Family Restaurant

Oakland Mills Village Center has another opportunity to fill an empty building, a key piece to its rejuvenation. A liquor license application submitted this week by a prospective restaurant operator moves the village center a step closer to filling the void left by the closing of Last Chance Saloon, a 23-year-old neighborhood pub and restaurant. Vaughn Ennis, one of the three partners in the venture, said the establishment would be "a standard American family restaurant," serving a variety of dishes, including seafood.

Bryan Voltaggio and Hilda Staples wanted their third restaurant, Family Meal, to be an alternative to chain restaurants for Frederick families. So, the food is wholesome and adults can get liquor in their milkshakes. On Nov. 2 (7:30-10 p.m.), Family Meal will give families an extra reason to show up, when the restaurant presents a Drive-In Movie Night on its parking lot. The attraction is 1959's "Attack of the Giant Leeches. " There will be a cash bar outside and full-service will be available inside the restaurant.

Casey's is a great little family restaurant, a real charmer, with a friendly and efficient staff and an accessible and affordable menu of pub fare and Italian-American specialties. Taken in from the road, where it lies just inside the Beltway, it doesn't look like much, just another county tavern. But it will take you about 10 seconds once inside the dining room to conclude two things: that the meal is going to turn out just fine and that everyone already eating there is a regular. Early in the evening, there are a few tables of older diners, a group of women celebrating a birthday and a kid dining out with his grandmother.

Dante Liberatore works a room in a way that few restaurateurs care to, or dare to, these days. We saw him compel a sour patron to concede that her wait for a table had been exactly as long as he said it would be. She wasn't thrilled, but her husband was. Later we heard him tell a diner at a nearby table that if she still didn't like a pasta dish the kitchen remade for her, he would eat it himself. She didn't like it, and he ate it. That's part of the fun at Liberatore's of Eldersburg.

The 167-year-old building at 6 Oella Ave. at the edge of historic Ellicott City has been a boarding house, seed company and a biker bar with Saturday night brawls so common that the locals nicknamed the place the "Bloody Bucket." Today, the Fields family wants the Trolley Stop restaurant to be known as a place of good food and cheap prices. In the year and a half since father Bob Fields, son John Fields and daughter Mary Fields purchased the Trolley Stop, they have continued the work begun by previous owner Joe Morea to turn it into a family restaurant.

The Bob's Big Boy Family Restaurant on Dobbin Center Way in east Columbia is closing today.The manager and other employees directed all inquiries to the restaurant's owner.But calls to the owner weren't returned yesterday, so it wasn't immediately known why the family restaurant is closing. A large white sign in the restaurant's entrance spread the news to visitors yesterday afternoon. It read: "This Big Boy will close operations at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 22, 1996."

Joseph "Buddy" Chiapparelli, owner of Chiapparelli's Restaurant in Little Italy, died Friday of cancer at his Roland Park home. He was 66.For more than 30 years, Mr. Chiapparelli was proprietor of the family restaurant at 237 S. High St. that serves Neapolitan and Northern Italian dishes.Noteworthy guests included President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, baseball Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson and football Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas.Mr. Chiapparelli took over operation of the restaurant in 1960 from his father, Pasquale Chiapparelli.

The regular lunch crowd at Friendly Farm will have to find a new place to meet.The Westminster restaurant, a branch of Friendly Farm in Upperco for 12 years, will become a banquet and catering facility on Monday."

Lifelong pals Mary Jane Brumbaugh and Marlene Sponaugle hope their 42-year-old friendship will survive their new relationship as businesspartners.The two 48-year-old Washington County women will soon open Double M Restaurant on East Baltimore Street where, they say, a family can have a home-cooked meal for a reasonable price.That theme of family food has also been adopted by another new restaurant here, the Taneytown Family Restaurant, which replaced Leonardi's on the square last month."We want to keep the restaurant very family-oriented," said Brian Smith, one of the owners of the Taneytown Family Restaurant.

After a five-year absence, Maria's Restaurant on Mount Airy's Main Street is back in business.Owners Dave and Lydia Brocato reopened their family restaurant three weeks ago with a few changes, including a revised menu and some nods to 90s health concerns, including a no-smoking rule.The Brocatos say business has been good, with many old customers coming back."I can't tell you how many people I've seen that used to come in five years ago," Mrs. Brocato said.The Brocatos closed Maria's in 1989 to spend more time with their three children.

You'll find Drovers Grill & Wine Co. along a quiet and hilly stretch of western Howard County highway in Mount Airy. Iif you wanted to take a nice walk after dinner, you could stroll over to Carroll and Frederick counties and make it back in time for an after-dinner drink. Sweet at its core, maybe a little odd, Drovers Grill, which opened last November, is an unpretentious yet fairly ambitious family-run restaurant. On a recent night, Kevan Vanek, the ebullient paterfamilias, was in the kitchen, working alongside one of his seven children.

El Guapito is the kind of independent, family-owned Mexican restaurant that people complain there aren't enough of downtown. Especially if you're on the hunt for dining with the feel of authenticity about it, El Guapito is your kind of place. The tacos here, in particular, pull no punches, with ingredients like beef tongue, roasted pork and absolutely delectable salted pork, or cesina, which is a real dazzler in combination with the garnishes that El Guapito uses: cilantro, radish and cucumber.

Casey's is a great little family restaurant, a real charmer, with a friendly and efficient staff and an accessible and affordable menu of pub fare and Italian-American specialties. Taken in from the road, where it lies just inside the Beltway, it doesn't look like much, just another county tavern. But it will take you about 10 seconds once inside the dining room to conclude two things: that the meal is going to turn out just fine and that everyone already eating there is a regular. Early in the evening, there are a few tables of older diners, a group of women celebrating a birthday and a kid dining out with his grandmother.

As Ted Stelzenmuller was getting ready to open his new restaurant in Canton last year, he met with a lawyer to go over paperwork. The lawyer offered a story about his own restaurant experience. "The first thing he said was, `I grew up in restaurants. My family started a business together, and now they don't speak,' " Stelzenmuller said. The lawyer's story was a cautionary tale. Stelzenmuller's mother, Michele Jackson, was sitting next to him in the lawyer's office, looking at the prospect of becoming co-owner of Jack's Bistro in Canton and partly responsible for a hefty loan to get her son's restaurant up and running.

Have a favorite family-owned restaurant? Jones Dairy Farm, a Fort Atkinson, Wis., company that produces breakfast sausage, ham, bacon, sausage and more, has launched a contest to recognize the best. Any family that owns and operates a commercial restaurant or noncommercial food service in the United States is eligible for the America's Best Restaurant Family Award. Diners can nominate their favorite families by filling out a form online at jonesdairyfarm.com (click on the award logo). An eligible restaurant family can bypass the nomination process by submitting an application, also available online.

The new Liberatore's in Perry Hall is a sort of Liberatore's Lite. If you live in the Baltimore area, you may have been to the Liberatore's in Timonium, and you know it's as close as Timonium comes to a fine-dining restaurant. It's not really a place you'd take the kids or drop in wearing jeans and flip-flops, and it's an easy place to spend a lot of money. Enter Perry Hall's Liberatore's. This is the one of the five Liberatore's most oriented to families, with a kids' menu, light fare and pastas for inexpensive dinners.

No one is surprised more than Brenda L. Wargo that the restaurant she and her husband, Andy S. Wargo, opened 10 years ago near Forest Hill is still open.Though she trusted her husband's ability to run Andy Wargo's Restaurant and Tavern on Jarrettsville Road, she wasn't so sure she could manage being a 28-year-old mother of two and a restaurant co-owner."I hated it at first," she recalled, saying she didn't want to juggle raising a family and a restaurant at the same time. "I wasn't ready to devote my entire life to business."

Fans of Poulet USA on York Road shouldn't spend too much time mourning its closing. A new Poulet opened in the Towson Town Center food court two weeks ago selling the popular rotisserie chicken. It's not a full-service restaurant as was its predecessor down the road. But owner Jonathan Soudry felt that Poulet simply didn't work as a sit-down eatery. "I realized too late," he says, "that a family restaurant needs more variety, and my concept works better when people can see the food as it's being prepared."

Oakland Mills Village Center has another opportunity to fill an empty building, a key piece to its rejuvenation. A liquor license application submitted this week by a prospective restaurant operator moves the village center a step closer to filling the void left by the closing of Last Chance Saloon, a 23-year-old neighborhood pub and restaurant. Vaughn Ennis, one of the three partners in the venture, said the establishment would be "a standard American family restaurant," serving a variety of dishes, including seafood.

Hilda H. Fallon, a lifelong Baltimore resident and one-time restaurant operator who raised five children, died March 15 of pneumonia at St. Agnes HealthCare. She was 81. Hilda Harrigan was born and raised in the Guilford neighborhood of Baltimore. She was a 1941 graduate of Seton High School on North Charles Street. It was in the York Road area of North Baltimore that she met her first husband, James W. Sobol. Mr. Sobol's parents owned Sobol's Restaurant, a bar and restaurant on York Road that had its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.