Restaurant

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.

Behind the nondescript storefront with its necessary neon window signs, Towson Best does indeed serve some of the best Cantonese food in the Towson/North Baltimore area. A group of young and unfailingly friendly owners and staff greet all who enter and set the tone for casual lunches and dinners that make you not only want to return for the food and but also to patronize a place run by such nice people. The room is divided by long planters. To your right is a tidy eight-stool sushi bar with its pristine fish and smiling chef, small booths and a few tables.

For more than 60 years, fanciers of the steamed Maryland blue crab trekked every summer to a secluded restaurant on the Bush River near Aberdeen and hammered and picked their way to gastronomical nirvana. They traveled to Gabler's Shore Restaurant from New York, Philadelphia and Washington in kind of a cultural homage to the model crab emporium not available in Queens or South Philly. And they traveled from the local crab capitals along Eastern Avenue and Belair Road. But these are sad days around Harford County.

Joe's Crab Shack will open its fourth Maryland restaurant at Hunt Valley Towne Center, the mall's developer, Greenberg Gibbons, said Thursday. The seafood restaurant will open this fall, adding to locations in Abingdon, Greenbelt and Gaithersburg. The 325-seat restaurant will feature a playground under an enclosed patio and a menu of crab and other seafood dishes. Earlier this week, Hunt Valley's developer had announced that women's apparel boutique Eilieen Fisher will open its first Baltimore-area store at the mall in September.

It looks like the "Kitchen Nightmare" might not be over for Baltimore's Cafe Hon . A producer for the show has been calling around town, looking to book people for what appears to be an episode that will check in on how the Hampden restaurant has fared since Chef Gordon Ramsay swooped in last year to help turn the place around. "Kitchen Nightmares" visited the struggling Cafe Hon last fall. The plot surrounded the restaurant's sharp drop in reputation after news broke that owner Denise Whiting had trademarked the word "hon," a beloved Baltimore term of endearment.

Chad Gauss has left the City Cafe. His last night as the Mount Vernon restaurant's executive chef was Saturday. Gauss will be opening his own restaurant in the old Hampden Food Market. The 3,000 square-foot restaurant, to be named the Food Market, will include seating for 90 in the dining room, a 12-seat bar and an open kitchen whose focus, Gauss said, will be "basically blue-collar food in a white-collar execution. " Gauss's partner in the Food Market is Elan Kotz, a familiar front-of-house presence at Aldo's in Little Italy.

Lunchbox, Bryan Voltaggio's lunch-only restaurant, opened last Saturday in Frederick The Lunchbox menu is very simple -- seven pressed sandwiches (e.g., portabello, Reuben and peanut butter and banana); green salads; soups (e.g., alphabet, roasted butternut squash); and sweets (e.g., brownies and cookies). Nothing is more expensive than five dollars. The family-friendly restaurant also serves specialty-brand sodas like Boylan and McCutcheon and even flavored South Mountain Creamery milk.

The game is over for the Sideline, a glitzy restaurant and sports bar in Largo owned by former Washington Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington. Owing millions of dollars to numerous creditors and faced with possible eviction from the Boulevard at the Capital Centre, the money-losing business closed abruptly Wednesday. Employees showed up at work to find movers clearing the place out, and they told television station WJLA (Channel 7) that they were angry that they weren't getting paid.

An email was forwarded to me announcing Wednesday night's reopening of Kaufman's Tavern in Gambrills. I gave Kaufmann's a call, and manager Daniel Carr confirmed that the sprawling restaurant would be open on Wednesday, Aug. 31, the first night since Hurricane Irene came through town and knocked Kaufmann's for a loop. Irene did a number on Kaufmann's, smashing a tree down on a car its lot and generally playing havoc with the expansive deck area that had been remodeled only this past spring.

"Top Chef" alum Bryan Voltaggio is busier than ever. Besides "Volt Ink," the new book written by him and his brother, Michael, he has two restaurant projects under way. According to Tom Sietsema of The Washington Post , the first restaurant, which is tentatively called North Market Kitchen, is a 10,000-square-foot space in Frederick that will seat more than 200 in its dining room, and will also house a specialty store and exhibition kitchen....

El Paraiso is a crowd-pleaser. Whether your friends are hard to impress foodie types, or cautious and careful when exploring a menu, El Paraiso ("the paradise" in Spanish) will make them happy. The restaurant, in a Reisterstown shopping center, serves tasty and familiar Mexican standards alongside authentic — and equally appealing — Salvadoran dishes like yuca con chicharron and beef tongue tacos. The restaurant opened in 2003, but the recipes date back much further. El Paraiso's owners, Mercedes and Maria Rodriguez, emigrated to the U.S. from El Salvador during the Central American country's civil war in the 1980s.

Greenberg potato skins, Greenberg potato skins, Greenberg potato skins ... jackpot! The Prime Rib is coming to the Maryland Live Casino — Greenberg potato skins, leopard-skin carpeting, baby grand piano and all. Established in Baltimore in 1965 by brothers Buzz and Nick Beler, the Prime Rib has is now a bona fide dining institution, with additional locations in Washington and Philadelphia. Attracting the Prime Rib to Maryland Live is a coup for the Baltimore-based Cordish Cos., which had originally announced that the casino's premier steak house would be Ruth's Chris . "The Prime Rib kept coming up in internal conversations and on surveys," said Cordish managing partner Joe Weinberg, who is overseeing the casino's design, construction and operations.

I wondered why I wasn't seeing more restaurants in Baltimore offering Preakness promotions. It's simple, really. They don't have to. Add commencement exercises at Notre Dame and Loyola into the mid-May mix, and you've got a pretty sweet weekend for the hospitality industry. Hotels are booked heavily (but not fully) this weekend, and restaurant reservation books are bulging -- The Preakness is the kind of event where visitors make reservations at the same places year after year. (If you want to rub shoulders with racing insiders after the race, by the way, Aldo's in Little Italy has evolved into the race's unofficial post-race 19th hole, a destination for the visiting media, trainers, jockeys and other insiders.)

Khalid Chaudry won't give up the recipes behind the food at his new Mount Vernon restaurant, Alladin Kabob. When pressed about the magic behind the meat samosas, or the sprinkle of red powder on a lemon sitting atop a small salad, the restaurant's owner demurred. "Those are our spices," he said. "It's our secret. " Whatever those secret spice combinations are, they work. Alladin Kabob's menu stretches across the Middle East and through India, with a few American dishes thrown into the mix. Regardless of point of origin, Chaudry's food is expertly seasoned.

There's a delicious surprise in the new issue of Sun Magazine. You have to know what you're looking for, though. There's so much to read and see in the 175th anniversary celebration issue of the Sun Magazine, great pieces by Sun staffers, past and present, and charming essays by Marylanders whose lives have been affected by the Baltimore Sun. But the surprise I'm talking about accompanies an essay by retired dining critic Elizabeth Large...

Plug Ugly's Publick House is a strange name for a tavern. But Baltimore history buffs know the Plug Uglies were a thuggish street gang/political club that ran riot on Baltimore's streets in the 1850s. Don't worry. The newest resident of O'Donnell Square isn't a gangland. Bartenders with untucked shirts are about as rough as it gets, and the staff here, you may be sorry to know, seems to have been chosen for their gentle dispositions. At first glance, Plug Ugly's could pass for any number of its neighbors, but look closer: The wood-filled bar area and dining rooms have been generously furnished with salvaged material like church pews and antique lighting fixtures.

The year began with Great Sage in Clarksville switching on New Year's Day from a vegetarian to all-vegan menu. And from that day on, hardly anything stayed settled for long in the area's dining scene. It was a big year for making transitions and changes. Some were voluntary, but others weren't, the victim of bad decisions, a sluggish economy and, in a few cases, a sudden disaster. Restaurants closed, sometimes suddenly, but every once in a while with enough time to give customers a chance to say good-bye.

T he name is a little strange - a reader on my blog said it sounds like a place you'd tell your children to stay away from - but Mr. Rain's Fun House is a perfect fit for the not-so-ordinary American Visionary Art Museum. It's the restaurant that opened last week where Joy America Cafe once was, a space that was empty for more than three years. Bill Buszinski and his wife Maria, the former chef/owners of the now-closed Sputnik Cafe in Crownsville, are running the restaurant, along with partner Perez Klebhan.

Midnight Sun alum Sam Sessa and I were both unfamiliar with Caribbean Secrets, the defendant in the trademark infringement lawsuit filed by Ocean City's Seacrets. So Sam drove by the restaurant on South Hanover Street earlier this week and snapped the above photo. I'm going to present this without much comment, but will point out Seacrets' lawsuit states: "The continued use of the CARIBBEAN SECRETS mark by Defendant in connection with its restaurant is likely to cause confusion or mistake as to the source or origin of those services, thereby misleading and/or deceiving consumers in the State of Maryland and elsewhere.