When Robbie Tutlewski and his wife, Kaleigh Schwalbe, were looking for a place to live after a move from Washington, D.C., they were instantly enchanted with Upper Fells Point.

“There were Christmas lights and people had their flowerpots out,” says Tutlewski. “We walked around the area, but I never thought anything would open up.”

But in 2021, something did. That something was the building that housed the iconic Henninger’s Tavern, including a five-room residence upstairs. Schwalbe saw potential, while Tutlewski saw a lot of work.

After all, the three-story brick building at 1812 Bank Street was built circa 1850 and tending to it seemed like a job all its own. In addition to being a family home, at one time, the historic building had housed a medicinal liquor store and sold ice cream. Tutlewski knew he wanted to open a restaurant. It just never occurred to him that he’d live over it.

“I didn’t know anything about how to get a restaurant started—how to hire staff, where to get produce, so to add on another layer of things to go into a space that had a lot of needs wasn’t what I was looking for,” says Tutlewski. “I was just looking to survive.”

But he relented. The couple moved into the home in 2021 and, by June 2022, their charming restaurant—with its menu of Polish specialties and tavern-style pizzas, and granny-chic vibe—was open for business. By September of the following year, Little Donna’s was named one of the 50 Best Restaurants in America by The New York Times.

Four years (and two babies) later, the gifted chef enjoys feeding some 140 or so patrons who arrive for dinner on a busy night.

“A lot of people coming into the restaurant say, ‘Wow, it feels like were in somebody’s house,’” says Tutlewski. “I always love to tell them, ‘You are in someone’s house—you’re in my house!’”

Did you have concerns about living and working in the same place?
One hundred percent, but I thought, if this sucks and the restaurant fails, at least we have a place to stay—we’ll figure out what to do with the downstairs.

Your commute appears to be exactly 12 steps. What’s it like to have such a short trip to the restaurant?
That’s probably the one thing I really miss—the commute. I miss that transition time just being able to space out. But if we lived somewhere else, the restaurant would not be as successful as it is. I wouldn’t have been able to make the commute and have a baby.

How do you balance being a dad with being a chef?
There’s a lot of back and forth. We start turning the lights on, firing up the stove, making the dough, and making pierogies at 7 a.m. I have to finish at five to pick up one of the kids [as the restaurant is open- ing]—and around 7 p.m., I head upstairs to help put the kids to bed.

Is it hard to have boundaries for yourself in both your personal and professional life?
It’s really challenging. The biggest one was having to step away from the focus of food since having our first son, Jesse. There are still things that I want to do here but they have to be on the backburner for now.

Does your staff come upstairs into your home?
Staff is always allowed to come upstairs and three of the people on staff help with childcare—some of them have extra jobs, so I’m only going to ask when I really need it. They will watch the baby monitor or bathe them. It’s not a card I pull often but sometimes I’ll be like, “Hey, can you watch the kids tonight?”

How do you decompress?
I try to get away. In the past, I couldn’t leave because I had to drain the boiler every day during the winter. I couldn’t put that much responsibility on everyone here. I couldn’t put on their prep task, “Cut onions, marinate fish, drain the boiler, this door fell off the hinge.” We’re slowly getting to the point of getting rid of those issues so people can just cook. Sometimes I feel like I’m spending more time working on this stuff than managing and running a restaurant, but it’s gotten better.

What does your almost-three-year-old, Jesse, think about the restaurant?
He knows what’s going on, that Daddy is at work. He comes in and says his hellos, says his holas to everyone, every single day. He has known the staff since day one. He loves looking at [patrons] and seeing what they’re eating. He walked up to somebody one time and goes, “Oh, nice pizza”—and he really meant it.

Walk by Little Donna’s, the pizzeria that opened the first week of June on Bank Street in Upper Fells, and you’d be forgiven if you kept walking.

It doesn’t look like a new restaurant, much less one of the best restaurants to open in the area lately. It’s a 120-year-old rowhouse with the kind of bistro-y décor—a painted menu between lace-curtained windows, a few cafe tables and chairs fighting for sidewalk space with pots of greenery—that looks like it’s been there for years.

In some respect, Little Donna’s has been there for years. When chef-owner Robbie Tutlewski and his wife Kaleigh Schwalbe bought the building in 2021, it had been Henninger’s Tavern for more than three decades. And rather than gutting the place, the couple decided to capitalize on that history, keeping most of the nostalgia-driven stuff on the walls—and many of the tavern’s regulars along with it.

Tutlewski isn’t a newcomer either. He spent the last five years working in D.C. restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Tail Up Goat, and before that a decade in Arizona cooking with Chris Bianco, one of the most respected pizzaiolos in the country (and this year’s James Beard Award-winner for Best Restaurateur). Walk into Little Donna’s and you wouldn’t know any of this. Tutlewski might swing by to ask how your pierogies are, before heading back into his tiny kitchen, but that’s about it.

Little Donna’s is named for the chef’s late grandmother, a small woman (hence the nickname) originally from Belgrade.

“We didn’t even know her age. She was taught to cook by a Polish family,” says Tutlewski, which explains the pierogies—deft potato dumplings topped with dollops of sour cream, some parsley, and a surprising and utterly addictive dose of chile crisp. It also explains a few other dishes: palacinka, tender pancakes rolled up with farmer’s cheese and served with flavor bombs of hot honey chicken and pepper relish; and pork schnitzel, a crisp masterwork stuffed with kielbasa sourced from Ostrowski’s, a nearly 50-year-old sausage shop conveniently located across the street. Paired with aioli and pickled celery, the schnitzel has been on the menu since the restaurant opened, and Little Donna’s grandson has pledged, thankfully, that both it and those pierogies will remain there.

 

TUTLEWSKI’S MENU IS DEEPLY IDIOSYNCRATIC, BUILT FROM HIS GRANDMOTHER’S ACTUAL RECIPE BOX.

 

Tutlewski’s menu is deeply idiosyncratic, built from his grandmother’s actual recipe box—which he’s installed on a high wall shelf amidst the Henninger’s gear, not far below the old tin ceilings—plus those years with Bianco in Arizona, and a childhood spent in the Midwest. The chef grew up in Gary, Indiana, and logged considerable time in Michigan, where his uncle ran a bar. That bar served taco pizza, which is now one of the four or five pizzas Tutlewski puts on the menu. “That pizza is what I grew up with. This is a Midwestern, thin-crust, tavern pie,” he says.

Little Donna’s doesn’t have a pizza oven, at least not yet, so the thin-crust pies, assembled with flour sourced from Lancaster, PA, and California, and just yeast, water, and salt, are made on a deck oven. Crepe-thin, with pockets of char around the edges, they’re substantial enough to hold the sausage and banana peppers of the Tavern Pie, the ricotta and lemon-marinated kale of the wonderful Bianca Pie, even the small mountain of chorizo, green-chile crema, cheese, salsa, lettuce, and crushed chips of that Taco Pizza. And be sure to leave back some of the excellent crust for the dips (tomato hot honey, icebox ranch) that Tutlewski offers to dunk them in. (If you forgot you were in a tavern, this should remind you.)

The inventive cocktail list includes strawberry-rhubarb crush; a drink called Taco Tuesday, with mezcal and charred pineapple juice; and one called Granny’s Meds, with gin, local honey, Lillet Blanc, and yuzu.

Other than the ghost of Little Donna, Tutlewski’s guiding force in the kitchen is Sacha Levine, a veteran chef and longtime friend who moved out from Arizona to help open the restaurant. Levine’s love of fresh produce and pickled things runs throughout the menu, a terrific counterpoint to the heavy bar food and hefty dishes from Eastern Europe and the Upper Midwest. It’s Levine who engineers the chopped salad, the farmers’ market-y sides to the mains, and the remarkable pickle plate, a haul of perfectly brined beets, baby carrots, watermelon rinds, jammy eggs, and whatever else Levine feels like pickling. It’s a gorgeous still life, and a perfect foil to all that pie.

Little Donna’s is still evolving: The crab dip is more like a chowder than the thick, oozy dip that Marylanders expect, the coddies need reworking, and the desserts—over-zealous, unwieldy brownie sundaes and polenta cakes—don’t match the execution of the rest of the menu.

But if you’re actually still hungry at the end of your meal, forget the desserts and order another crush and a Tomato Pie, which is maybe the best thing at the restaurant. A deceptively ordinary entry amid the more ornate pies, it’s built of just tomato sauce, garlic, oregano and olive oil, and it is stunningly, breathtakingly good.

LITTLE DONNA’S: 1812 Bank St., 443-438-3956. HOURS: Wed.-Sat., 5-10 p.m. PRICES: Appetizers: $7-15; entrees: $14-26; desserts: $9. AMBIANCE: Retro cool meets Baltimore rowhouse.