Calamari

Joe Flacco celebrated his 27th birthday at Chazz: A Bronx Original on Monday night with his wife, Dana. The Flaccos were joined by the Pittas, Ravens tight end Dennis and his wife, Mataya. At Chazz , The group ordered a number of appetizers including fried calamari, tomato bruschetta, the signature veal meatball and, from the mozzarella bar, the burrata and parma prosciutto. According to a representative from the Harbor East restaurant. The table also enjoyed two coal-fired pizzas, the Burrata and the Funghi, and for dessert, the group shared the tiramisu and cinnamon-spiked, vanilla-iced bread pudding.

FISHERMAN'S COVE SEAFOOD MARKET 538 Cranbrook Road, Cockeysville. Hours: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sundays. Phone: 628-7577. Whatever you do, try the shrimp salad sandwich ($4.25). It comes with chunks of spicy shrimp as big as your thumb (well, my thumb anyway) and is served on a fresh submarine roll with lettuce and tomato. Oh, you'll want to kiss me for this one. However, a firm handshake will do.Equally delicious is the crab cake sandwich ($3.75). Listen, know crab cakes.

Sister Martina Marie Wagner, a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame who was the former head of the religion department at Seton Keough High School, where she was a beloved and respected figure, died Sept. 1 of cancer at St. Agnes Hospital. She was 74. Born Juanita Wagner in the Bronx, N.Y., she moved with her family in 1941 to Baltimore, where she attended St. Ann School and graduated in 1954 from Western High School. She worked briefly as a clerk with the Maryland Casualty Insurance Co. before entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame in 1954.

Sushi Sakura occupies the Pikesville location where Fortune House Chinese restaurant was for a short time. Before that, it was a forward-looking and ambitious Chinese restaurant named Try's Asian Fusion that I admired but never went back to after I reviewed it. I had, in fact, come to review Fortune House a few months ago, but it was "closed for painting." Fortune House, it turned out, was being converted into Sushi Sakura, a perfectly nice Japanese restaurant that I didn't take to at all, in spite of the fact that the food it serves is comparable to what I've enjoyed in similar restaurants for years.

Recently, I found myself facing too much chocolate and having too little stomach space. This is a predicament many people dream about, especially on Valentine's Day. But after drinking a chocolate martini, eating chocolate-coated chicken, sipping chocolate peanut soup, swallowing many pieces of chocolate cake and nibbling on "calamari" made of marzipan, I found myself shying away from the sweet stuff and desperately seeking sushi. The occasion was the Chocolate Affair, a benefit by about 40 area restaurants, candy makers and caterers for the Center for Poverty Solutions.

The street-level restaurant space at Pratt and Light streets has lain vacant since a Legal Sea Foods pulled out more than four years ago. That's a long time for an Inner Harbor space to sit empty, especially with Harbor East beckoning diners to its dense crop of glitzy restaurants. Now, the anchor spot at 100 E. Pratt St. is alive again. Since opening there in early March, Brio, a chain based in Columbus, Ohio, has in short order managed to liven up its location more than its predecessor ever did. Brio has done more than just occupy a moribund space; it has energized it. The outdoor seating already has the solid look of something permanent, a space that's ready for company.

"THE PRESIDENT really enjoyed the fried calamari with the real good tomato sauce," enthused the owner of an Italian restaurant in D.C.'s swanky Georgetown, where President Clinton and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl engaged in an eating contest the other day."Maybe the myth of the french fries will be thrown out the window and the myth of calamari will begin."Oh, how she wished.Few better things can happen to a foodstuff than to be associated with our head of state, even if the president insists he hates it.Broccoli consumption doubled, to three pounds per capita, in the year after George Bush let slip that he can't stand the stuff.

Most teams approach a game against the Yankee Rebels baseball team with fear and trembling.And for good reason. The Yankee Rebels arenearly impossible to defeat. The team is the Terminator of the 15-16age bracket in the Baltimore area.This year, for instance, they are 42-1 against Baltimore area teams. And their overall record is 56-3.They are so good they even take on older teams and beat them, most notably this season a 3-2 win over Johnny's 20-and-under team. That would be like the Hagerstown Suns beating the Orioles.

Three years after opening its original Fells Point hot-dog shop, Stuggy's is adding a location in Federal Hill. The new location will be at 17 E. Cross St., in a space that was most recently an M&T Bank branch. A Stuggy's stand debuted at Oriole Park at Camden Yards last season and will return this year, according to Stuggy's co-owner Ryan Perlberg. Since taking over the old Burritos en Fuego space on South Broadway in 2010, Stuggy's has annexed the properties to either side, the Whistling Oyster and Sam's Kid, and converted them into the contemporary lounge spaces Rye and Willow , respectively.