On a warm morning in late August, Myeasha Taylor wades down a row of nearly waist-high greenery at Black Butterfly Farm, a teaching urban farm on 6.7 acres in Curtis Bay that’s part of the nonprofit Farm Alliance of Baltimore. Taylor, the farm’s education and production manager, picks a handful of ripe fish peppers—bright red chiles about the size of small jalapeños—from among the 100 “row feet” of plants running down the plot between columns of indigo, flowering okra, and red amaranth taller than she is. Bees weave through the summer air. Butterflies alight on the tallest sun-drenched plants.

“This is our little ancestral crop section,” says Taylor as she lifts a tangle of vines woven through a line of near-invisible trellises. Most of the peppers are still the same shade as the leaves surrounding them, some are painted in stunning kelly-green and orange stripes, some are vermillion, still others the color of butter. A few are white, a distinction that gave the fish pepper its name, as it was favored by cooks in 19th-century Chesapeake Bay oyster and crab houses for use in their fish stews, disappearing into pale, creamy soups, and before that, in Black communities in the Mid-Atlantic where the peppers were grown and used in fish and seafood cookery.

That fish peppers are now growing in this South Baltimore field, are being sold at the 32nd Street Farmers Market, and are on the menu of such places as Blacksauce Kitchen, Artifact Coffee, and Spike Gjerde’s Woodberry Tavern—where they’re used so liberally, the peppers have their own mis en place containers at the chefs’ stations—is largely because of Denzel Mitchell Jr.

Mitchell, the Oklahoma native who is one of the founders of the Farm Alliance and is currently its executive director, got interested in urban farming 15 years ago. That was also when he first learned about fish peppers from a local farmer. He had never heard of them.

“So, I go home, I look up the fish pepper, and find out that it’s intrinsically connected to the enslaved African experience in the Chesapeake. It has a storied history in Maryland,” says Mitchell.

Captivated, he went to local nurseries and farmers markets, thinking he’d have no problem finding the peppers—but to his surprise, no one was growing them. It was as if the pepper, once so widely found in fish houses that it was named after them, had disappeared.

Mitchell is a cook at Blacksauce Kitchen, the Remington restaurant he helped Damian Mosley open in 2016 that specializes in barbecue and biscuits. Blacksauce uses fish peppers in a house-made hot sauce, in fish sandwiches, in mayonnaise, and in other seasonal preparations. As he shares his fish pepper origin story from Blacksauce’s tiny dining room, he pauses, disappearing into the back and returning with a Mason jar of pickled fish peppers. He opens the jar, adding a few peppers to a dish of curried chickpeas on a Trinidadian flatbread known as bara. The peppers are fruity, floral, with a heat similar to a serrano—spicy but not bitter.

“The story of the fish pepper really spoke to me,” he says, lifting more peppers from the jar. “It was an homage to enslaved African foodways, and that influence in Chesapeake Bay cuisine, that connection to the cuisine in this region—it was the most popular pepper in the fish houses, so there’s this heritage.”

Mitchell’s initial research led him to the culinary historian Michael W. Twitty, author of the James Beard Award-winning book The Cooking Gene, who specializes in traditional African-American foodways. Twitty had curated an African-American heritage seed collection, the first of its kind, with the Landreth Seed Company. (Founded in Philadelphia in 1784, Landreth is the oldest seed company in the U.S.)

Twitty theorizes that Haitians fleeing the Haitian Revolution, a rebellion of the enslaved against French colonial rule in the late 1700s, initially brought fish pepper plants to the Mid-Atlantic, where the peppers were grown by enslaved Africans and became popular in Black community cooking and later among regional fish houses. Then by the early 20th century, due to urbanization and changing food styles, the pepper was largely forgotten, absent from regional cookbooks, missing from farms, and impossible to find in the ground.

“When you’re erased from history, what can you do? Things disappear because people get exhausted, even when things taste good. It’s simply not worth the time anymore,” says Twitty, speaking, of course, not just about the trajectory of the fish pepper.

The preservation and subsequent rediscovery of the pepper happened largely by accident. Sometime in the 1940s, a Black artist from southeastern Pennsylvania named Horace Pippin traded some fish pepper seeds with Pennsylvania beekeeper and seed collector H. Ralph Weaver in exchange for bee stings to treat his arthritis. (Bee stings have long been used as a therapy for joint pain.) Years later, that beekeeper’s grandson, food ethnographer William Woys Weaver, found his grandfather’s seeds, realized how rare they were, started growing them, and introduced the seeds to the Seed Savers Exchange.

“They were in the freezer at my grandfather’s house,” says Weaver now, noting that properly frozen seeds will keep for many years. “I’ve planted corn frozen in 1999 and gotten 100-percent germination,” he says, adding that wheat can keep for 1,000 years. “He had them all in little baby food jars at the bottom of the deep-freeze. Probably my baby food jars because my grandparents raised me,” says Weaver. “I had [seeds] that nobody could find at that time.”

“THE STORY OF THE FISH PEPPER WAS AN HOMAGE TO ENSLAVED AFRICAN FOODWAYS.’’

Many years after that, Mitchell would order seeds whose lineage can be traced back to Pippin’s bartered handful and begin the next renaissance of the fish pepper in Baltimore.

Not long after Mitchell started growing his 21st-century fish peppers, he ran into Spike Gjerde—one of the foremost chefs in the region and the only Baltimore chef to have won the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Mid-Atlantic award—and the two got to talking about produce, as food people do. As Mitchell tells it, Gjerde stopped in his tracks when he found out what Mitchell was growing. “He was like, ‘Fish peppers! Fish peppers? Where? Can we go right now?’” Mitchell smiles, considering the jar in front of him, filled with its deeply aromatic crimson treasure.

At the time, Mitchell was farming on six vacant lots in Baltimore’s Belair-Edison neighborhood. “I only had 15 plants, but no one else was growing them,” says Mitchell, whose Five Seeds Farm, which closed in 2016, is now the site of Hillen Homestead’s flower farm. “Spike wanted to get Tabasco out of his restaurant and have a Maryland hot sauce that represented Maryland cuisine on Chesapeake oysters, grown by Maryland farms.” Gjerde bought all the peppers Mitchell had. Soon he was growing enough peppers so that Gjerde could start making Snake Oil, his own brand of hot sauce, a heady mixture of mashed fish peppers, cider vinegar, and sea salt that’s sold at Artifact Coffee and used in abundance at Gjerde’s restaurant, Woodberry Tavern.

Back at Black Butterfly Farm, Taylor says they’d recently started harvesting the season’s fish peppers—55 pounds of them had just gone to Woodberry. “They’re easy to grow. And they’re easy to pick; they just take a long-ass time,” she says, smiling under her broad sun hat.

For years, the Farm Alliance has been buying fish pepper seeds each season—these days primarily from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange—but this year, says Taylor, they’ll probably start saving some of their own seeds as well. “Seed saving is really important,” she continues, noting how the peppers were off the market for so long and that Farm Alliance gets funding for ancestral crops through a grant from the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education organization. The practice, of course, is also how the pepper survived in the first place.

Taylor surveys the adjacent crops—in addition to the amaranth and indigo, there are rows of sweet potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, and bright marigolds nestled below the amaranth like stray bursts of gold. Those crops will head to Farm Alliance’s market stall at the 32nd Street Farmers Market in Waverly, and many of the peppers will migrate to Gjerde’s kitchen.

“I became aware of fish peppers from reading about them, from accounts by Michael Twitty and William Woys Weaver, because they weren’t around,” says Gjerde, sitting on the patio outside his restaurant one afternoon. “I started asking people about fish peppers, and it was really Denzel who found me.”

When Gjerde went to Mitchell’s farm for the first time, the chef still hadn’t even seen a fish pepper, much less tasted one. “They’re bright, hot, not as aggressively spicy as habañeros, with a grassy quality. That was the first time I’d ever seen an albino [pepper],” Gjerde says. “We even tried to make a white hot sauce, but it was a kind of unappealing tan.”  Gjerde smiles ruefully as he considers the notion of beige hot sauce. “We’ve made green Snake Oil in the past, but we mostly just use the red. Anytime we’re adding heat or spice to cooking at Woodberry, it’s through pickled fish pepper, dried fish pepper, or Snake Oil.”

Although the production of Snake Oil paused during the pandemic, Gjerde says they’ve got a healthy supply of it, in the form of about 100 cases of bottles and 50 barrels of pepper mash, and he’s planning to jumpstart production soon. Gjerde likes the rather histrionic appeal of his hot sauce’s name, as “snake oil” has long been used to describe cure-all elixirs.

“It’s not hot hot. We always have to relieve people of the notion that it’s gonna, like, hurt them.”

He looks over his latest menu, cataloging the dishes that use fish pepper: on the deviled eggs and the crudites that make up the Tavern Board, in the scrapple musubi, the pit-beef carpaccio, the smoked-clam savory pie, the fried chicken, the crab cake, and the steak au poivre. So, most of the dishes on the menu? “Yeah,” he says, with a rather startled laugh, “now that you mention it.”

These days Mitchell is not the only local farmer growing fish peppers. Gjerde’s personal culinary obsession, running to thousands of pounds of the peppers a year, requires sourcing beyond the Farm Alliance’s fields, and has expanded to include One Straw Farm in northern Baltimore County, Heritage Acres Farm in Pennsylvania, and 78 Acres in Smithsburg, all of whom now grow fish peppers, too.

As more people have become aware of the cultural history and importance of local produce and demand has grown, more farms have added the peppers to their repertoire, including Sassafras Creek Farm in Leonardtown and Tomatoes, Etc. in Westminster, whose owner, farmer Jim Crebs, sells the plants at his family’s stall at the JFX farmers market during the summer. David Thomas, who with his wife, Tonya, runs H3irloom Food Group, a Baltimore business dedicated to exploring Black food traditions, plans to grow fish peppers at Gabriel Fields, their Upperco farm.

And fish peppers aren’t just at Woodberry. Chef John Shields, long a proponent of Chesapeake cuisine, uses them in a Haitian-style dish with blue catfish. And in Upper Fells, chef-owner Robbie Tutlewski of Little Donna’s ferments fish peppers and adds them to aiolis and sauces, and doses his crab and catfish stew with them—a fitting destination for the peppers, whose bright colors are no longer hidden in the pot.

Mitchell is circumspect when he considers the role he’s played in Baltimore’s current fish pepper renaissance, which is not so much the second regional revival of the pepper but the third.

“I think the first one was actually the 1810s to 1830s, during the enslavement period,” he says, tracing the pepper’s heritage back before the oyster and crab houses to when those cooks learned to add fish peppers to their soups from the Black communities who had grown the peppers in the first place. “It was in the Black enslaved service community, then in the Black culinary community,” Mitchell says.

“We’re talking about the peppers that were used with terrapin, blue crab, rockfish, oysters, and shad,” says Twitty. “This particular pepper comes to be associated with the genius of these Black cooks working in these fish houses,” he continues, noting the importance of pepper vinegar and pepper sauce.

In Twitty’s 70-page pamphlet, Fighting Old Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Marylanders, 1634-1864, he includes a recipe for fish pepper sauce; it’s also the second recipe in The Cooking Gene. That recipe, calling for fish peppers, kosher salt, and apple cider vinegar or rum, bears a striking resemblance to the ingredients in Gjerde’s Snake Oil, which is not a coincidence.

“It’s confirmation that food transcends all types of barriers; food is the connection. It’s pretty cool when you think about it,” says Mitchell. In Blacksauce Kitchen’s single dining room booth, he sits back, smiling. “I mean, there could be worse things attached to your legacy.”

While sitting in a small Senegalese restaurant during a trip to Senegal and Gambia in 2022, David and Tonya Thomas shared an “aha” moment.

“We sat on this dock at this roadside restaurant, and they had prepared this meal of chicken yassa and jollof rice for us,” recalls David. “That chicken yassa changed my life.”

When the couple tasted the deeply flavorful dish—seared chicken in a caramelized onion and lemon-mustard sauce—it triggered a flood of childhood memories. “Isn’t this your grandmother and mother’s smothered chicken?” Tonya said to David. “We always thought it was just a homemade dish,” says David. “It’s simple and complex at the same time—but when we tasted the chicken yassa, that taste was there, that flavor was there.”

For the Thomases, co-owners of Bel Air-Edison-based The H3irloom Food Group and longtime Baltimore restaurateurs—they owned Ida B’s Table and Herb & Soul Gastro Café & Lounge—the trip was not only a flavor journey through Africa but a homecoming.

For both David and Tonya, whose ancestors were enslaved, their travels to Africa were the culmination of a lifelong pursuit to learn more about their roots through the foodways of their mother country. As they toured the continent with fellow chefs and culinary historians, the trip was both professional and personal.

Shortly after their return from Africa, the duo, who left Ida B’s in February of 2020, launched The H3irloom Food Group, which is dedicated to sharing the story of their forebears through food, whether it is catering weddings and parties in their 17,000-square-foot event space, hosting educational dinner series, manufacturing hot sauces out of the massive commercial kitchen, or schooling fledgling Baltimore brown and Black chefs on techniques, such as how to sous vide or properly braise.

“We’re not just a caterer,” explains David. “We envision this business to once again reclaim the narrative.”

Although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, for David, 54, that narrative started in the Jonestown kitchen of his paternal grandmother: Greensboro, North Carolina-born Anna Poole Thomas, who was the daughter of an enslaved person. Her Howard County home sat on five acres of land rife with apple and pear trees and vines heavy with grapes, watermelon, and tomatoes. As a boy, David suffered from allergy issues so severe he couldn’t play outside, so he sat beside Anna as she cooked in her kitchen.

“I was allergic to 109 different things,” says David, as he enumerates: “Cotton, synthetics, plastics, all nuts except peanuts, penicillin, all seafood except canned tuna—I’ve outgrown a great deal of it, but I still can’t eat seafood.”

Despite his dietary constraints—in fact, because of them—he became an astute observer as he watched Anna cook. “She made everything from biscuits to homemade root beer,” he says. “She ground her own salt and spices. I watched her butcher chickens….I’m always chasing my grandmother’s recipes because I never sat with her to get her to write them down. I have a mental memory of flavors, and eating that chicken yassa took me back 40 years to sitting in her kitchen.”

At an early age, Tonya, now 57, also grew up watching various family members work their magic in the kitchen, especially her maternal grandmother, Clarice Davis, who cooked for Baltimore City schools, and her maternal great-grandmother, Levie Ratchford. “My great-grandmother cooked and baked everything,” Tonya recalls of her expansive family, including her grandmother, who had eight children, and an aunt who had 12. “When we had family gatherings for the holidays, there was always a spread on the table. We’d have not only the turkey, but the ham. And you had not only green beans but greens and mac and cheese and corn.”

Tonya can trace her family’s roots back to the 1800s in Calvert County. Her ancestors were oystermen. She got her start baking for her grandmother. “When she was cooking, she’d say, ‘Can you make me a cake?’” she recalls. “I started experimenting and making things. From there, as I delved into my family history, I found out that my paternal grandmother, who died before I was born, was known for making bread pudding. I was tickled because I am now known for my bread pudding.”

 

“We’re not just a caterer,” explains David. “We envision this business to once again reclaim the narrative.”

 

Though they shared an interest in cooking, both David and Tonya pursued other creative paths. She chased her dream of working in fashion design. David, who was trained as a classical pianist and played bass, became an independent music producer. By 1990, Tonya was working as a visual merchandizer for national apparel chain Fashion Bug in Arbutus, where David, who lived nearby, applied for a job. “I was a studio musician at night, and I’d get off at 6 or 7 in the morning,” he says. “Sometimes during the day, I’d be doing nothing, so I was like, ‘I’m going to get a job and make some money.’ I walked down the hill and I see this woman [Tonya] in the window, and I’m like, ‘Wow.’ And then I see a ‘help wanted’ sign and I was like, ‘I’m going to go in there and get a job and hopefully get a woman, too.’” True to his word, he got both. Fashion Bug hired him and two years later, on July 18, 1982, he and Tonya were married.

Even at Fashion Bug, Tonya was known for her culinary skills. When there was a grand opening or the debut of a store remodeling, Tonya would bake a cake or make deviled eggs. Her first professional job came when David was working for a production company that brought rapper Chuck Robb to town. Robb’s team was looking for someone to stock the green room before his concert, and David helped Tonya get the gig. Before long, the couple turned to the idea of making food their livelihood. In 1994, they opened their own catering company, Skilletz, in which everything was cooked in a cast-iron skillet. The mission was for people “to know where their food came from,” Tonya says. “It was healthy, organic, all-natural, farm-to-table before that was a thing.”

Using organic, sustainable ingredients was a natural progression, says David. “It was us reverting back to our childhood memories,” he explains. “My grandmother used to go out and pick her greens, and it was the same thing for her family. We were using the cast-iron skillet as our foundation, though we didn’t even realize it was the way our grandmothers cooked—it was just the universe talking to us.”

From there, the duo briefly worked at Metropolitan Kitchen & Lounge in Annapolis. David was the chef; Tonya made the pastries. Though they were only there for a short time, the experience was formative. “They wanted a chef who could deliver farm-to-table cooking,” says David. “I crafted the menu, hired the staff, Tonya would help train the staff and expo in the kitchen. It was important to the rest of my restaurant career.”

By 2012, the couple opened their first eatery, Herb & Soul. It was carry-out only, with a window in the back of a low-budget bodega-style store in Parkville, though the fare was so elevated—tender short ribs, lamb chops, bacon-wrapped pork loin, house-made rolls—people would often call for reservations. “We’d always tell people, walk past the toilet paper to get to us,” says Tonya, laughing at the memory. “They would see the menu, and think it was a dine-in restaurant.”

When the eatery first opened, they called their fare “Southern Fusion.” “We were evolving,” says David. “Calling it Southern Fusion was not understanding that all soul food— Southern food, all American food—is fusion, a great part of the world’s cuisines are fusion.” But to David, fusion meant, “We wanted to cook Southern soul food, whatever we knew that to be at the time, with influence from around the world.”

As dining devotees flocked, the business evolved and expanded. “We just put a little folding plastic table out there,” says Tonya. “Then these two women came in and ordered food with a bottle of wine and we were like, We can’t have them eating out of the containers or on paper plates,’ so we went out and got china for people just to be able to sit and dine in the middle of the store.”

When the convenience store closed, Tonya and David took over the whole space—and their first dine-in restaurant was born.

From its earliest days, then-WYPR host Marc Steiner was a fan. One day, he brought along famed culinary historian Michael Twitty for lunch and introduced him to the couple. At the time, Twitty was researching and writing The Cooking Gene, his memoir about Southern cuisine and food culture. (The book would later win the James Beard Foundation Book of the Year in 2018.) Tonya recognized the famed author—but David didn’t. So, when Twitty said to them, “I like what you’re doing but you guys have a larger story you could be telling,” David brushed it off. “Okay, thank you for coming in, I appreciate you,” he said, in a somewhat dismissive tone. After they left, Tonya turned to her husband and said, “Do you know who was at the table?” “I was like, ‘Ohhhhhh,’” chuckles David. “From there, we just fell down the rabbit hole.”

Meeting Twitty—someone they now count as a close friend and one of their traveling companions to Africa—was pivotal for the couple. “From that point on,” says Tonya, “we weren’t just giving you food. There had to be a reason this food was on the table.” As they learned about the history of the foodways of the African diaspora, it deepened their cooking and sharpened and shaped their mission to amplify their story—and the stories of those on whose shoulders they now stood.

In 2017, they opened Ida B’s Table, named for Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, a prominent Black journalist and civil rights leader. The fare was all-natural and organic, and the couple sourced from local farms. There were modern soul food interpretations, like local catfish in stewed tomatoes; cheddar farro (an ancient African grain); Old Bay fried chicken with buttermilk biscuits; and spiced Liberian greens on the menu. And the spot also served as a community hub where activists and authors like Twitty would give readings and local Black artists like Baker Artist Award-winner Ernest Shaw would exhibit their work.

“That space was about trying to reclaim the narrative of our food and our people,” says Tonya. “Ida B. Wells was known for telling the truth,” says David. “It was going to be a place where we told the truth—and I wasn’t afraid to tell anyone about that truth.”

Among the falsehoods he wanted to correct is the common misconception that soul food is unhealthy. It’s a narrative he says that stems from the higher rate of obesity in the Black community. “But that all came from industrial agriculture. Once [our ancestors] migrated from the Deep South and [stopped] being on that land, we were at the whims of industrial agriculture. We left the land because we were oppressed there, but it took us from a system of growing our own food to being dependent on the foods that were brought to us. Once Tonya and I understood that, we said now that we know better, we have to do better by educating our people—that’s what Ida B’s was all about.”

As they continued to tell their story and learn more about their heritage, the duo dreamed of going to Africa to further their culinary education. In 2018, David took first place on The Food Network’s Chopped, winning $10,000. From that first appearance, he announced his intentions to take his family to Africa with any award money he won. In 2020, as a Chopped Grand Champion, he took home another $50,000. That was the money that paid for their culinary trip to Senegal and Gambia. They made it a family affair, bringing their son Brendan. On their first night there, they landed on what would have been the 36th birthday of their older son, National Guardsman Evan Curbeam, who died at the age of 29 in 2013, after a drowning accident.

“We landed in Dakur and they had made arrangements for us to go up to this beach and have a candle-lighting ceremony,” says David. “The sky was filled with all these stars,” remembers Tonya. “I felt like he was there with us. It was memorable in so many ways. We went to an ‘auntie’s’ house and I touched a tree in her yard. I was like, ‘Why do I feel so comfortable here?’ And that’s when Michael [Twitty] said, ‘This is probably where your roots are.’ Throughout the whole experience, people kept saying, ‘Welcome home. We’ve been waiting for you to come.’”

As they visited small rural villages, where performers danced and banged on drums and mingled alongside village chiefs, they ate the food of their ancestors. “We went there to connect, walking through century-old markets with open stalls that had flies all over the place,” says David. “Then we went into the villages and were given rice and thieboudienne,” the national dish of Senegal, with fish and rice in tomato sauce. “We ate all together and with our hands as a community,” adds Tonya.

 

The duo dreamed of going to Africa to further their culinary education. 

 

They came back to Baltimore more energized than ever—and ready to rewrite the stories that had been told about their people. “The narrative is that they pulled these savages out of the jungle and brought them here because they needed to be taught some decency,” says David. He pauses, growing emotional. “No, no, tell the truth. Y’all grabbed us from there because we’re artisans and engineers and rice cultivators, that is what we found out from our trip, because we saw it. We talked to [village] chiefs who said we didn’t sell our ancestors into slavery, they forced us. When you start understanding that we are more than fried chicken and collard greens.”

They now had a greater understanding of their culture and renewed sense of purpose. Within months of coming back, and at the height of the pandemic, they decided to embark on a new business opportunity when their friends, entrepreneurs Linda and Floyd Taliaferro, wanted to recruit them as partners in their recently launched wedding and event catering business. Their new venture, says David, “is not just about making money—it has to be righteous work at the same time.”

To that end, H3irloom just acquired 68 acres for the business in Upperco, where, like their ancestors, David and Tonya will cultivate the land and grow organic vegetables to use in their catering. “Our partners acquired the land because of what we’ve been talking about for years,” says David. “This has all been part of the grand scheme.”

And last June, along with Twitty, James Beard Award-winning chef Mashama Bailey, and Wisconsin-based chef Adrian Lipscombe, they also acquired 30 acres in South Carolina as part of the Muloma Project as an attempt to take back the land, an old African settlement, that the locals had been forced off.

“There will be three working kitchens,” he says. “One is an ancestral kitchen more like you’d find in Africa in our travels there. You’ll have a heritage kitchen, which will be more like the antebellum kitchen you’d find in the Deep South. And then we go to the modern kitchen, a legacy kitchen which would be a kitchen you’d find in any modern restaurant. We will be able to tell the entire evolution of cooking with a farm to support each kitchen.”

While their plans are grand and their vision stretches way beyond the borders of Baltimore, they’re tirelessly pushing their narrative here, too.

Back in Baltimore on an early summer Saturday, Tonya, along with sous pastry chef Imani Brown, stands covered in flour in the pastry kitchen at H3irloom, making more than 300 of her trademark biscuits to sell at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market.

“You don’t want to overwork the dough,” says Tonya as she rolls and cuts her sticky bun biscuits filled with sweet potatoes and glazed with tamarind. “You want them to stay nice and airy.”

Buttermilk biscuits are a classic Southern staple, but Tonya puts her personal spin on them, filling them with ingredients like strawberries, plantains, and pineapple. “Why can’t biscuits be eaten as a dessert?” she asks.

In the meantime, David works in the catering kitchen, whipping up eggs for 30 sheets of frittatas he sells to wholesale customers including Black-owned businesses like Cuples Tea and Black Acres Roastery.

“We want to take everyone on the food scene in Baltimore with us,” says David. “It’s not about one or two restaurants exceeding expectations. It’s about how many restaurants can we get in this landscape to step up their game just a little bit? We want to leave Maryland’s culinary scene better than when we found it.”