Cafe Hon

Denise Whiting will be watching Friday night's "Kitchen Nightmares" episode featuring her restaurant in the cozy confines of Cafe Hon - in the attached Hon Bar, to be specific. Cafe Hon is bringing in a big-screen TV for the viewing, which is open to the public but booked solid, Whiting says. Whiting said she hasn't seen the show yet but has seen the promos for the episode that have been running on the local Fox affiliate. "I'm really grateful to Gordon Ramsay and his team for dealing with everyone here so graciously.

Denise Whiting cried, was scolded by Chef Gordon Ramsay and then hugged out months of drama on tonight's "Kitchen Nightmares" episode featuring Whiting, who Baltimoreans -- and the staff of her Hampden theme restaurant Cafe Hon -- love to hate. The show did an exceptionally good job of explaining the controversy that mired Cafe Hon and  Whiting for the better part of a year. If you knew nothing about Whiting and "Hon" trademark, you'd come away with an accurate understanding of how the story played out in Baltimore.

The "Kitchen Nightmares" episode featuring Cafe Hon is scheduled to air on Friday, Feb. 24 at 8 p.m. Cafe Hon owner Denise Whiting revealed the Feb. 24 airdate on her Facebook page Saturday morning, and  Dining Dish blogger Dara Bunjon posted the news later the same day. Taped last November, the "Kitchen Nightmares" episode featuring Cafe Hon is expected to focus on Whiting's year-long struggle to defend her trademarking...

Talk about a bye week. This weekend is a good one for getting good a table at your favorite restaurant while everyone else is still recovering from the holidays and watching puny non-division-winning teams play in the wild card round. Keep in mind that a  few restaurants have given themselves a vacation.  Jack's Bistro is one of them. The Canton restaurant will open on Thursday, Jan. 12. Charleston is taking a break and will reopen on Jan. 10. There are things to do this weekend, though.

Oh, that's right. Cafe Hon is a restaurant. It would have been easy, last year, to mistake Denise Whiting's Hampden establishment for almost anything else. It was only in November, when Whiting announced she was rescinding her controversial "hon" trademark, that the municipal emergency surrounding Cafe Hon subsided. Two months after the TV show "Kitchen Nightmares" gave it a wholesale makeover, Cafe Hon has settled back nicely into its primary business of serving food to customers — lots of them, too. On recent visits spanning several weeks, the Hampden restaurant was full of patrons, many but by no means all of them families with young children.

Nobody asked me, but ... do we really need to redevelop Owings Mills Mall into a retail "town center"? How about we just decide that the whole thing was a big mistake, knock it down, tear up all that pavement and turn the area into a park, with exotic things like trees and grass and deer and stuff? How about doing a facelift along Reisterstown Road instead, supporting the small businesses that are already there and encouraging new ones? Anyone for a charrette on this? • People who opposed the Baltimore Grand Prix keep sending me I-told-you-so cards.

The real problem with Cafe Hon specifically and Hampden in general ("Beleaguered café owner drops her 'Hon' trademark," Nov. 8) is that the folks there have turned a quirky, eclectic neighborhood into a tourist trap. It should be avoided at all costs. C.D. Wilmer, Baltimore

After almost a year of simmering controversy, Cafe Hon owner Denise Whiting said Monday that she will relinquish her "Hon" trademark. "I'll take it off the register," she said. "It was never mine to have in the first place. " Her trademark announcement, which she made on a morning radio program with reality TV chef Gordon Ramsay, was wrapped in an apology. "I am sorry for the animosity and the hatred and everything that trademarking a word has done," Whiting said. "Trademarking the word has not only almost killed me but has just about killed the business.

Update: The timing of the Cafe Hon's participation in the Habitat for Humanity's Women Build project, on the weekend it was being filmed for a "Kitchen Nightmares" episode, struck some observers as too coincidental. Surely, naysayers wondered (or came right out and said), the rehab shift was orchestrated by the producers of "Kitchen Nightmares," who would come down to film the Cafe Hon crew on the job site. On Saturday morning, I found the Hon crew -- employees, friends and longtime customers -- split between two Habitat for Humanity sites, one in Patterson Place and another a few blocks away in McElderry Park, where a corner house on Jefferson Street was being readied for a Monday morning dedication.

Gordon Ramsay will find no nightmares at Cafe Hon. No one has any reason to believe that Cafe Hon's kitchen is the horror show that many people associate with "Kitchen Nightmares. " Not all nightmares are alike. An occasional "Kitchen Nightmares" focuses on a personality problem that threatens a restaurant's well-being. Presumably, Whitings' public relations travails are what got a producer's attention. Hardly anyone seems to remember the original Cafe Hon, a little lunchroom Whiting operated for a few years before moving across 36th Street to its current location in 1995.