Chazz

Can you just imagine the incredible buzz if a Hollywood Superstar A-lister like Treat Williams opened a restaurant in Baltimore?
We must, for now, be satisfied with Chazz Palminteri who was in... what exactly? Not the Godfather, that's for damn sure. The website says "Oscar nominated"... I'm expecting for some lighting category. So anyway, no review until the buzz dies down and the menu gets filled out.

Goodbye Elevation, Hello Slices

The horribly slow service and narrow product offering that defined Elevation Burger is now a Harbor East memory. And not one of the best. Quite fitting that their demise coincides with the horrible sewer problems that have closed Aliceanna Street for weeks now.
Hopefully the new venture (Harbor East Delicatessen and Pizzeria) will be more successful and give us some needed options here - namely breakfast sandwiches and pizza slices. And if the service is quicker, then hallelujah, they might have a winner.

We're watching

We’re watching you, Bagby Pizza Company. We think we saw a brick oven going in there and we know what evil that could portend. Smacks of pizza crust that is good for us, sauce made from heirloom tomatoes and cheese from animals we usually don’t associate with cheese. What we’re hoping for is 2 cheese slices and a medium coke for $5. Otherwise we’d rather have another cell phone store. Or a Chinese restaurant.

Three shining examples of suckiness

Not all waiting is rewarded. How long did we wait for Elevation Burger to open, only to find out that what we had built in our mind was not what they took months and months to build on Aliceanna Street. It would be forgivable that they are not the oasis of hamburger ecstasy we had all hoped for if it weren’t for their pretensions to be so… and their terribly slow service. Better burgers can be had within a block, better fries within a block, better ice cream within a block. And, unpardonably, they do not even offer a turkey burger.

Harbor East’s greatest shame is its lack of decent breakfast options. Microwaved breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks? Lame, unchanging breakfast options at Whole Foods’ hot bar? Hello Whole Foods! Do you have a corporate policy against bacon? Me Moms makes a decent breakfast sandwich, but it’s a slow process there, so they can’t be the answer for all of us. Please Taco Fiesta, if we promise to come by later to drink Modelo Especial, can we please have some Huevos Rancheros?

But yet nearly as bad is the lack of a Chinese restaurant down here. Yes, we can walk all the way to Fells Point, but it’s getting hot out and sticky, too. Or we can go to the Cheesecake Factory of Chinese Food, P.F. Changs and watch their incredibly riveting table-side mixing of the condiments. Dinner and a show. Fabulous, makes me forget that the entrée I’m paying $20 for I could get for $8 and enjoy more at Happy Imperial Emerald Garden.

Three great things

Chiangale does a lot of great things, but one of the best is their fried chicken. Get vendors to take you there, steer out of town clients there, convince a relative that this restaurant has the best view of the harbor… but find a way to have a plate of that chicken placed in front of you. I don’t know how typical of Italian cuisine it is, but you don’t complain when an Oriole actually hits a home run, do you?

If you like your fried fowl a little less expensive and don’t mind eating from a cart parked where you’d have second thoughts about parking your car, then take a walk up Central Avenue to Me Moms on whichever day of the week they decide to deep fry a turkey. Around $7 will get you a sandwich piled high with this treat – which falls into the category of things you’re really best off not trying at home – and the best fries in Harbor East. And they’re really nice people. Nice people deep frying turkeys, that’s worth something.

The best things are things you have to wait awhile for, and one of those is the pumpkin truffles at Glarus Chocolate on Exeter. You can’t have one right now. You’ll have to wait. But it is like all the goodness of a pumpkin pie wrapped up in chocolate. A ping pong ball sized dollop of heaven. Great. Now I want one.

You know how to eat, so why this blog?

Because here we all are and sometimes the best part of the day is the break we take to grab a bite, be it at the start of the day, the middle or at the end. And if someone wants to ruin that time of day by taking a cheeseburger, removing the burger and calling that a grilled cheese sandwich, they need to be held accountable. And if someone wants to give us something as sublime as a perfectly constructed tower of mozzarella and tomato, they need to be lauded.

So by reading you will be informed, but by commenting you will be empowered. This is our culinary landscape and we are its caretakers. Let’s wield that power like hungry, petulant 6 year olds.