N is for Nick’s Fish House

I am an advertiser’s dream — short attention span and highly suggestible. So when I see a sign advertising half-price burger night and another for $1.50 Miller Lite, that is what I will order, even if I am in a fish place with lots of deliciousness on tap. Le sigh.

That said, my burger at Nick’s Fish House was delightful, cooked perfectly rare and served by the friendliest bartender I’ve met in a while, and all for $5.50. (That’s including the beer.)

Nick’s Web site hilariously describes the location as “the beautiful Middle Branch adjacent to the historic Hanover Street Bridge and just south of the Inner Harbor. ” I would call it a waterfront bar on the edge of the industrial section of South Baltimore, wedged between I-95 and the Port Covington Wal-Mart. Of course, if you want a place where you can dock your boat, I guess that’s where your bar has to be. (There are slips outside of Nick’s.)

The decor is beachy, stopping just shy of Jimmy Buffet-esque escapism, with pretty palm-frond looking fans circulating overhead and nice wood gleaming everywhere. This time of year, they have a great-looking Christmas tree, but obviously Nick’s is a summertime place. I scurried past the outer deck to get inside, but even so, there are precious few places in Baltimore with good outdoor dining and the sunsets out there in nice weather must be beautiful.

Because I was so overeager to order a burger, I had to ask for the menu after I ordered to check it out. I actually really like oysters, so I was disappointed in myself for obeying my cruel overlords, the Monday Night Specials signs, and not getting some briny goodness. Everything else was pretty typical bar food with a slant toward seafood. Prices skewed a touch high, but there are lots of daily specials, so if you choose judiciously, you’ll probably get out without too much damage. If a summertime kinda place left me this pleased in December, I’m sure I’d be floating on air

M is for Mama’s on the Half Shell

Mama’s on the Half Shell! Oyster power!

I never hear the name of this watering hole without hearing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to visit this Canton Square stalwart. The happy hour is quite good — specials on oysters and drinks, including Clipper City drafts for $2.50. The specials are only good at the actual bar, though, which is a shame when the weather is so nice. Mira and I stole a seat on the sidewalk on MotHS’s cute patio beneath flower pots rocking gently in the late summer breeze. It was worth the extra money for my $3.10 Clipper City and Mira’s extra-strong mojitos. We shared a plate of oysters (mostly delicious except for the dry Chincoteagues, which was weird since they were more local than the PEIs or Long Island mollusks) and crab dip. The dip was heroic in size but gluey in texture — if I had it to do over again, I’d just order more oysters. Of course, “order more oysters” is my solution to a lot of problems.

When the mollusks were slurped and the pints were drained, Mira and I trekked to Safeway to buy flowers and then walked to Polly’s house. We were two unwise women, bearing the gifts of a mixed bouquet and tipsy good wishes, going to visit the blessed child. Polly’s son, whose coming was foretold at the first Alphabetical Happy Hour back in January, was born in early August. He is quite small and deeply uninterested in his parents’ friends, but he has amazingly soft little feet. Most importantly, his parents  are lit up like candles to have him in their home. He is a lucky young man, and I am a lucky (less) young woman to have such nice friends to drink with and vist with. M is the halfway point of the AHH, which is not too bad, all things considered. I should probably be up to R by now, especially considering that Polly MADE A WHOLE PERSON since I started this blog, but all things considered, it’s not a bad pace.
So where should the AHH go next?

C is for Cool. Really F#_@ing Cool.

Lillet blonde, on the rocks with a twist of orange at Cafe Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. It’s my new favorite cocktail and I love it dearly.

Dinner was good — and the prices at the cafe were reasonable for the birthplace of California cuisine — and the service was great. I showed up well after 8 pm and they parked me at the bar for less than the promised 45 minutes with the wholly distracting Lillet. When I was seated, I said thanks for squeezing me in. The bespectacled, betweeded hostess said, “It’s a pleasure to have you.” I was a late-coming one-top, the type of table that is often on the recieving end of a world-class stink-eye. I’ve never been to a place as famous as CP before and was so happy to find that the staff knows how a small meal can be a big deal to someone like me.

The appetizer (tomato soup) and entree (grilled polenta) were nice, but the alpha and omega of the meal were the aforementioned apperatif and the dessert, hazelnut creampuffs with dark chocolate and caramel sauce. The puffs arrived with coffee as dark and deep as a well. I usually take cream but not tonight. Even I know not to mess with a good thing.

L is for Lime

Lime, a Federal Hill tequila bar, was hopping on Tuesday night. Annie and I snagged the last table in this tiny wedge of a restaurant. Table service meant backless stools and no free shot and a lime presented to bar patrons. Oh well, it’s Federal Hill, so small spaces are de rigeur. (Exception: the new oversized townhomes on Fort Avenue down the street from Lime. WTF? That block looks like a mouthful of oversized veneers ready to chomp away its teeny neighbors.) Voices and loud music bounce off the hard green walls so loudly that Annie and I had to shout across the table to hear each other. Perhaps I’m just too old for Federal Hill. Dumb kids and their rock and roll.

After perusing Lime’s enormous margarita and tequila list, Annie got a Hometown Girl, a pink concoction with passionfruit juice that she loves. I am a margarita purist who wants only lime, salt and tequila singing across my tongue. Lime’s Horny Frog was just that, silly name notwithstanding. I had two Horny Frogs since it was two-for-one night. (Nice service note: Annie, who is a very good girl, had only one drink and the server gave her half off.) Lime has great specials every night, so it’s never a splurge, which is nice in these economic end times.

While Lime’s drink menu goes on for pages, the food menu is about half a dozen items, a smart move for a small kitchen. Skip chips and salsa (nice but not special) and nachos (individual nachos carefully layered with toppings, not a big fun mess of condiments – really, what is the point of an elegant nacho plate?) and go straight for the chicken tacos (soft torillas and tender, juicy meat).

Wednesday is flip a coin night, where the bartender will flip a coin and patrons who correctly call it in the air get a $1 drink. That’s a fun promotion, and Lime is a fun place. If they just hung some rugs on the walls or glued foam rubber to the bottom of the tables to get the decibel level down, I’d be sold.

Now you whippersnappers get off my damn lawn. My damn e-lawn, anyhow.

K is for Koco’s Pub

I liked Koco’s Pub, but I think I went during the wrong time of year. Awash in beachy kitsch, this Hamilton mainstay seems like a careworn cliché in mid-July. In winter it probably feels like a tropical resort, with its palm-leaf murals and friendly service. I’m happy to go back and give it a go at some later, chillier date. With all its nods towards points south, Koco’s is a quintessential neighborhood spot.

Koco’s is a meandering, lemon yellow building with a be-parroted sign, looking not entirely unlike a cruise ship run aground on the side of Harford Road. The main entrance is on the side, on Overland Avneue, and when I ducked in on a sunny day, my eyes to a minute to adjust to Koco’s dim lighting. When my pupils sorted themselves out, I saw a clutch of families having dinner, complete with kids playing on the floor. I saw regulars lining the long bar at the far end of the restaurant. I saw the aforementioned beachy kitsch. Ugh.

I’m leery of all things beach-themed (restaurants, parties, weddings, etc), which are often an attempted cheap short cut to fun. Beach = AWESOME, right? There’s a picture of surfboard on this menu and the club sandwich is called a Jammin’ Jamacian, so I must be HAVING A BLAST!!! But really, only the beach truly feels like the beach. Whenever I’m standing in someone’s scrubby back yard next to a tiki torch drinking a melting mai tai, it’s like watching a bad drag queen with five o’clock shadow. C’mon, who are you kidding here?

Anyhoodle, beach-themed places work to do to win me over. Koco’s does the work, with bar food at extremely reasonable prices and happy hour drink specials. (Said happy hour only runs from 3-6, though, so nip out of work early to catch them. There aren’t any food specials, but when fries are $4 a basket that’s not really an issue.) My friend Ellie and I got a few domestic draft beers for $2, served in chilled pint glasses. For our second round, we got new glasses, straight from the freezer – very nice touch. The bartenders were the best I’ve encountered in a long time, attentive but not pushy. Ellie and I opted not to order food – not even Koco’s famous crabcake, which looked like a delectable softball of crabby, flaky goodness – and the staff was no less interested in making sure we were happy.

The bartender even gave us (and everyone else at the bar) an oft-refilled basket of snack mix. I fall for free-salty-snacks-trick every single time a bar places a thirst-inducing treat in front of me, like the rube at the street fair who’s sure he can beat the carnie’s shell game. But really, any place with free snackes is A-OK in my book and the incredible service evoked a four-star Carribbean hotel far more than Parrothead-y décor did. I didn’t feel whisked away to a tropical island, but I did feel right at home.

Note: Koco’s is closed on Sunday and Monday.

J is for J.A. Murphy’s

After such a long hiatus, it’s criminal that I should crib from the city’s best-known nightlife reviewer to explain how I feel about J.A Murphy’s Tavern in Fell’s Point. But Sam Sessa of the Baltimore Sun speaks the truth:

“”Without a hook, J.A. Murphy’s might not bring enough patrons to stay afloat…In the coming months, [owner Keith] Murphy wants to take black-and-white photos of his customers and hang them on the walls. That’s not a novel idea, but it might make the bar more personable.”

My trip to J.A. Murphy’s was pleasant but unremarkable. As Sessa said in his review, the service was very friendly and the prices are reasonable. Murphy himself is a natural host with a charming Boston accent. Genny and Mira snagged a table out front, so I can’t review the bar as well as I can review the sidewalk immediately adjacent to said bar. The drinks were cold and my crab mac-and-cheese was tasty, albeit extremely salty. (I am a salt fiend so it was OK for me but I wonder if it would please a broader audience.) As long as they can balance the books, I imagine J.A.’s will become a neighborhood staple.

That said, I hate the black-and-white photos idea. Must even bars, where we go to see and meet people in person, be a version of a Facebook page? Do we always need our own images and good times reflected back at us to remind ourselves and everyone else how much fun we are having? The owners call it “a bar about nothing” (ha ha) but seem to want to shade in a history that the place hasn’t yet earned.

When I think of a bar with pictures on the wall, I think of Morseberger’s Tavern on Frederick Road in Catonsville. This was my grandfather’s bar – not that he owned it, but he was a long-standing patron from when my grandparents first moved to the neighborhood after World War II. If you go to Morseberger’s – and there is really no reason to – look for the neon sign that austerely reads “BAR.” I would link to the Web site, but Morseberger’s doesn’t have or need one. Everyone who goes there found it long ago.

Inside you will see the walls papered with pictures of men like my grandfather, stretching from the early 1950s to the present day. These are guys who maybe got college degrees on the GI Bill, but probably worked union jobs from the day they got home until the day they retired. (Pop was a C&P Telephone dispatcher.) In the pictures, they are drinking, dancing, smoking, playing poker, holding babies up for the camera’s inspection. If I search them carefully, I can find two of Pop – one in black-and-white where he still has thick, dark hair and is turned away from a card game, another in color where a ball cap shields his balding scalp from the fierce midday sun on some desolate dock, as he holds up a huge fish and wears a proud grin, eager to have both recorded for posterity.

Back in the day, my grandmother didn’t like that Pop drank his after-work beers at Morseberger’s, because the front room was whites only. (Black customers were confined to a room in the back. Mom-Mom was of the opinion that if he wasn’t too good to take their money, Mr. Morseberger should have let his black customers have their choice of seating.) But that was where the neighborhood guys drank and gossiped and bought Lotto tickets, so that’s where he went year after year. It’s not a nice bar, but it’s one with a history.

When my Uncle Theo was a wee little kid in the early 1960s, my grandfather took him to Catonsville’s famous Fourth of July parade . They were standing on the sidewalk outside Morseberger’s when the national guard troops marched by. Most people politely stood and clapped, as Catonvillians still do each year. But one agitated hippie began screaming that the soldiers were pigs, baby killers, etc. An old lady got upset, so Pop told the agitator to quiet down. The other guy unwisely initiated a shoving match, and came up on the wrong end of Pop’s right hook.

With the hippie sprawled out before him and his son on the crowded sidewalk, Pop grabbed Theo and ran into Morseberger’s. He yelled at the guys at the bar to watch Theo and slipped out the back door, where the black customers came in. The victim (rightfully) complained to the police, who were only marginally committed to finding the assailant of the parade-disrupting pinko who couldn’t take punch. They popped into Morseberger’s and asked if anyone had any pertinent information. Astonishingly, no one in the packed bar had seen a thing. (I guess no one noticed or thought to question Theo, who I imagine was given a seat at the bar and a Coke.)

A few years passed, and opinions about the Vietnam War changed. By that time, my dad (older than Theo) was knocking on the door of eligibility and even my hippie-punching grandfather didn’t think it was a fight worth fighting anymore. One night Mr. Morseberger was fired up about not giving one inch to the Viet Cong; Pop told him to shut up, that he wouldn’t want his son to have to die for something so hopeless and he couldn’t expect other people’s kids to do the same. Mr. Morseberger came from behind the bar and was aching for a fight. Pop said, “Hey, you touch me, tomorrow I own this bar.” Morseberger backed off. Perhaps in that one-second, fist-to-face contact with the sidewalk agitator, Pop had absorbed a lesson about pacificism.

After my grandfather’s funeral, the cousins convened at Morseberger’s to raise a glass to Pop. As my sister and I were leaving,  my father remarked, “Pop went there for so long that if they had any class at all, they wouldn’t charge you for the drinks. They will, but they shouldn’t.”

They did charge us, but it was worth it anyway, to drink beer and laugh after a day of being quiet and sad in church and at the KoC hall.

So that is a bar with history, most recently the very sad history of two murders, much to the chagrin of the Catonsville Chamber of Commerce. One guy, Benjamin Shorter, reportedly beat a guy in line for the bathroom. (Incidentally, what is now the bathroom was formerly the blacks only section.) A Sun story quotes an acquaintance as calling Shorter a “nut job,” and Uncle Theo informs me that Shorter was always a lunatic and a stint as a recon Marine didn’t help. Morseberger’s is steadfastly not a member of the CoC and has no interest in the creeping gentrification of the neighborhood. I hope to God it is never turns into some sort of hipster parody of a working class bar, where cheap domestic beer is only consumed ironically.

Anyway, Morseberger’s is my image of a tavern with lots of pictures on the wall. For better or worse, J.A. Murphy’s, the bar about nothing, has a long way to go.

I is for Iron Bridge Wine Company

A while ago I promised that I’d make Columbia’s Iron Bridge Wine Company my I spot because I felt the restaurant had been dealt an unfair hand by animal rights vandals. My sense of righteous indignation, which usually leads me into trouble, led me to a nice wine spot.

 IBWC, located in what I remember from childhood as a biker bar, is perched along Route 108 facing one of the few pastoral scenes left in Howard County. Inside, the décor is all dark wood and rich red draperies that stop just this side of the Moulin Rouge or a R&B slow jam video. The bar is beautiful, and I wish we’d spent our happy hour there, especially since they have a $20 bottle special on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Instead we went for a wine tasting class in the adjacent dining room from what the restaurant calls “Iron Bridge University.”

IBU was a deal for $25 – samplings of two whites, two reds and a port from Spain and Portugal. The students were arranged around a tall center table set up with five different wine glasses and the teacher (Waiter? Bartender? Sommelier?) talked for 45 uninterrupted minutes about older versus newer vines, appellations, and Portuguese geography. It was like drinking from a fire hose hooked up to a hydrant full of wine. The grapes were good, and the price was right (especially since it got us 10% off our total bill), but I didn’t learn one single thing. Maybe my cohorts and I aren’t ready for Iron Bridge University. We’re more Iron Bridge Community College, or Iron Bridge Reform School for Naughty Girls who Sit in the Back of Class and Giggle.

 My favorite selection was a not-quite-sparkling white that we ordered a bottle of after class . I’m a sucker for anything carbonated (soda, beer, seltzer, champagne, prosecco, etc), and it was a decent match for Annie’s roasted veggie pizza as well as the complimentary tuna tartare appetizer that came with the class. My two fellow “students” were offput by the super-sweet port, but personally I think tastings are for sampling the more outlandish stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily buy a whole bottle of on spec. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I generally like port (albeit more in winter), but it was still too sweet for me.

 We also ordered “grilled cheese” off the menu, which was a grilled round of brie served with crostini and macerated strawberries. Grilled brie sounds weird, but was quite tasty and I’d love to try it on the grill at home. Lulu, as she did at the Diamondback Tavern, housed a plate of risotto quite happily. In honor of the original foie gras protesting that inspired my trip, I order the chicken liver and foie gras pate, oddly presented in two Chinese soupspoons with crostini (a bit bready for the task at hand) and truffle butter (to die for). I enjoyed all the richness, but I still don’t quite understand why people throw down over this stuff. Doesn’t seem worth the fuss to me, from either the gourmet or animal rights angle.

The service wasn’t as silky smooth as I’ve seen in some high-end spots, but it was still quite good. They were generous with the extra crostini, and when our server didn’t know the answer to a question, she admitted that she didn’t, looked into it and relayed an answer back to us. I asked for a wine to go with my pate, since I have no idea what the traditional pairing would be, and the bartender offered up a crazy-rich white that was a terrific match. It was the only drink I tried that wasn’t from the tasting menu, but it was great. The wine list at IWBC has some great bargains for down-and-outers like me, and some pricier choices for the fat cats. Definitely worth the trip to HoCo.

H is for Hamilton Tavern

Hamilton Tavern like walking into a Dorothea Lange photo, only everyone’s skinny because they’re Lauraville hipsters instead of starving Dust Bowlers. The walls are strewn with artfully arranged saws and farm equipment that allude to the tavern’s commitment to locally sourced and seasonal foods. You won’t find tomatoes on the burgers, because tomatoes in May are worthless. You won’t find stout on tap until autumn, because the summer is better suited to Resurrection and IPAs. While the Ham Tav is a haul from my hood, it’s a carefully designed restaurant with a clear idea behind it, one that I can respect and admire. It’s a nice marriage a modern concept with an antiqued decor.

Hamilton Tavern has a limited menu — about eight appetizers and six sandwiches. The kitchen has wisely limited itself to things it does well. This week’s dip of the week was spicy black bean; I do wish I’d had the chance to try the smoked salmon dip from some weeks past. Mmm, smoked salmon. (Note: if anyone has any local smoked salmon dishes to recommend, please put them in the comments!)

Genny and I ordered fried pickles, which were the best I’ve ever had, although I think fried pickles are a contradiction in terms. While I love pickles and I love fried things, pickles are just too soggy to really achieve the crispness that defines fried food. (I feel the same way about Black Velvets. I adore champagne and Guinness, but can’t imagine them mingling.) Hamilton Tavern’s goat cheese side sauce is a tasty addition to the fried cukes. I still preferred the buffalo tofu — the creamy dullness of the tofu compliments the spicy of the buffalo sauce well.

In any case, Genny was pleased with the vegetarian options. There were some meatier things that I would have tried if we’d been there for a full-on dinner (namely the pulled duck BBQ sandwich, since I’ve had duck on the brain lately). Service was serviceable, but not special. Kudos goes to the designer, though. The farm equipment, pressed tin ceiling and fairy lights on the railing give an unearned patina to a very new restaurant. The ladies room is neatly papered in torn pages from authors like Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin. As an affirmed bookworm, I WILL do this to my powder room some day, even though I often come home from work so exhausted by words I want revert to pictograms and smoke signals.l

Restaurant owners would likely weep on a review that ends with a praise of the bathroom decor, and the Hamilton Tavern deserves better than that. I’ll have to go back sometime soon, and try that duck sandwich and check out the intriguing but as-yet-neglected-by-me wine list.

Incidentally, the people have spoken in regard to the Hamilton Tavern — it edged Heninger’s for AAH honors. Apparently no one has any love for Hull Street Blues in Locust Point. I have my I spot (iSpot?) all picked out, but start thinking about J places. Thanks.

Well that’s just ducky

Marylanders celebrate high holy days with crab feasts. You get a basket of some of the most beautiful, blue-tinted and darkly speckled creatures from the sea and boil them alive with a firey shower of Old Bay. Then you disembowel the now-rosy animals by hand, stuffing yourself to overfull and commenting how there’s no better way to spend a summer day. Such things tend to inure you against the horrors of butchery.

I am not sentimental about animals. I didn’t grow up with any pets, aside from short-lived goldfish, which are notoriously bad at cuddling and doing tricks and all those other anthropomorphic things. I love food so much that I instinctively recoil from anything that limits culinary possibilities. But I also like to think of myself as a Good Person, as most of us do, which is why I enjoyed the evenhanded exploration of the ethics of foie gras in Mark Caro’s book The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000 Year Old Delicacy Inspired the World’s Fiercest Food Fight.

Caro is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times who was drawn into the fold of foie due to a professional slap flight between two noted Windy City restauranteurs, Charlie Trotter and Rick Tram0nto. Trotter removed foie from his menu for ethical reasons, a move that eventually culminated in a city-wide ban on selling the fatty duck livers, produced by force-feeding the birds to the point of obesity. Gourmets balked at the idea of having a treasured item removed from their menus. Animal activists balked that anyone would argue a delicious tidbit was worth the torture of innocent animals. Conservatives balked that such a specific law should be imposed upon restauranteurs and consumers when everyone could just let the market decide that engorged duck livers weren’t worth the ethical or financial trouble of eating or producing them. So Caro went on a journey from Chicago to New York, California and France to see what the fuss is about. Surprising, it’s about quite a lot — ethics, culture and commerce, to name just a few.

Caro explores how and why other places have banned foie gras. Surprisingly, Israel is at the top of the list. Foie has roots in Europe’s Jewish communities — it’s basically a high-end version of schmaltz, the beloved Kosher poultry fat schmeared on bread by bubbes the world over. It was one of Israel’s first export industries. (The book mentions that Maryland briefly considered a ban, but it ultimately didn’t go anywhere. Still, the incident made producers nervous that a state “without much of a culinary scene” (!) would likely enter the foie fray on the side of the animals and their cohorts.)

Besides the halls of the Israeli Supreme Court, Caro explores duck farms in the U.S. and in France, talks with animal activists and participates in the process himself, sending the readers interest in foie — as well as his own cholesterol score — through the roof. The activists and chefs and farmers make for better reading than the aldermen; Caro does his darndest to make the Chicago city council’s parlimentary procedures seem dramatic but it is a thankless task.

The Foie Gras Wars is not for the faint of heart, since even the mildest description of the most humane abbatoir may leave you reaching for a veggie burrito afterwards. But it’s worth plowing through the icky (if well-written) parts to explore the ethics of fatty duck and goose livers. Caro gets contradicting stories about the amount of suffering the birds experience during force feeding — advocates say they don’t mind, detractors say it’s torture — because there’s basically no one who investigates such matters that doesn’t have a stake in the outcome. People who turn their nose up at the cruelty of foie happily power down Purdue oven stuffer roasters, even though said chickens are treated much worse than the average foie bird. Don’t eat veal because you don’t want to support the industry? Veal is a side business for the dairy industry, so you’re going to have cut out cheese and cream and milk as well to make that stand.

But just because it’s hard to avoid cruelly treated animals doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t. And surely just because we can’t attain the ideal of veganism doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do our best to minimizing suffering in the world. Right?

The foie gras debate can seem like a twee Rich People Problem, but its implications are larger. The idea of suffering, and the argument that ends can justify means, is not wholly divorced from other issues, like President Obama’s decision to withhold pictures of tortured detainees.

Does the end justify the means when the end is sustenence? What about pleasure? What about tremendous pleasure that can’t be achieved in any other way? What about the hypocrisy of being sentimental about one animal or one food and not another?

What about when the end is national security? What if short-term gains are ultimately more damaging to America’s interests? Are images of suffering unnecessarily inflamatory, or necessary to make informed decisions about how we live our lives and enjoy our freedoms? (That last one applies to both detainees and ducks.)

Philosophers, presidents, chefs and citizens struggle with these questions every day. They stare back at us from the television screen, from a plate of seared foie served with quince and toast points, and from our paper box of Chicken Nuggets with Sweet and Sour Sauce. Freedom of choice can be a terrible, magnificent burden.

H is for Help Me Please, Readers