NEWS
By Elizabeth Large | October 4, 2009
How much good service matters to you when you've got great food might determine how you feel about the new Alizee. It's a restaurant that has successfully reinvented itself after a recent change of owners, a change of chefs and a change of basic concept. But I'm not sure the management realizes yet that with a change for the better come more customers, and with more customers comes a need for more servers. Certainly the staff was overwhelmed the night we ate there. On a weeknight, the dining room was almost full because of a hotel package tour.
NEWS
By Frederick N. Rasmussen | May 22, 2009
James Michael Crooks, a chef and former co-owner of the Country Kettle Cafe in western Howard County, died Friday of heart failure at his New Windsor home. He was 44. Mr. Crooks was born in Wheaton and was raised there and in London, where he attended London Central High School. After graduating from Wheaton High School in 1982, he went to work in the restaurant business. "We met when we both were working at the Olney Ale House in 1983. Back then, we were young and crazy," said his wife of 17 years, the former Amy Regina Lauer.
NEWS
By ELIZABETH LARGE | April 30, 2008
Who would have thought a decade ago that Lauraville would become a dining destination? So far it has the Chameleon Cafe and Big Bad Wolf's House of Barbeque, not to mention the Alabama BBQ Company, with more restaurants on the way. Clementine (5402 Harford Road, 410-444-1497) is scheduled to open this week. Owners Winston Blick and his wife, Cristin Dadant, picked the name to reflect both the Southern nature of the food he cooks -- as in, he says, the song "Darling Clementine" -- and its accents of French and Spanish, as in the orange fruit.
NEWS
By Elizabeth Large | March 9, 2008
Food **1/2 (2 1/2 stars) Service ***1/2 (3 1/2 stars) Atmosphere ***1/2 (3 1/2 stars) I'm not sure how much difference a change of chefs makes to a successful restaurant. No matter how talented the new man in the kitchen is, the owners will want to stick with what's been working. In the case of Kali's Court, that's been very fresh fish and very large crab cakes delivered in an elegant, dressy setting. This winter, Kali's brought in Damon Hersh, when former executive chef Rashad Edwards left to open the restaurant group's newest project, a bistro and patisserie called Meli.
NEWS
By Ericka Blount Danois | August 5, 2007
Gerry Garvin struts down the aisle with a black chef's smock, sunglasses, knee-length khaki shorts and clogs to deliver a cooking presentation at a health fair at a local church. As he prepares to make four dishes featuring cherry tomatoes, including ones with clams, mussels, and Chilean sea bass, a woman in the audience begins walking toward the back of the church. "Where you going?" he asks as he prepares the pan with oil. "Don't walk out when I'm trying to do my thing!" Garvin, who is in his late 30s and lives in Los Angeles, does his thing most days on TV One's Turn Up the Heat with G. Garvin.
NEWS
By Sarah Kickler Kelber | June 19, 2007
Bravo's Top Chef, whose third season premiered last week, is back with a vengeance. The first casualty was Clay, a self-taught Mississippi chef. His first mistake was misunderstanding the "Quickfire Challenge," in which he was supposed to create an amuse bouche, or a bite-size culinary creation that teases the taste buds. The concept was beyond him, which is strange since the amuse bouche has appeared in the previous two seasons' challenges. The moral of the story is, if you are going to go on a reality show, watch it first.
NEWS
By LAURA VOZZELLA | May 2, 2007
Now that local produce, meats and cheeses are all the rage at upscale eateries, restaurateur Riccardo Bosio has decided to fly in an ingredient of another sort: The Chef. At Bosio's invitation, Chef Stefano Azzi is schlepping all the way from Siena, Italy, to Baltimore to make dinner. Granted, it will be quite a meal. It leads off with wine-braised pheasant, pears cooked in Chianti, and chicken liver pate cooked in Vin Santo. Then it's on to octopus salad and sauteed squid. Then vegetable soup.
NEWS
By SLOAN BROWN | February 14, 2007
A new culinary expo hits Baltimore this week. The "Great Tastes" show begins tomorrow night with a "Dine Around Baltimore" event. Several local restaurants - including Taste, Birches, Pazo, Da Mimmo, Vin, Oceanaire and Phillips Seafood - will offer an $85 dinner with wine pairings to participants. Then dessert and champagne will be offered at the Tremont Grand Hotel, the home base for the four-day eating extravaganza. Each of the next three days, one local restaurant will join forces with a Food Network chef to prepare a chef's meal.
NEWS
By FREDERICK N. RASMUSSEN | June 6, 2006
Eutiquio Sanz, a retired chef who for more than two decades prepared the celebrated Spanish cuisine of the downtown Baltimore restaurant Tio Pepe, died of cancer Sunday of cancer at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Bolton Hill resident was 66. Mr. Sanz was born and raised in Segovia, Spain. At 15, he became an apprentice chef and began working in some of Madrid's finest restaurants. A decade later, he moved to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and took over as head chef of the five-star Hotel Valle Mar. During the summer of 1983, his cousin Pedro Sanz, owner of Tio Pepe Restaurante at 10 East Franklin St., arrived for a visit in Tenerife and convinced him that he should bring his culinary expertise to Baltimore.
NEWS
By STEPHEN G. HENDERSON | March 22, 2006
Chef's block. This phobia, like its literary cousin (writer's block), causes the novice to regard an empty pan with as much terror as a would-be scribe does the blank page. Convinced that anything he puts in the pan - oil, butter, a diced green pepper - will taste "wrong," the sufferer of chef's block is paralyzed. There is a cure, according to a trio of local chefs. In fact, they say you can start cooking with the contents of one small shopping bag. Timothy Dean of Timothy Dean Bistro recommends experimenting with large scallops, mushrooms, shallots, garlic, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and pine nuts.