From Afghanistan to Venezuela to Peru to Ethiopia, Baltimore’s dining landscape has become increasingly international. With the January opening of Ammoora, the newest country to join Charm City’s global gastronomy scene is Syria.

Even if you think you’ve never eaten Syrian cuisine, it will feel instantly familiar if you’ve ever sampled fare from the Middle East. Syrian food falls under the umbrella of Levantine cuisine. The Levant, historically along the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean (also known as “the fertile crescent”), includes the regions of Syria, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Cyprus. There are slight variations of spices (mostly combinations of sumac, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, and coriander) across the region, but the fare, dating back centuries, is similar from one country to the next. It’s colorful and aromatic, combining sweet and spice, texture and tang—and the plates are almost always shared.

Ammoora, set inside the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Federal Hill, celebrates the birthplace of tech entrepreneur-owner Jay Salkini. These are the dishes that he and his Damascus-born chef, Dima Al-Chaar, grew up eating. Influenced by old-school family recipes, Al-Chaar, who has opened restaurants from Dubai to Damascus, uses traditional ingredients and adds her own modern twist. The overall menu mission, says Salkini, is for Marylanders “to taste this amazing food that my mom and grandma made for us with style and with love.”

When you sit down to study the menu, you’ll likely crane your neck to see what others are eating. Go with a big party and order the recommended two to three small plates per person. We actually ordered more than that—and some of us left the table still hungry. (Be forewarned, the tab can grow shockingly high for what amounts to a lot of very small starters.)

That said, the oversized menu is filled with culinary treasures, including eight dips and a dozen or so hot and cold mezzes, plus flatbreads, soups, and salads. Vegetarians will rejoice that more than half the menu is plant-based. There are four entrees featured, but on each of my visits, my companions and I were too enamored with the appetizers to move on to the bigger plates.

 

SYRIAN FARE IS COLORFUL AND AROMATIC, COMBINING SWEET AND SPICE, TEXTURE AND TANG.

 

The dishes rotate every few months, so no two visits will be the same. On the dip side, among our favorites was the shrimp hummus, a creamy spread that adds a generous pile of crustaceans, as well as cilantro, lemon juice, and garlic, to the traditional chickpea dish—it’s the very best version of hummus you’ll ever have. The keshké—a thick labneh yogurt bolstered by bulgur, scallions, and walnuts and flecked with dried rose petals, is tangy and rich and offers a cooling component to drizzle onto almost anything else you order.

Another spread, the muhammara—roasted red peppers, walnuts, pomegranate molasses, tahini, and olive oil—is equal parts smokey and sweet and gets its zing from a hit of red chile paste. With its deep red and orange hue, it reminded me of a beautiful sunset. The kebbeh orfaliyeh—think Syria’s answer to beef tartare—was subtly seasoned with minced onions, bell peppers, marjoram, and red chile paste. A few of us at the table thought that it was slightly under-seasoned, while another dining companion deemed it “perfect.”

On the hot mezze side, everyone agreed that the beyti sujuk rolls—char-gilled beef folded into doughy lavash bread resting in a pool of piquant tomato sauce and dressed with a dollop of labneh—was a menu highlight, as was the clever knafeh shrimp deep-fried to perfection in kataifi dough (a shredded and spun phyllo dough usually used for Middle Eastern pastries), which provided an extra-crispy crust.

The shrimp, served with a tahini tajen swirled with chile oil for dipping, resembled mini corndogs. The Aleppo-style kebbet karaz hot mezze—lamb meatballs with bulgur, cinnamon, and mini meatballs floating in a sweet-and-sour cherry sauce—was terrifically tart and led to much negotiation over who would scrape the last bits from the bowl.

All the dishes are prettily presented. Many get dressed up with a sprinkling of nuts or a scattering of pomegranate seeds that glisten like jewels across the surface and make everything look elevated and extra elegant. The dips arrive with house-made pita served inside a Syrian mokhoul basket.

The space, all pink, rust, and cinnamon, with exquisite inlaid Mother of Pearl furniture and coffee carts imported from Syria, is as alluring as the food, though the front of the house is sexier than the back, which definitely channels more of a hotel restaurant vibe. The well-heeled crowd is diverse. Across various visits, we saw a table of Johns Hopkins professors, a Syrian family who drove in from Annapolis, as well as people who live at the Ritz Residences, all adding to the convivial vibe.

This is exactly what Salkini was after.

“Syria isn’t what you hear about in the news. We want to deliver the message that we have a lot of love, and we need to be loved,” says Salkini, referencing the recent earthquake in his country. “We wanted to bring the love and hospitality of the region.”

Ammoora—meaning “loving, beautiful, and captivating” in Arabic—truly embodies its name.  It’s a round-the-world flavor journey worth taking—just know that this kind of travel doesn’t come cheap.

AMMOORA 751 Key Highway, 410-872-6610. HOURS: Daily 5-10 p.m. PRICES: Salads and soup: $10-16; mezze: $14-24; entrees: $36-55; desserts: $9-12. AMBIANCE: Elegant.

Debbie Phelps almost always buys things in threes. That’s fitting: Her three children, including her youngest—swimming phenom Michael Phelps—are grown and living on their own, but never far from Phelps’s heart or mind.

“I carried those back from Fukuoka,” says 63-year-old Phelps, motioning to three parasols mounted against a charcoal wallpapered wall in the foyer of her harbor-front Ritz-Carlton Residences condominium in Federal Hill. The trip—to the 2001 swimming world championships in Fukuoka, Japan—had been one of her first international forays, and she’d brought home not only the parasols, but also a triumphant 16-year-old Michael, who’d broken his own world record for a gold medal win in the 200-meter butterfly.

It’s fitting, too, that those parasols are the first things greeting visitors when the private elevator doors open to Phelps’s second-floor residence. The foyer—warm, lush, and punctuated with this subtle memento—sets the tone for the whole home.

“When I walk in, I want my home to almost open its arms and wrap me up in them,” says Phelps, who moved in 2013 to her current unit from a larger space in the same development, keeping much of the same design. “I want it to be comfortable. I want it to be home.”

But in creating the space, Phelps had another goal in mind, this one tied to her family’s remarkable journey. “I want my home to tell the story,” says Phelps, sitting just steps from the foyer in a home office lined with images of the cities that played a starring role in her son’s rise to fame, including Sydney, Athens, Barcelona, and London. Around her, and scattered throughout the home, are keepsakes collected as she traveled to competitions across the globe. “It’s like opening a window to where things have been,” she says.

Though the journey began in Western Maryland, where she grew up—and where she met ex-husband Fred Phelps—the past 15 years, in particular, have been a truly instructional affair. The run-up to those years had moved the family from Harford County, where Debbie Phelps was a public-school teacher in home economics, to Baltimore County, so that eldest daughter Hilary could pursue a swimming career with the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Phelps’s middle child, Whitney, and youngest, Michael, soon followed in their sister’s footsteps, plunging Debbie Phelps into the hectic life of a swim mom. Both daughters proved to be accomplished swimmers, but it was Michael who captured the world’s attention with his athletic feats, competing in the 2000 Sydney Olympics at age 15, nabbing six gold medals at the Athens Olympics in 2004, a record eight gold medals in Beijing in 2008, and then another another four in London in 2012—all contributing to his unprecedented total of 22 Olympic medals.

Debbie Phelps, of course, was there for it all, an exhilarating ride she details in her speaking engagements and in her book, A Mother for All Seasons. At televised competitions, when the camera panned from Michael in the pool to his mom in the crowd, she was often caught in what she calls a “DP moment,” alternately cheering and wiping away tears. Her career, meanwhile, progressed on its own upward trajectory, taking her from the classroom into administrative roles and finally to her current position as director of The Education Foundation of Baltimore County Public Schools.

Though her Baltimore County homes—first in West Towson and then in Rodgers Forge—offered family-friendly living within striking distance of the swim center, Phelps says she’d always told her children she was eventually city-bound, in search of convenience and “the energy of the city.” If she could be on the water—non-chlorinated for a change—all the better. In the meantime, she had to make do with the fountain in the backyard of her Rodgers Forge townhome that was “as close as I could get to the harbor,” she jokes.

By 2010, with her children launched in their own lives, Phelps was ready to make a move. There was no need to search: She’d known since shortly after the 2008 Beijing Olympics exactly where she’d land. Heading home from Michael’s official homecoming celebration at Fort McHenry, she noticed the brand new Ritz-Carlton Residences outside the window. “I remember saying to everyone in the SUV, ‘I want to live there someday,’” says Phelps.

Moving in—first to a garden-style two-bedroom condo and later into the one-bedroom unit she now calls home—Phelps finally has the vibrant city life she wanted, plus maintenance-free living with breathtaking water and city views. Her new home also offers a welcome sense of security and privacy. The post-Olympics public outpouring of admiration for Michael was “humbling and warm and exciting,” says Phelps, but there was no denying her family was now firmly in the public domain (a point driven home to Phelps one night as she sat in her Rodgers Forge family room and looked out the open door to see a stranger peering in). “It’s like I said to Michael recently—he belongs to the public,” Phelps says. Still, “sometimes people just need their space. I can have that here.”

It’s here that Phelps can relax on her “DP days,” a once-a-month ritual she’s adopted in recent years. “There’s no watch, my phone is on mute or vibrate, and the kids know that if they call and I don’t answer, mostly it’s a Saturday and it’s a DP day.”

Often she heads to Harford County on those days, but “there are days I can come here, and I don’t have to leave at all,” she says. “It’s always nice some days just to relax and leave your pajamas on and do nothing except watch Law & Order or football all weekend.”

It’s here, too, that the family can gather to connect and reflect on their collective experience, something they couldn’t do while Michael was in the midst of his meteoric rise. Though the family and Michael’s coach, Bob Bowman, had shared some of the same magical memories, “when we were living this, I didn’t really know how Bob felt when Michael won the eighth gold, or how Michael felt after he didn’t medal in the 400 IM in London,” she explains. And with Michael always off to the next challenge, there was never the time nor the space to reflect. “This home gives us that. It’s a place to talk through all the experiences, because, no, we have not gone through photo albums and said, ‘Remember this? Remember this?’”

When she moved from Rodgers Forge, Phelps left behind all of her furniture, in part for her niece, who’d moved into her old home, “but also,” Phelps pauses, “because it was a new chapter.” To design the space that would reflect her style, she turned to Colorado-based interior designer Lita Dirks.

“Lita said, ‘Tell me what you like.’” Phelps says. Although on this day in August, Phelps is comfortably dressed in a summery all-white ensemble, with chunky silver jewelry and peep-toed slingbacks, “for much of the year, I wear a lot of warm colors: reds and blues and greens,” she says. With that in mind, she and Dirks put together a palette for the home that mirrors Phelps’s wardrobe.

Her penchant for deep reds, plus a post-Beijing Olympics mindset lent itself to Asian-inspired touches like a crisp, lacquered dining-room china cabinet that’s flanked by a terra-cotta soldier on one side and a copper kimono statuette on the other. But there are whimsical notes, as well, like the portrait of pearl-bedecked ostrich in one of the guest bathrooms or the zebra-striped chest in the hallway.

And of course, family is woven throughout, from the 12-seat dining-room table that fits the extended clan to the three slim statues standing sentry beside the living-room fireplace. (“This is Hilary, Whitney, and Michael,” says Phelps, noting that Hilary’s statue has its eyes closed, “just like her baby picture.”)

Family also includes grandchildren Taylor, 8, and Connor, 6. And Grandma Phelps—that’s “G” to the grandkids—wanted this to feel like home to them, too. As she notes this, she points out the childproof table, perfect for coloring or playing games, but more telling is her recounting of then-4-year-old Connor’s first encounter with the three statues. As Connor began, in typical preschooler fashion, to “look with his hands,” Phelps’s first worry wasn’t about losing an expensive piece of home décor but instead that, “he’ll be so upset if it breaks.”

Even the kitchen is, in its own way, part of the story. Sleek and functional, it’s the kitchen of someone more excited about the new restaurant at the Ritz than the latest culinary gadget. Though her children are endlessly amused by the notion of a home-economics teacher who doesn’t like to cook, Phelps is happy to cede the kitchen to her daughters, who visit often. “That is not my forte,” says Phelps with a laugh.

In moving into her current unit, Phelps transferred much of Dirks’s design, tweaked with the help of Rita St. Clair Associates to add color, especially on the walls, and to conform to a new layout. Eight months in, Phelps was still revising when an Asian-inspired trunk in the window of Harbor East’s Arhaus caught her eye. “That’s when I met Debbie,” Phelps says of Arhaus interior specialist Debbie Shepard. “I said, ‘I want that piece!’”

As the two walked the showroom floor and chatted, “we just clicked,” says Phelps. The trunk is now featured beneath the parasols in Phelps’s foyer, its taupe-painted finish complementing the neutral shades in the parasols. And Shepard is a newfound friend and design consultant.

Both Phelps and Shepard declare the home a work in progress. In the near future, they’ll add a sitting area to the bedroom to capitalize on the stunning water view and a large, round table beside the kitchen to accommodate the growing family. But the biggest need is for display space, says Shepard. Tucked away in storage, Phelps has “some great treasures to work with from her travels,” and her life, says Shepard. “They have sentimental value. We really need to have some of these out so she can enjoy them.”

Phelps has designs for her life outside the home, as well, of course. In 2016, she’ll reach the 40-year milestone as a public educator. She is “not by any means ready to stop working,” she says, though her next move is still up in the air. “I’ve often thought about going back and getting my doctorate,” she says, noting it would be more for self-satisfaction than anything else. “And, I don’t know, maybe another book.”

However her future pursuits unfold, they will be closely tied to family, including Michael, though the public focus on the champion now is not what anyone expected, after his DUI arrest in September, which prompted the swimmer to seek treatment and delay his return to competitive swimming.

“As a parent, it is very disappointing,” Debbie Phelps said in an e-mail response to us following her son’s arrest, which occurred after this interview. “But I am proud of him for taking responsibility and support his decision to focus on himself right now.”

And while nobody knows where Michael’s career will go next, Debbie Phelps’s role remains unchanged. “We’re just going to support him like we always have,” she says.

No matter what, the Phelps family will always have each other—and a place to gather. “You raise your children with wings to fly. I feel like I’ve given them wings to be successful,” Phelps says, edging close to a DP moment before breaking into a smile. “But it doesn’t mean you can’t all hang out together.”