Baltimore Is Making a Comeback—With Modern Design Resorts and Daring New Eating

The Latrobe Constructing in central Baltimore has lengthy been a logo of the town’s shifting fortunes. It opened in 1912 as luxuriously appointed flats for younger males who’d discovered prosperity in what was then a flourishing port. However as the town went from increase to bust, so did the Latrobe. Over time it has been a flophouse, a makeshift workplace block, and eventually, when its homeowners went bankrupt, an deserted shell. 

However the constructing has rediscovered its outdated glamour: it’s now the fabulously over-the-top lodge Ulysses, which opened in September 2022. After I checked in a single latest afternoon, I used to be proven to a room that blended the louche type of the Nineteen Seventies with the richness of the Renaissance. The carpet was blue leopard print, and the claw-foot tub was encircled by silk curtains. Downstairs, the foyer was hung with brooding, Caravaggio-esque work, and orchids grew from silver planters with swan’s necks for handles. 

This can be a great distance from the Baltimore depicted in The Wire, the TV cop drama that started in 2002 and made the town notorious for its struggles with crime and corruption. When the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore, a glossy waterfront lodge, opened in 2017, it appeared to coincide with the start of a brand new chapter. The story was interrupted by the pandemic, however, as a brand new wave of motels and eating places illustrates, the momentum is again. 

In Hampden, a neighborhood of row homes within the north of the town, I spent an evening on the Guesthouse by Good Neighbor, a property on the reverse finish of the design spectrum from the Ulysses. In latest a long time, Hampden has drawn younger creatives pushed out of dearer cities. Guesthouse by Good Neighbor encapsulates this dynamism. It was opened in September 2023 by Shawn Chopra and Anne Morgan, husband-and-wife design obsessives. With simply seven rooms, it has a modest footprint however huge ambitions. 

Chopra and Morgan have stuffed the guesthouse with a shoppable choice that features ceramics by Baltimore-based Whitney Simpkins and glassware by Aaron Probyn, a minimalist London designer. The rooms additionally showcase the work of native makers, resembling shoji doorways with indigo-dyed panels created with Blue Gentle Junction and Maryland Douglas fir flooring by Brick & Board. “Folks can come to the home and see what woodworkers and artists are doing,” Chopra advised me. 

That evening I went to dinner at Little Donna’s, a row-house restaurant within the Higher Fell’s Level neighborhood run by Robbie Tutlewski. Named after his grandmother, Little Donna’s made the New York Occasions listing of America’s finest eating places in 2023. Tutlewski, who comes from a household of Yugoslavian heritage, was introduced up within the Midwest earlier than shifting to Baltimore in 2021. His meals is a scrumptious mélange of all three influences. Crab, for which Baltimore is legendary, seems within the type of pancakes spiked with successful of chili jam. Lobster pierogi transported me to Japanese Europe. Tutlewski’s pizzas are unique takes on the Indiana pies he grew up consuming. The evening I visited, the particular was a pizza topped with slices of persimmon, their sweetness balanced by sharp cheese and a sprinkling of rosemary. If this was the usual of house cooking throughout Tutlewski’s childhood, you’ll want you have been a Tutlewski too. 

Elsewhere, outdated institutions are being given a brand new spin. Woodberry Kitchen, the restaurant Spike Gjerde ran for 15 years in an outdated mill, was regarded by many as the very best within the mid-Atlantic area, owing to the chef’s rigorously native strategy. When the pandemic hit, Gjerde was compelled to evolve. The result’s the Tavern at Woodberry Kitchen, a miniature model of his outdated operation with an much more intense concentrate on the foodways of the Chesapeake. 

I sat down with Gjerde within the Tavern’s hovering eating room, the place we shared a plate of ham full of an fragrant mixture of recent herbs—the recipe for which is thought solely in “half a county of southern Maryland,” he stated. This was adopted by an oyster pie: a briny filling recent from the Chesapeake, encased in crisp pastry. Gjerde’s localism is motivated not solely by a fascination with meals historical past but in addition by ethics—a need to chop down on the miles meals has to journey and to purchase from producers he is aware of and trusts. “I’ve all the time been centered on the query of how we will feed ourselves in the very best approach,” he stated. “Woodberry stays a sixteen-year try to reply that.”

Among the many catalysts serving to to invigorate Baltimore’s meals scene is the redevelopment of its meals markets, pillars of metropolis life for greater than 250 years. Amongst them is Lexington Market, which opened within the 18th century and moved right into a shiny new downtown constructing in late 2022. The cavernous area, laid out over two flooring, is a riot of worldwide delicacies, with stalls promoting all the things from Malay to Dominican to Nepali. The redevelopment is giving new life to outdated stalwarts, too; the legendary Faidley’s Seafood, which opened out there in 1886, has additionally made the transfer to the brand new digs.

Across the markets, companies are popping up like mushrooms. One night I traveled southwest of downtown to Hollins Market, which has additionally been revamped. Elevated foot visitors there’s drawing restaurateurs like Amanda and Joseph Burton, who opened Rooted Rotisserie down the road from the market in 2023. Throughout the pandemic, the Burtons have been each furloughed from their hospitality jobs, so to make ends meet they started promoting at-home meal kits from their very own kitchen. Then they went to Paris to have fun their anniversary and had an epiphany on the Sunday market within the Bastille. “There was wine, cheese, and a rotisserie grill,” Amanda advised me. They beloved the informal, rustic facet of French cooking they noticed that day, and determined to take it house with them. Rooted Rotisserie is a mannequin neighborhood restaurant, serving a slender vary of completely executed dishes. Go for the rotisserie hen, keep for the double-cut pork chop.

On my final night I checked in to Roost, an elegantly minimalist lodge that opened in 2023 at Baltimore Peninsula, a 235-acre, multibillion-dollar improvement alongside the Patapsco River. This community of shiny condominium buildings, workplaces, and shops was partly funded by Maryland native Kevin Plank, the founding father of the sportswear model Beneath Armour. In the waterfront tasting room of the Sagamore Spirit Distillery, which occupies a spot in entrance of a pair of disused piers, I tried a flight of rye whiskey, the distillery’s specialty. Drink in hand, I appeared out on the piers stretching into the river—long-abandoned vestiges of Baltimore’s previous that now type half of a brilliant future. 

A model of this story first appeared within the Could 2025 challenge of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Charmed Metropolis.”