. The carryout started with a location on Harford Road in Lauraville, and later brought its famous fried-chicken platters and loaded baked potatoes to Charles Village. Now, owners Craig Curbean and Dante Davis are returning to their roots with a full-service restaurant located just down the street from the flagship. Set in the former home of barbecue restaurant Lauraville House, The LVH—a name that pays homage to the former inhabitant—will offer plenty of seats and a menu of Curbean’s signature comfort foods when it opens this fall. Be on the lookout for dishes like crab dip-stuffed chicken breast, vegetable fettuccine, and blackened tilapia with herb-lemon butter.

Fire & Rice: On the subject of Hamilton-Lauraville—which has recently exploded with new dining options like Farm to Face and Char’d City—the area will also soon welcome this Japanese-inspired restaurant from the former owner of Tooloulou, which once operated locations on Harford Road and in Belvedere Square but has since closed. Chef/owners Shawn Lagergren and Kevin Scheuing will offer ramen, sushi, and grilled meats at the spot on the bottom floor of the new SoHa Union retail-and-residential development at 4801 Harford Road. As it progresses in the coming months, the project is also expected to house a new space for Touloulou’s former Belvedere Square neighbor Pure Chocolate by Jinji.

Good Neighbor: A new quasi-cafe and homegoods store is slated to take over the former Sirkis Hardware space on Falls Road in Hampden next year. Owner Shawn Chopra recently told the Baltimore Business Journal that he’s transforming the three-story row house into a destination for shoppers to explore handmade wares from Baltimore makers, ceramic artists, and woodworkers while also enjoying coffee and cafe fare. The spot comes on the heels of another Hampden addition, Treehouse Cafe & Juice Bar, which is now operating in soft-opening mode on Chestnut Avenue.

EPICUREAN EVENTS

10/18-27: Maryland Food Truck Week

Just because the temperatures have dropped doesn’t mean our favorite food trucks roll out for the season. In fact, the annual Maryland Food Truck Week proves that it’s just the opposite. The ten-day celebration to benefit Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland kicks off with a free food truck rally at South Point in Port Covington on Friday, October 18 from 5-9 p.m. Throughout the week, diners can catch their favorite chefs on wheels (think favorites like Crossroads Bistro, 410 Empanadas, and Dizzy Cow Pizzeria) at daily events happening everywhere from Halethorpe to Elkridge. The festivities will close out with a Halloween-themed bash on October 27 at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

10/18-27: Max’s Empanadas Pop-Up at R. House
While contemplating your options at R. House this week, make your way over to the rotating pop-up stall to browse the menu at this farmers’ market favorite. Max’s specializes in Argentinian empanadas stuffed with fillings including beef, chicken, chorizo, and mixed vegetables.

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]]> Batch Bake Shop Opens in Hamilton-Lauraville https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/batch-bake-shop-opens-in-hamilton-lauraville/ Tue, 09 May 2017 16:54:00 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?p=29386

Residents of the tight-knit Hamilton-Lauraville community have felt a void ever since the beloved Hamilton Bakery closed its doors on Harford Road last year. But now, the shuttered space has officially made a comeback.

This morning, Batch Bake Shop—a new sweets shop from four partners who formerly helmed the bread and pastry program at Cunningham’s Cafe + Bakery in Towson—officially celebrated its grand opening in the modernized space that sits at 5414 Harford Road.

“I’m kind of the odd man out,” says Laura Salierno, one of the co-owners. “The other partners all live within three blocks of our physical location.”

Salierno explains that the owners’ personal connection to the community influenced their decision to settle in the space, which housed Hamilton Bakery for more than five years.

“When we realized that the space was available, we decided to take a shot,” she says. “We’ve found such a warm and welcoming community here. Today is only our first day open, and people have already been so supportive.”

Since the deal was finalized in January, the team has been hard at work, quickly transforming the space into a bright hub with Edison bulb lighting, wooden benches, sleek community tables, wall-rail seating, and pops of teal throughout the interior.

“It’s very charming,” Salierno says, mentioning that the shop is an ideal workspace with ample outlets and free WiFi. “Before, the space was separated by handrails and whatnot. So we wanted to open it up and make it a bit more modern.”

The seasoned pastry team fills the bakery’s showcases with made-from-scratch products ranging from bagels and brownies to macarons and custom cakes. Salierno says that, while the menu features a selection of traditional treats, the team has enjoyed getting creative with unique offerings like a signature whole wheat brioche, and savory pastries filled with ingredients like cheese, ham, broccoli, and turkey.

Salierno says that it is an exciting time to be joining the community, as the dining scene in Hamilton-Lauraville continues to thrive.

Speaking of small businesses, the community has seen a number of them come and go recently. Last week, Green Onion Market co-owner Rich Marsiglia posted a message to Facebook announcing that he would be closing his beloved bodega, and preparing to turn the space over to new owners in the coming months. 

The neighborhood also recently welcomed Diner Latino 2—a Mexican spinoff based in Highlandtown—and will soon see Amendment 21, a new wine shop opening in the former home of Everest Liquors at 4924 Harford Road. Also joining the scene is the highly-anticipated SoHa Union development, which will house a Southern spot with French influences from former Maggie’s Farm owners Matthew and Andy Weaver when it debuts this fall.

“This is a very cool area to be in as far as local support for a small business,” Salierno says. “Customers have really seemed to make it a point to say they’re happy we’re here, and they’re glad that they can localize their dollars.”

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]]> Chef Winston Blick Discusses Reopening Clementine https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/chef-winston-blick-discusses-reopening-clementine/ Wed, 26 Oct 2016 14:31:00 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?p=30356 Though chef Winston Blick and his wife, Cristin Dadant, have been running their catering business out of the kitchen of their restaurant on Harford Road since it closed last summer, it hasn’t been the same without a crowded dining room.

“It’s weird,” Blick says. “We used to do catering tastings on Friday evenings when it was loud and bustling, and now we do them for people in an empty restaurant.”

After making the decision to close in July of 2015 to focus on their catering services, the husband-and-wife owners are now vowing to reopen Clementine—the homey comfort food spot in Hamilton-Lauraville known for its generously portioned, locally sourced dishes.

The owners have established a GoFundMe campaign with the hope of raising $40,000 for replenishing inventory and upgrading the interior, and plan to reopen by Thanksgiving.

“You can feel the void,” Blick says. “We can feel it in us, the community feels it, and we need to fill it. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed feeding the community. It’s really satisfying, and it’s one of the few ways to make people really happy and content.”

Blick says that part of the reason for Clementine’s closure was financial, mentioning that, this time around, he has hired a chief financial officer and restructured the restaurant’s business plan in order for it to be more profitable.

“In the restaurant world, places are either opened by chefs who don’t know money or people with money who don’t know food, and that’s why they fail,” he says. “I’m not a business man, I’m a food guy. So having that help gives us great hope.”

Though the 75-seat restaurant will be still be a hub for locals to enjoy carefully curated charcuterie plates and comfort cuisine sourced from area farms (some of Blick’s classics include bacon-wrapped meatloaf, Asian-braised pork cheeks, and gouda mashed potatoes), the owners are eager to implement a few upgrades.

Among them will be the addition of a retail section up front, showcasing a growler-filling station and prepared foods similar to the comestibles at Blick’s nearby Green Onion Market.

He also wants Clementine to be more of a nightlife destination in its second phase. He plans to put more of an emphasis on the bar program—highlighting craft beers, ciders, wines, and spirits—and offer extended evening hours with trivia and live music.

The renewed focus on the bar also means that Clementine will downsize its portions, offering a more casual menu of small plates.

“We’ve been known as the big plate place for a long time,” Blick says with a laugh. “Now we’re just going to offer smaller versions of the classics. It’s a way for us to change with the times without changing our core philosophy.”

As the dining scene in Hamilton-Lauraville continues to grow (the in-the-works SoHa Union development is slated to debut a new spinoff from the owners of Maggie’s Farm in 2017), Blick is excited to pick up where Clementine left off.

“It’s going to look and feel like Clementine, we just want to freshen it up,” he says. “There’s only one second chance, so we want to be smart about it and serve the community right.”

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]]> Maggie’s Farm to Launch New Crowd-Funding Campaign for Second Restaurant https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/maggies-farm-to-launch-new-crowd-funding-campaign-for-second-restaurant/ Fri, 26 Aug 2016 11:06:00 +0000 https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/?p=30744 Continued]]> After trying a hand at GoFundMe, Maggie’s Farm owners Matthew and Andy Weaver are switching gears, testing out a brand new crowd-funding concept for their second restaurant.

The husband-and-wife team, who announced plans to open a neighboring sister-spot in Hamilton-Lauraville earlier this year, is partnering with D.C.-based tech startup Equity Eats to raise funds for the new eatery.

The project, which the owners are referring to as “Restaurant B,” will be the anchor business in the new Soha Union development aptly named after its location at the corner of Southern Avenue and Harford Road.

“We are really pushing for a mixed-market space like a tiny Belvedere Square Market or a Mt. Vernon Marketplace,” Andy says. “We think that’s the way Baltimore is going.”

Though the owners are keeping specific details about the new spot under tight wraps, Andy says that it will offer a fusion of American and International cuisine and a carefully curated list of wine and cocktails. Slated to open in November 2017, the building will boast 100 seats (double the current capacity of Maggie’s) and highlight an open kitchen, woodfire grill, outdoor patio, spacious bar and dining room, and a section for private dining.

Andy says that she first discovered crowd-funding site Equity Eats through restaurant and hospitality-related listservs.

“They pitched themselves as a Kickstarter specifically for restaurants,” she says. “We started a conversation with them, and I had just always kept the idea in my back pocket as we developed the plan and eventually signed the lease.”

In only one year since its inception, Equity Eats has raised more than $4 million to help budding food businesses across the country get on their feet. What sets the company apart from other crowd-funding platforms is its built-in rewards program that offers backers restaurant credit in exchange for a donation.

Dan Benavidez, a business development representative for Equity Eats, explains that the system’s app offers diners specific perks like reserved seating, priority walk-ins, one-on-one communication with owners, and a surplus of food and drink credit based on how much they donate.

“What we’re doing is more restaurant-specific,” he says. “And it’s more serious in the sense that we have the technology and infrastructure that small businesses need.”

Benavidez notes that the goal behind the concept is to unite restaurants with their customers on a personal level.

“You’re turning to your most loyal customers and advocates for help,” he says. “Opening a restaurant is hard. It’s difficult to get loans and people typically look at it as a bad investment, but we want to turn that stigma around.”

The Equity Eats campaign, which will mark the startup’s first foray into Baltimore, will launch next week. The owners are in the midst of planning an official launch party at Maggie’s Farm, where they will be on hand to answer any questions that investors have about the new restaurant.

“We’re excited to put our neighborhood on the map a little more,” Andy says. “We’ve always been one of the underdogs.”

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