Cuisine

Mark Salter had a good 17-year run at the Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels. The British-born chef gathered up a library of glowing reviews, both for his cooking and for his proprietorship of the luxury property, and evolved into something of a celebrity — and this was before the days of the big celebrity chef. In recent years, Mark Salter and Sherwood's Landing, the luxury property's main restaurant, seemed to recede into the background. Then, in May, Salter crossed the Tred Avon River into Oxford, where he took over the historic Robert Morris Inn . The original building, the home of Robert Morris, dates to 1710.

At least for today, I think Thai Yum is Baltimore's best Thai restaurant. Word will soon spread, and Thai Yum might not be ready for a sudden crush. When we visited, Penny Chungsakoon appeared to be working the line herself. There are unresolved service issues. Please be patient with it. This is the restaurant that used to be known as Ten-O-Six, from its street number on Light Street. When Tom and Penny Chungsakoon opened it back in 1999, the Federal Hill restaurant worked with an innovative menu that was half fusion (with exotic or then rarely seen ingredients such as wild boar, sweetbreads and ostrich)

The chef and the owners remain the same, but the Federal Hill Thai-American restaurant known as Ten-O-Six is now known as Thai Yum and, as its name suggests, will be exclusively Thai. A big hit after its 1999 opening, in its heyday Ten-O-Six was especially admired for chef Tom Chungkasoon's artful and ambitious fusion dishes, which might feature medallions of ostrich, sweetbreads or even wild boar. Then, for no particular reason, Ten-O-Six seemed to recede from the spotlight and never fully work its way back in. In the e-mailed message announcing the change, Chungkasoon wrote, "Due to the increasing popularity of Thai cuisine, we refined our cooking to only center around Thai cooking.

Miguel's Cocina y Cantina is on the ground floor of Silo Point, a luxury condominium project that looms (that's the only word) eerily over the modest rowhouses of the surrounding Locust Point neighborhood. To get the full incongruous effect, try approaching it first, if you can, via the free Water Taxi Harbor Connector that runs on weekdays between Fells Point and Tide Point. It's a short walk from the landing through an industrial-residential mix, and by the time you get there you'll have built up an appetite for novelty and adventure.

Cazabe is a new Dominican restaurant. Other restaurants have occupied this roadside building - recently, the Pit Stop and an Italian restaurant named Avanti - which sits on a lonely stretch of U.S. 1. What should have been a 20-minute ride from downtown Baltimore took us about 2 1/2 hours because of a major accident. Headed back, we were so thoroughly satisfied, that I can truly say it was worth the trip. Cazabe is charming. For years, Eduardo Island, the owner of Cazabe, and his family operated a very popular Dominican restaurant in Hyattsville named Julito's, which they eventually handed over to others to run for them.

It was an exciting moment: I was in the Library of Congress, watching as a cart approached packed with dozens of dull gray boxes. I was about to open what amounted to a time capsule and plunge into the 1940s, an America most of us today can barely conjure. Among the first social programs to be shut down on America's entry into World War II was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic stimulus package for the Depression, the Works Progress Administration. One WPA program, the Federal Writers Project, operated in all 48 states and employed more than 4,500 writers.

When water damage caused the Carlyle Club to close for renovations, it gave the upscale Lebanese cafe an opportunity to reinvent itself - a necessity because it had become a semi-forgotten restaurant. It's hard to be an upscale dining room in a Quality Inn & Suites. This has always been a difficult location for restaurants. I'm not sure why other than the parking, which is no better and no worse than there is around many city places. For more years than I can remember, the Carlyle's dining room was a Chinese restaurant called the Dragon Palace.

Eleanora E. Allori, former longtime owner of the historic Milton Inn in Sparks, died Sunday of respiratory failure at the Lorien Mays Chapel nursing home. She was 77. Eleanora Elizabeth Keller was born in Baltimore and raised near Patterson Park and in Cumberland. After graduating from Patterson High School, she worked for the Social Security Administration and the G. Fava Fruit Co. before taking a job as a hat check girl at the old Maria's 300 on Albermarle Street in Little Italy. While working at Maria's, she met her future husband, Attilio B. Allori, who had been a partner in the popular restaurant.

Giovanni Rigato, a chef and owner of two restaurants in Baltimore's Little Italy who made his mark on the city's cuisine, died Thursday at his residence in Parkton. The cause of his death has not been determined, his family said. He was 64. Mr. Rigato was born in 1944 in Cavalese in the Italian Dolomites, a mountainous region near the Austrian border, where his maternal grandmother, Lina Zanella, was a cook in the family's small dining hall. "He had great stories about her cooking and spending time with her," said a daughter, Bridget Rigato of Baltimore.