Inspired by his previous job working at Danny Meyer’s Michelin-starred restaurant, The Modern, Matthew Oetting, owner-chef of Marta, knew he wanted to offer some type of elevated bread service that would wow patrons when it was served. At The Modern, which was located inside the Museum of Modern Art, bread service was such a production, it took two people to deliver it to the table.

“There were two different compound butters,” says Oetting, “and a high-end olive oil and balsamic vinegar. There was a tray with compotes and chutneys. And then there were the breads—all artisan and local—set inside baskets with five varieties, from Parker House rolls to pumpernickel.”

So, as he contemplated what he wanted to do at his new spot in Butchers Hill, it was only natural for Oetting to think about making his own bread.

“I knew I wanted something pretty spectacular,” he says. “We toyed with the idea of making the bread from scratch,” he says. “Before we opened, I bought four different flours and studied how to make sourdough starter. My chef de cuisine and I were talking, and he was like, ‘Chef, this is a lot of work. I have an idea—what if instead of making the bread, we make the butter?’”

For inspiration, Oetting’s wife, Martha, showed him some images from Google and TikTok. And Marta’s butter board—a sourdough boule from Stone Mill Bakery and a spread of house-cultured butter served with a shower of Maldon sea salt and herbs, flower petals, and a drizzle of basil oil—was born.

The board manages to be all things to both customers and staff: It’s easy to make, elegant in appearance, and a top seller.

“We hear the ‘oohs’ and the ‘ahhs’ from the kitchen,” he says. And when the boards come back, “It’s as if they’d been licked clean,” Oetting says with a laugh.

Opening a new restaurant in a once-beloved space can be a tall task—after all, comparisons to the former spot are inevitable. Such could have been the case with chef Matthew Oetting’s Marta, a 62-seat boîte set inside the old Salt Tavern, once a neighborhood mainstay with its duck fat fries and Wagyu burgers crowned with foie gras.

But that hasn’t happened. In fact, on a late fall night, as patrons poured into the place, the memory of Salt, which closed in 2018, has worked in Marta’s favor.

“People have so many great memories of Salt,” says Oetting. “The neighborhood was salivating at the idea of something opening back up in the space and being an anchor for that community again—it was a huge help.”

Gone are the lime-green globe lights that were the hallmark of Salt. In their place are trendy table lights, a gleaming new bar, and granny-chic, floral wallpaper chosen by Oetting’s wife Martha, the restaurant’s namesake (translated into Italian to reflect the menu mission).

“Being a chef is hard,” says Oetting. “Being a chef’s wife is much harder. It was important to me to show her how much I appreciate her support.”

After more than two decades in hospitality, Oetting’s career has taken him all over the Big Apple, from Danny Meyer’s famed Union Square Café to Scarpetta, where he learned the intricate art of pasta-making. Before arriving in Baltimore in 2015 to open Loch Bar as executive chef (and later The Bygone), he ran the back of the house at Stephen Starr’s martini bar, The Continental, in Miami. After such varied experiences, the peripatetic chef was ready to be his own boss.

“It was time for me to finally do something of my own,” he says.

Marta has provided him a place to pursue his passion for taking classic dishes and transforming them with his own sophisticated spin, which includes employing luxury ingredients. To wit: a cacciatore dish substitutes the chicken for lobster and onion dip is jazzed up with caviar.

Beyond the food, Oetting envisioned, in his words, “a neighborhood eatery that has a warm glow even before you walk in. I wanted a place that the community would cherish.”

(While it does aim to serve as a neighborhood place, the chef’s reliance on luxury, albeit authentic, Italian ingredients can make eating here a pricey proposition.) That said, there are many ways to enjoy a night at Marta.

As you enter the circa-1904 building, turn to the left if you’re looking for a space that feels intimate and a world away from the city streets. Go right and snag a barstool or a table in the bar for a more boisterous vibe and a lovely view of the early 20th-century architecture and the twinkle of string lights hung between the rowhouses. Whatever experience you choose, there’s something to match the mood.

If you sit at the bar, consider one of five Negronis on offer or pick from an array of apéritifs. Pair your potion with the addictive truffle and Parmesan potato chips or an indulgent piece of grilled ciabatta smeared with ricotta and truffle honey.

If you go with a group and sit at a table in the bar, make a meal out of shareable starters and crudos. Favorites include the tuna cannoli—a fried shell encrusted in sesame seeds, pistachios, and garlic chips, and stuffed with yellowfin—and the prettily plated yellowtail with its thin pieces of sashimi and slivers of green apple scattered across the plate like a collage and doused with apple-hibiscus sauce.

An array of antipasti, including the chicken wings stacked like a modern sculpture, is also a nice way begin a meal. The wings were coated in a hot-honey glaze, then paired with pickled vegetables as a cooling counterpart. The roasted beet carpaccio drizzled with truffle vinaigrette, topped with whipped goat cheese, shaved fennel, and gooseberries, and capped with crushed hazelnuts was bright and beautiful and a great vegetarian option.

As for entrees, there’s an excellent Roseda Farm-sourced skirt steak served with dabs of an herbaceous olive salsa verde (think Italy’s version of chimichurri) and a must-order pan-seared scallop piccata dish, bathed in butter sauce and studded with capers and artichoke hearts.

But the real star of the menu is the house-made pasta section. Over several visits, everything we sampled was excellent, including a tangle of carbonara-coated spaghetti entwined with blue crab and miso egg yolk for added umami; the Sardinian-style gnocchi (made from pasta dough not potato) slicked with tangy tomato sauce; and an intensely earthy tagliatelle coated with truffle butter and shaved king trumpet mushrooms.

Plating is paramount here and most dishes are flecked with flowers or herbs or a handful of microgreens to add a pop of color and texture. This artistry was not lost on diners, as every dish seemed caught up in the social media klieg lights across various tables.

As the saying goes, when one door closes, another one opens. In a city like Baltimore, with its loyal foodies who tend to fall back on their favorite hangouts, change isn’t always welcome. But nearly five years after Salt’s closing, Marta seems a worthy successor.

This feels like the beginning of a beautiful new relationship.

Matthew Oetting was initially hired by the Atlas Restaurant Group to oversee the kitchen at Bygone, but first worked as executive chef at the group’s Loch Bar for two years, while waiting for the fine-dining restaurant to open at the top of the Four Seasons. With the recent restaurant debut, Oetting, who came to Baltimore from kitchens in Miami (Scarpetta) and New York (Telepan, The Modern), talks nouvelle cuisine, vintage menus, and the local restaurant scene.
 

I know you did a lot of research as you were conceptualizing and creating Bgyone’s menu. What was your process?
When I was doing research, I was having a hard time finding menus from the mid-19th century. I reached out to the research librarian at [my alma mater] Arizona State University and he put me in contact with a colleague named Chris, who specializes in culinary history—he was an amazing resource. He started sending me menus from the period. The first few that he sent were from the ’20s, ’30 and ’40s— he ambiance of The Great Gatsby was the era they were going shooting for when they were conceptualizing Bygone.

But the menus that came through were extremely bare bones. In the era of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the menus aren’t all that impressive, not many had composed dishes with the protein, the starch, the vegetables, the sauce all on one plate. It was all very broken up—there was the vegetable section, there was the potato section, the chop section, and the seafood sections. Some of these menus had 15 different sections on one page. Chris said to me, ‘You have to remember what was happening in history at that time—they were just coming out of the Depression and then World War II. People weren’t spending money in late ’20s, early ’30s and through the war.’ Eating out wasn’t really a focal point. 

So how did you arrive at this particular menu full of French-inspired classics?

Chris said, ‘If you want to look at menus from the ’50 and ’60s, you’ll see something a lot different, so he started sending menus from that era, and they were incredibly impressive. It was the dawn of nouvelle cuisine, and chefs started putting together composed plates. People were going to restaurants after World War II and had money to spend—that’s where the inspiration for the menu started to take shape. I had 40 menus in these huge, three-ring binders that I used as a basis for the Bygone menu. 

You’ve said that this is the food that speaks to your heart and soul. Can you elaborate?

A lot of the preparations are very home-style. Cooking dishes like whole roasted duck and chicken and roasted brisket come from the heart. A lot of the dishes have long preparations that take two, three, four, five, six days. Preparing these kinds of dishes gives me a warm feeling. Being able to transform it for the modern palate is what I’m about.  

Are there any menus in particular that spoke to you?

One of my favorites was The Golden Lion in Seattle. It had a lobster section like we do at Bygone, it had frog’s legs and crab legs and medallions of veal Oscar, and all of these great classic preparations. I was also inspired by menus at The Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel in New York. I collected menus from the Beverly Hill Hotel menu in 1956 and the 21 Club’s 1961 menu.
The food from this particular period was flexible.   

There’s a lot of nostalgia here for an older crowd, but there are younger people for whom this will be new. Do you hear that from customers?

Yes, there are a lot of millennials coming in, and I think they like the throwback—they recognize that it’s a throwback, but don’t know what it’s a throwback to.
 

Did you draw on any other inspirations for the menu?

New Orleans at that time, and still somewhat today, was a culinary mecca. French Creole cooking was extremely popular at the time. I put Creole snapper blackened and served with crawfish étouffée and dishes like Cajun fried cauliflower on the menu as an homage.  

If you’re a chef, even if you’re opening a New American spot or a steakhouse, you need classical training. Why is that?

It’s the foundation of everything you do modernly. How could you know how to make Hollandaise foam if you can’t make Hollandaise? How could you know how to make a preparation using Bordelaise sauce, if you don’t know how to make Bordelaise sauce? That’s what makes Bygone so cool. It takes dishes like tuna ravigote and vichyssoise and brings them back to the forefront. These are dishes that people have forgotten about for 50 years—now they are new and exciting again. Without the understanding of what nouvelle cuisine was at that time, we wouldn’t be anywhere. Paul Bocuse just passed away and his impact on the culinary community was huge. Without him, we wouldn’t know how to make some of the things that we have today or have some of the chefs that we have today.  

These dishes are really complicated—it’s not like working somewhere where you’re just flipping burgers on the grill. Has that made it hard to find people to cook?

We’ve had a lot of cooks come through, and I’ve had to let a lot go. I’ve had to say, ‘Listen, I’m sorry, it’s not that you’re not a good cook or can’t cook, it’s just that you’re not ready for this particular kitchen.’ This is high end—you have to be very skilled and have a very strong foundation to know what you’re doing here.   

When you get out to eat, where do you like to go?

I just went to Alma Cocina Latina. One of my cooks works as a sous chef there. I went there and had great arepas. La Cuchara is really great. I also like McFaul’s IronHorse Tavern near my house—there’s always good food and everyone needs a local spot.
 

How have you seen the culinary community change since you moved here?

I’ve seen the culinary community change in the two years since I’ve moved here. I see our community of chefs getting bigger and more prestigious. I don’t know what my direct impact on that is, but it’s a great feeling to know that you’re in a blossoming community.  

What’s the most valuable piece of advice you ever got from a mentor?

When I asked to move from my externship as garde manger to a paid line cook at the pasta station at Union Square Cafe, Chef de Cuisine Sandro Romano at told me, ‘You don’t become an astronaut overnight.’