New Restaurant

Tourists may think Baltimore's most noteworthy culinary achievements are crab cakes and the food in Little Italy, but local foodies point to Cindy Wolf and Tony Foreman's restaurants as proof that their city has sophisticated eating places to rival any in the country. Now diners will have an ambitious new restaurant and upscale wine bar to try when the couple's latest venture, a Northern Italian restaurant called Cinghiale (pronounced ching-GYAH-lay), opens across Lancaster Street from their signature establishment, Charleston.

When Last Chance Saloon, a 23-year-old neighborhood pub in Oakland Mills, closed in January last year, residents and local officials said its loss as community restaurant and gathering place left a major void in the village center. They were pleased when the "coming soon" banner on the former pub's white, wood-paneled building came down recently, signaling the arrival of Fire Rock Grill, which opened Tuesday. "This has been a long and anxious wait for us, and we are absolutely delighted that they have opened," said Barbara Russell, an Oakland Mills resident and member of the Columbia Association board of directors.

Nearly a year ago, an early-morning fire caused an estimated $1 million in damage to a popular downtown Westminster restaurant, but the site of the Fat Cat Cafe is making its way back. In place of the shattered windows, caution tape, piles of debris and the destroyed third floor, there are tarps and glass, a construction crew and a turret extending from the roof of the rebuilt top level. The building is being restored by its new owner, Sykesville Mayor Jonathan S. Herman. Herman, who fell in love with 172 E. Main St. years ago, said the building will keep its historic look and will reopen with a new restaurant and apartment units inside.

NEW YORK - Could it be a culinary case of the seven-year itch? New York City's love affair with Mario Batali began in 1998 when Batali opened his flagship restaurant off Washington Square, Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca. The bond strengthened and deepened as the chef opened a string of six other Manhattan hotspots and an Italian wine shop. But now this romance has hit a bit of a snag. Lately, just as Batali has opened an ambitious new restaurant and is poised to open another in Los Angeles - his first outside Manhattan - he finds himself besieged.

When I reviewed Towne Hall in Greenspring Station earlier this year, I said its food was good but it was noisier than any new restaurant I had ever complained about. I would have bet my firstborn it couldn't get any louder. Then I heard the restaurant was going to start serving hard-shell crabs. The name changed to the City Crab & Seafood Company, and I assumed it was now a crab house, filled with banging mallets. If so, they would have had to drag me back kicking and screaming. Well, I was wrong.

Michael Gettier, chef and restaurateur, is nowhere to be found when a visitor shows up to see him at his new establishment in Towson.He's not in his office or the accountant's office, he's not in the kitchen, he's not in the lounge or the dining rooms or the banquet rooms. He's not in the wine cellar or the walk-in coolers. And he's not in the parking lot or on the roof. So there's only one place he can be.Sure enough, there he is, in the basement stairwell, where an associate with a plumber's snake is trying to drain the water that flooded the bottom floor when a boiler was accidentally left to drain overnight.

The Corner, a new restaurant in Hampden, took over the location where a diner had operated since the beginning of time. The Corner has things like escargot, moules frites and roasted monkfish on the menu, so, naturally, folks fretted about The Avenue losing another piece of its flinty soul. Don't worry. The Corner has the makings of a weird-Hampden classic. In these early months — it opened in early March — it's as awkwardly charming as a newborn calf, and part of an evening's pleasure is watching it stay upright.

Get ready, moms and dads. Chuck E. Cheese's coin-operated games, rides, videos, mechanical animals, plastic ball pools and pizza are coming to Back River, and very soon.The new restaurant is to open Aug. 6 in the Diamond Point Plaza shopping center in the 8300 block of Eastern Ave., just across Back River from Essex. It has cost $800,000 to outfit, said Alice Winters, an official of ShowBiz Pizza Time Inc., the national chain that operates Chuck E. Cheese's restaurants from headquarters Texas.

The Kona Grill was slated to open officially on Tuesday in the building formally known as 1 East Pratt Street but more commonly as the Verizon Building. Based in Scottsdale, Ariz., the Kona Grill has opened about 25 restaurants in 15 states — this is the first one in Maryland. The accessibly snazzy menu combines steaks, sushi and New American cuisine — the signature dish is a macadamia-nut chicken entrée with white cheddar mashed potatoes and "wok-tossed" vegetables.

Maryland Live Casino has opened its version of the Prime Rib, the iconic Baltimore steakhouse that has flourished almost from the second of its founding in 1965 by the Beler brothers. The new steakhouse is operated by the casino and is technically unaffiliated with the Prime Rib restaurants in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington. The casino operators describe the relationship as a licensing partnership with Buzz Beler. He has, by all accounts, played a significant role in pulling off the casino restaurant, whose chefs received training in the Prime Rib ways in the Washington restaurant's kitchen.