2022 Fall Dining Guide

Every bar should stock a Jacob Simpson. Busy as he was on a recent Saturday night, juggling customers in front of him and parties beyond, the tall drink of water managed to turn a couple of strangers — okay, my brother and me — into fans from the moment he introduced himself to us with a smile as broad as Dwayne Johnson’s and a handshake that put the pandemic in a rearview mirror. “Our cocktails are half-price and dumplings are a dollar” until 7, he volunteered. Happy hour on a Saturday? I’ll take it. While he managed multiple conversations with friends and colleagues, Simpson, also a co-owner, whipped up a cocktail I can’t get out of my mind, calvados daiquiri. “It’s like biting into a green apple,” he said as he watched me take a sip and nod in affirmation.

The industrial setting in Mount Vernon Triangle is warmed up with red lights and splashes of teal in the bar, but also Chinese finger food, enlightened riffs on orange chicken, embedded in a nest of spiky greens; crisp pork belly jolted with hot mustard and nestled in tender bao; and wontons slicked with red chile oil. The snack-y menu seems to suit the pre-dinner, post-club crowds that routinely gather in what feels like a hub for the cool kids.

My brother leaves with some unfinished five-spiced pork, rice and arugula and a hot tip from Simpson: “Put an egg on it.” Which my sibling does the next day, texting me proof. Saturday night, part two!

To understand how pierogi, pizza and skate landed on the same menu in Baltimore, it helps to know that chef Robbie Tutlewski grew up in Indiana, comes from Polish stock, had a grandmother from Yugoslavia (Little Donna is named after her) and has worked for a pizza maestro in Arizona and the beloved Tail Up Goat in Washington. His dad instilled a love of food in him and coached Tutlewski to “sell the food you grew up on.”

Lucky diners at Little Donna’s, which follows the long-running Henninger’s Tavern in a corner storefront in Upper Fells Point. Working in part from recipes written in his late grandmother’s hand, Tutlewski personalizes some of his greatest hits.

Take the pierogies, four half-moons dolloped with sour cream and … chili crisp? The popular condiment adds texture and sass to a tradition made lighter and more elastic than usual with olive oil and sour cream in the dough. I love the filling, buttery pureed potatoes lit with horseradish. “Sausage & Sauerkraut” teams smoked kielbasa from the neighboring Ostrowski’s with tangy cabbage and a hot mustard dressing, sepia tones enlivened with lemon and scallions on the plate — strapping satisfaction (and possibly the Polish equivalent of menudo for hangovers). The sauteed skate, topped over summer with a refreshing stone-fruit salad, salutes the pan-fried fish the chef recalls from his youth in the Midwest, where pike and walleye got top billing.

The lone disappointment on the list are the tavern pizzas, a surprise given Tutlewski’s association with the acclaimed chef Chris Bianco in Phoenix. The bar pies at Little Donna’s are square-cut, per custom, but puffy and chewy when the ideal texture is cracker-y. Glass half-full: That just leaves more space for the rest of the menu, maybe some pork schnitzel or a slice of egg custard pie, whispering of bay leaf.

The restaurant, dressed with half-curtains in the windows and a pressed-tin ceiling, looks like it’s been around forever. The piece de resistance is the inherited wood bar, one side of which is decorated with a peeling military poster and sign framed in bottle caps: “Be nice or leave,” it reads. Be good and sup well.

Good news first: The pickle bar is back at one of my favorite blasts from the past.

The menu at Parkway brings together wants spanning breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you go for just one dish, make it chicken soup. Tender chunks of chicken pack the golden broth, gently herby and crammed with a fistful of carrots, celery, onion and egg noodles. Every spoonful has the power of a hug. As for sandwiches, the Reuben hits all the right spots with tangy sauerkraut, sweet Russian dressing and half a pound of thinly shaved corned beef. The best of the pastry case is a warm-spiced slab of carrot cake that can easily satisfy three forks.

Dinners are served starting at 4 p.m. — my kind of happy hour — and include such comforts as cabbage stuffed with ground beef, fried chicken, and sliced turkey with cornbread stuffing and cranberry sauce. Diners select a side; lightly dressed coleslaw or creamy mac and cheese tend to round out my plates.

Introduced in 1963, the front of the Silver Spring operation is a small food store and deli, where you can buy wine or beer to drink with your meal and which you pass through to reach the dining room. Painted in purple and aqua, the restaurant is otherwise plain and practical. A band of mirrors lets you play voyeur from just about every table, and how thoughtful that the condiments extend to two kinds of hot sauce and three kinds of sweetener. Comfort and abundance explain what owner Danny Gurewitz, grandson of the founder, calls “a cornucopia” of diners here.

Can we talk? The blueberry pancakes are tough and the hash browns inside the omelets are underdone. Your mileage depends on knowing the kitchen’s strengths. (See above.) But there’s something to be said for a place that has outlived so many other area attempts at “deli.”

Since it set sail in Annapolis seven years ago, this mom-and-pop from Michelle and Jeremy Hoffman has featured dishes reflective of Jeremy’s origins in Pennsylvania Dutch country and his interest in all things fermented. Expect pierogies as appetizers, tang throughout the menu and … duck tongues, anyone?

“We’re a family-friendly restaurant,” says Brian Cieslak, Preserve’s chef de cuisine. “But we don’t think parents should miss out on flavor.” Hence the fried duck tongues, offered with rice vinegar aioli and chili crunch oil. Preserve sells “a lot,” says the Maryland native.

Things that sound familiar never taste that way. What read over summer like pasta with clams turned out to be buckwheat bucatini flavored with bacon, black garlic and diced asparagus, all of which slide across the tongue with the help of a cream reduction. Scallops, striped from the grill, got a lovely charge from a relish of fermented fish pepper, cilantro, lime juice and celery, an idea Cieslak picked up at his wedding in St. Lucia.

Similar to his boss, Cieslak works with his wife, Sommer Walker, a former ballerina who’s now bar manager at Preserve. “It’s a dream team,” the chef says of the time with his colleagues, a detail anyone can fact-check by observing the tiny open kitchen crammed with people who look like they’re having as much fun as diners. It doesn’t hurt that kids’ meals are served aloft toy dinosaurs. The sight of a child’s hamburger being ferried through the snug dining room is as happy-making as Preserve’s tall slab of many-layered crepe cake, flavored as if it were tiramisu.

The place sneaks up on you. One minute you’re quietly walking up the stairs to the second-floor dining room in Shaw, the next you’re inside a piñata that’s just been whacked. Behold the Virgin Mary and Aztec pyramids, depicted on a mural that screams “Mexico!” The place is so loud, you resort to reading lips, and the tables are constantly reconfigured to accommodate the party of four here, the group of six there. Servers walk around auctioning off dishes and avoiding eye contact in barely controlled chaos.

So why bother? Because Alfredo Solis, the co-chef behind my No. 1 favorite restaurant from spring, Mariscos 1133, owns the place with his sister, and the pozole and chilaquiles at the oldest of his five establishments are dynamite. The soup, centered on pork braised for half a day with chiles, cumin and other brassy notes, is “good for a hangover,” says Solis. Duly noted, sir, but I’m content dispatching the liquid gold sober, the better to inhale its nuances, like clove in the seasoning. El Sol’s chilaquiles may be the best in town, thanks to a green salsa made in small batches with lots of cilantro, tomatillo and epazote. Say sí to the bright guacamole, zapped with garlic and serrano and made to order.

Concerned that customers were only ordering dishes they were familiar with after El Sol opened in 2014, Solis added photographs of everything to the menu. “It’s kind of cheesy,” says the chef, but it got people ordering more than, say, tacos, good as they are. Misses like the arid chicken mole are rare. Hits including smoky shrimp atop a cream sauce fired up with dried peppers are the happy norm.