Filet Mignon

A waterside Fells Point eatery has brought a little more of the sea inside. Last weekend, Shucker's Restaurant and Bar opened its new raw bar. Tony Lombardi - who owns Shucker's with Andy Rosenthal - says the room used to be one of two main dining rooms. Now, the room is more of a bar/lounge area. When you walk in the restaurant's front door off the Broadway Pier, you can go left of the big 400-gallon fish tank into the main dining room, the main bar or a back bar/lounge. Or you can turn right, where you'll find a long Corian-topped bar, divided in the middle by the large iced fresh seafood display set behind a wall of glass.

Fred's Tiffany Room Restaurant in Parole is a cozy neighborhood restaurant that offers a good selection of fairly priced seafood and more kitschy ambience than you probably want for a quiet, romantic dinner.But if you decide to go to Fred's, avoid the steak. My 1/3-inch-thick, way-too-tough "filet mignon" deterred my boyfriend and me from going back unless we have no other dining options.After seeing an ad in the phone book touting the "Best Crab Cake in Annapolis," my partner and I trekked to Fred's one recent rainy weeknight.

Last April, Lennys Chop House closed when restaurateur Lenny Kaplan didn't come to an agreement with the new owners of the Harbor Inn Pier 5 hotel, where the restaurant was located. It was big news because the restaurant, with its well-known owner, luxe appointments and pricey menu, had been open only 15 months.Since then, the hotel has kept the chop house open as its dining room. Much of the staff of Lennys stayed behind, according to general manager Robb Young, who was promoted to the hotel's food and beverage director; and the menu stayed the same except for the addition of a three-course prix-fixe menu with four complementary wines for $49.50.

Ruth's Chris Steak House has the potential to offer a perfect dining experience -- wonderful, cozy ambience, excellent service and great food.However, our recent visit was egregiously flawed. In an establishment with the word "steak" in its name, half of my filet mignon was too well-done.And at a restaurant with prices like those of Ruth's Chris, perfection is not just something you hope for. You demand it.My boyfriend and I called the restaurant at 8 p.m. on a Friday and were told that the earliest we could be seated was 9.The restaurant is partitioned into cozy dining alcoves, and we were seated in one, but unfortunately for us, it was in a busy spot next to a door.

Il Giardino -- The Garden -- is the secret of the Golden Triangle.That may sound exotic, but we're not talking Far Eastern intrigue here.A one-story building camouflaged by the suburban clutter and heavy traffic of the old Golden Triangle shopping center, where U.S. 29 and U.S. 40 meet, the 12-year-old Italian restaurant looks ordinary on the outside.It is obscured by the rush of never-ending traffic, the disruption of a tire store going up next door, the bustle of the Lotte Plaza Asian supermarket, and the huge Super Fresh across U.S. 40.Inside, that's all out of sight, and out of mind.

Just when I start telling people what a sophisticated restaurant city Baltimore has become, I notice that just about the only places that are packed night after night are the pubs.This is not a bad thing. Baltimore's pubs, the good ones, have a sort of straightforward approach to eating, drinking and being merry that's appealing after a few meals of pan-seared Chilean sea bass with crispy fried sugar snap peas and roasted saffron Roma tomatoes with basil aioli.Which brings us to the Claddagh Pub in Canton.

Dinner at Karson's Inn is a very retro experience. George Karson, son of the former owners, reopened the restaurant in November. (It had been closed for months while their estate was being settled.) His goal was to re-create the restaurant as it was at the height of its popularity in the '50s and '60s -- when, as he says, the lines waiting to get in stretched out the door.Walk into Karson's now, and it's instant nostalgia.Even if your parents didn't take you there for special occasions when you were a child (as one of my guest's did)

New Orleans is known as much for its music as its food, so it makes perfect sense for Main Street Blues to capitalize on the marriage by featuring Big Easy fare, and live music six days a week.Owned by Dennis Martin and Patric Branham, this new Ellicott City eatery is a thin stretch of a restaurant, with tables hugging the teal sponge-painted walls all the way to the mural in the back depicting blues greats B. B. King and Muddy Waters. If your eyesight's not so good, you might think someone is frozen in a perpetual groove back there.

Lewnes' Steakhouse is the sort of restaurant that can stir up extreme emotions.There's the intense yearning as you wait for your food while the smells of delicious dishes at other tables swirl mercilessly around you, joy as you bite into chunks of tender filet mignon and then abysmal sadness when the meal is over and you're too stuffed to order that second strawberry shortcake.My sister and I arrived at Lewnes' late on a chilly weeknight to a short wait for a nonsmoking table. We passed time at the restaurant's small bar, where a slightly inebriated man nursing a drink proclaimed himself a regular and animatedly emoted about Lewnes' wonderful steaks, crab balls, crab cakes everything.

J. T. Ashley's Grille is not a bad place to grab a meal -- if you don't mind average food and slow service.We found the restaurant almost empty early on a recent Saturday evening and were seated immediately. The decor was a clash between the Miami-style pastel walls -- salmon-pink -- and the grill-house feel of the green marble columns and faux oak tables.The piped-in pop medley featuring The Supremes and Top 40 music created a weird feel and was a little loud.But overall, we got a lot of feeling -- thanks in part to the dim lighting -- and the restaurant was warm and comfortable.

These days it's cause to celebrate when a restaurant more ambitious than a pub or pizza place opens in Baltimore. Scary times usually produce eateries that offer sure bets in the way of food - sure bets that don't cost much. When I first heard about the Reserve (1542 Light St., TheReserveBaltimore.com), a new Federal Hill bar, I figured when it got around to serving food, the kitchen would produce the usual nachos, wings and burgers. Instead, the offerings include tuna tataki, shrimp and tropical fruit ceviche, cornmeal-crusted red grouper in a smoked salmon caper beurre blanc, Buffalo strip steak with parsnip puree and pan-roasted boneless quail.

Last week I did a Top 10 list of romantic restaurants for the budget-minded on my blog, Dining@Large. Because I believe you'll have a better time with your sweetie celebrating at a restaurant before or after Valentine's Day when places aren't as crowded, I'm reprinting it here. Note that the list is in alphabetical order. (We also discussed where to go for the what-the-heck-she's-worth-it dinner, when money isn't a consideration.) 1 Annabel Lee Tavern in Canton. Dark and romantically mysterious setting.

In O. Henry's stories of striving in turn-of-the-century New York, known collectively as The Four Million, filet mignon has a recurring role as a symbol of love and momentary luxury. The diminutive tail end of the tenderloin is the rare celebration meal for two starving artists, each secretly working in a laundry so the other can pursue a dream. In another story, a young lady who subsists mostly on weak Irish stew sheds a tear over her filet as she dines alone, fearing the well-to-do suitor who bought it is about to be proved disreputable.

A waterside Fells Point eatery has brought a little more of the sea inside. Last weekend, Shucker's Restaurant and Bar opened its new raw bar. Tony Lombardi - who owns Shucker's with Andy Rosenthal - says the room used to be one of two main dining rooms. Now, the room is more of a bar/lounge area. When you walk in the restaurant's front door off the Broadway Pier, you can go left of the big 400-gallon fish tank into the main dining room, the main bar or a back bar/lounge. Or you can turn right, where you'll find a long Corian-topped bar, divided in the middle by the large iced fresh seafood display set behind a wall of glass.

City dwellers on the go have some new choices for dinner. Federal Hill's Dinner at Your Door not only has a new address -- with more room and a drive-up service -- it's also offering some new meal options. For the last three years, Dinner at Your Door offered healthful catering and delivered dinners to nearby neighborhoods. However, owner Brooke Hagerty says that when the shop lost its storefront lease at 1106 S. Charles St., she not only found a new place, but the larger space has enabled her to expand the business.

There are custom-made homes, custom-made clothes, and now custom-made steak, courtesy of Howard County's newest restaurant, oZ. Chophouse. That's pronounced Oh-Zee, as in the abbreviation of ounce. Not Oz, as in "The Wizard of." The name, and the concept, come from owners Tim and Katie Buscher. "We were going to call it Ounce Chophouse because we can customize our steaks and serve them by the ounce, but it didn't sound right," Katie Buscher says. Little "o", big "Z," period was born. Although, from the sounds of it, this eatery may have more than just the slight similarity in nomenclature to the land of Dorothy.

Darren Petty, who owns the Natty Boh Lounge and Canton Station with Charley Alfred, said he's been a National Bohemian fan since he was a young man. Short on cash, he chose the famed Baltimore-brewed beer not because of its taste, though it's not bad at all, but because it was cheap - "$3.50 a case warm, four bucks cold." Natty Boh is no longer brewed in Baltimore, but the love affair between the city and the the beer continues, thanks in part to Petty and Alfred. The mustachioed, circle-headed Natty Boh logo now winks from the walls of the Natty Boh Lounge, which opened in November on the second and third floors above Canton Station.

A popular Remington eating institution has taken a second home downtown. You'll now find Dizzy Issie's North Charles on ... well, North Charles. More precisely, in Mount Vernon, above the Grand Central pub at Charles and Eager streets. "At my other place, we get a lot of people from downtown, and sometimes they would have to wait 40, 45 minutes for a table," says Dizzy Issie's owner Elaine Stevens. When her good friend Don Davis, the owner of Grand Central, invited her to set up shop on the second floor, Stevens says she jumped at the chance.

WHEN IT COMES TO THE HOLLY BALL, decking the halls is only the beginning. The fundraiser for the Hospice of Baltimore and Gilchrest Center for Hospice Care is known for its "only the best" atmosphere. "Pat Modell [the honorary co-chair with husband Art] makes sure this is over the top. The best band. The best food. Mink coats for the auction, for crying out loud!" exclaimed IBM vice president P.J. Mitchell. Unfortunately, Pat was feeling under the weather. So, son David Modell and wife Michel stood in for his parents, greeting guests alongside gala chairs Connie and Bill Pitcher.

Mo's Crab and Pasta Factory occupies a peculiar niche in the world of restaurants. Not many places are so casual that customers show up in shorts and T-shirts, yet so fancy that dinner for four can easily run several hundred dollars. The restaurant, in Little Italy, belongs to the chain of Mo's seafood restaurants, which includes the Fisherman's Wharf, two blocks away on President Street, the Seafood Factory Neighborhood Bar and Grill on Eastern Avenue and Mo's Seafood Factory in Glen Burnie.