Open A Restaurant

A lot happened on the local restaurant scene this year, but the biggest trend wasn't a happy one. Let's call it entree creep. At the beginning of the year I was still talking about places trying to keep their main courses under that magic $20 figure so they would be considered moderate. That now seems long ago and far away. Consider yourself lucky if the entrees on a restaurant's menu are priced under $30. Of course, there are exceptions; but when a bar in Fells Point has entrees starting at $19.95 and ending at $28.95 (I'm thinking of the last restaurant I went to, John Steven Ltd.)

It's no mystery why Amicci's has been so popular for so long. Open a restaurant with good, basic Italian food served in heaping portions and at reasonable prices, and people will come. This Little Italy stalwart has changed quite a bit since it opened in 1990. Back then, it had 43 seats and a casual, sandwich-driven menu. Today, with a new dining area that opened in May, the restaurant seats 220, and the menu is mostly Italian entrees like lasagna, chicken parm and shrimp scampi, plus several pasta vegetarian dishes.

A California-based chain will open a restaurant Friday in the Columbia lakefront building once used to showcase the new town's model home plans and amenities.Fresh Choice, which bills itself as an "upscale, self-service-style restaurant" with soup, salad and pasta bars, is expected to hire at least 60 employees, said Stephen Robinson, general manager of the restaurant.The opening is part of the Rouse Co.'s plans to enliven downtown Columbia by bringing restaurants to the area around Lake Kittamaqundi, officials said.

College will sponsor software symposium Anne Arundel Community College will hold a symposium in Linthicum on May 16 to introduce area business and industry representatives to software integrating business systems. The SAP R/3 Symposium will take place at the Maritime Institute of Technology & Graduate Studies Training & Conference Center, with panelists discussing the software's benefits, implementation and employee training options available to local companies. The SAP R/3 system is being used by nearly 11,000 companies and agencies, including Northrop Grumman Corp.

A week hence, Baltimore diners will begin speaking a strange new language, bending their tongues around opakapaka and onaga, which is not to omit furikake and lilikoi and so much seared shutome. And you thought it was tough to say Yuri Temirkanov. The name this time is Roy Yamaguchi, member of a burgeoning club of celebrity chefs to appear on television, publish a cookbook and open a restaurant or two. He serves Hawaiian/Asian/Euro- pean-fusion food, featuring fish (opakapaka, onaga and shutome)

It takes a lot of guts to open a restaurant. Owners choose a location, fine-tune their recipes, hone their wine lists and tinker with their interiors. Then they hire staff, open their doors and hope for the best. You've probably heard that 90 percent of restaurants go out of business before they are a year old. Several studies have found that the number is closer to 30 percent the first year, with 60 percent of restaurants closing before they reach their third anniversary. Here are some of the new Baltimore-area restaurants reviewed this year that seem likely to beat the odds.

The level of excitement generated by the return of Chef Fernand Tersiguel to Ellicott City can only be likened to the circus coming to town -- before the days of television, VCRs and MTV.Residents of the historic town of Ellicott City said they have been waiting for this event for five years, ever since the first Chez Fernand -- a few blocks farther down the street -- burned down in 1985.After trying unsuccessfully to find a new site in Howard County, Tersiguel left the area to open a restaurant in Baltimore, leaving a gap that has never been filled, patrons said.

Night after night, touring the country for his one-man show, Chazz Palminteri searched for the perfect Italian meal, but 31 plates of linguine marinara gave way to 31 disappointments. Then, he walked into Aldo's , a mainstay of Baltimore's Little Italy, and found not only the pasta he'd been craving but the collaborators for his dream project. Two years later, and the Academy Award nominee is about to add a restaurant to a resume that includes "The Usual Suspects," "Bullets Over Broadway" and "A Bronx Tale," the 1989 one-man show that brought him fame, not to mention a lifelong friend and mentor in Robert De Niro.

Fruits of the sea Don't confuse it with other restaurants in the area with nearly the same name. The Bay Atlantic Seafood Restaurant has opened in the Mount Vernon Hotel where the Washington Cafe used to be, at Cathedral and Franklin streets. It's run by the Baltimore International College as a teaching facility for the School of Culinary Arts and the School of Business and Management. The menu emphasizes seafood like the restaurant's signature dish, Bay Atlantic seafood stew with clams, mussels and catfish in a tomato garlic broth.

Have you ever considered opening a restaurant of your own? A cozy bistro with checkered tablecloths. Or a country inn serving fresh-cooked American fare? No matter what kind of place you've dreamed about, you'll want to be aware that restaurants are one of the toughest, diciest businesses you can launch."Captured by the romance of owning a restaurant, people often plunk down their money on the naive assumption that there's nothing more to it than opening their doors and serving good food," says John Seidel, president of Business Sales Consultants, a restaurant brokerage and consulting firm based in White Plains, N.Y."