Dining Room

There's a lot of love at Nora's Kabob. Brothers Sevi and Raymond Sinanian, who opened the Ellicott City restaurant last month, are quick to profess their affection for the flavors of their youth, including the almighty pomegranate, and for their mother, for whom Nora's is named. Fortunately, the duo is more than just talk; their devotion to flavorful Middle Eastern cuisine shines through in their food. Though the service isn't perfect, the Sinanians' appreciation for their customers is clear.

Mount Washington Tavern , which was gutted by a two-alarm fire last Halloween, expects to reopen by the middle of autumn, co-owner Rob Frisch said last week. Meanwhile, the Baltimore City Fire Department has listed the cause of the fire as "not fully ascertainable. " That official listing does not suggest foul play. "It simply implies the damages and destruction was too great, which made it difficult and unsafe for investigators to narrow the cause to one specific source," said Chief Kevin Cartwright, Baltimore City Fire Department spokesman.

Regi's in Federal Hill was hit by an electrical fire on Tuesday morning. The fire, according to owner Alan Morstein began in an outside walk-in refrigerator and spread into the restaurant's back dining room.  The main dining room and bar were unaffected by smoke and water, Morstein said. "Had it not been for our neighbors who alerted Engine Company #2 on Light Street at the first signs of the fire, we would be rubble," Morstein wrote in an email to his customers.

Bob Sleeper is a man who cannot be fenced in. While many of his friends are city dwellers, he craves the great outdoors. For this reason, he and his wife, Marian, left a large home in suburban Marriottsville in favor of an old — and much smaller — farmhouse in Westminster. Sleeper's first love has always been the land — 5 acres in this instance, with a two-story, 2,700-square-foot bank barn on a knoll. "We downsized the house but upsized the property," said Sleeper, a 60-year-old employee of Constellation Energy.

Often when an old home is in the final stages of an interior renovation, the grandeur of new molding, flooring and light fixtures stands out like a masterfully worked canvas awaiting the addition of the primary subject. Such is the story unfolding behind the new windows of the Alice and Mike Gosse's circa 1920 East Baltimore rowhouse, where the scarcity of furniture draws full attention to the quality of the detailed work completed. Just inside the front door, off a narrow hall, the entire first floor is open, extending little more than 15 feet wide and 65 feet long to the back wall of the home.

The building at the corner of Belair and Mountain Roads in Fallston has a reputation as one of those spots where no restaurant seems able to survive. Tony Ashe, owner and general manager of the Mallet, the newest restaurant at the location, hopes to change all that with his combination fine dining/crab house/martini lounge/tiki bar establishment. In the dining room, tasty if traditional steak and seafood dishes and friendly service suggest the Mallet might be the restaurant that breaks through on this corner.

Calle's Cucina is a place with potential. Chef-owner Carl "Calle" Vahl has the experience to run a show-stopping restaurant, with both formal and on-the-job training in Italy and New York. Philosophically, Vahl is in the right place, too. He uses fresh, local ingredients to create authentic Italian dishes and is committed to becoming an integral part of the Charles Village community. All great things. Unfortunately, both the food and the atmosphere at Calle's Cucina need some tweaking, and it's not completely clear where the restaurant falls on the casual-to-fine-dining scale.

Chip Olsen and his wife, Linda, grew up on Long Island. Their memories, reflected in framed photographs on the walls of their home, are of long afternoons sitting on sandy beaches or idly dangling their feet from one of the many piers along the shore. Little wonder, then, that they would end up living in a home on a pier jutting 500 feet into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Chip Olsen's job as senior managing director at CB Richard Ellis required travel and relocation, taking the couple from Charlotte to Atlanta.

The exterior of the Anne Arundel County home of Mark Rucci and his partner, Randall Franklin, provides few clues to the storybook world visitors will find inside. At street level, a Victorian wrought-iron gate stands between two large urns containing trimmed topiary. While the gate opens to the front walk, its placement and its arched carving are purely an ornamental touch — there is no fencing to keep people from the yard. At the end of the walk, four artificial pink trees sit on pedestals in front of the bi-level home with its light yellow siding and vivid, cadet blue shutters on each window.

The Waterfront Kitchen, a lovely and rewarding new Fells Point restaurant, is a model of sophisticated understatement. A straightforward and compact "spirited American dining" menu is being executed with quiet precision by chef de cuisine Levi Briggs and served by a polite and informed staff. This is old-fashioned dining — quiet and leisurely. You'll want to bring people here, if you can find it. Let's get our bearings. We're on a jutting tip of Fells Point, at the water's edge, on the ground floor of the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Museum's education pavilion.