For those who don’t already know, Baltimore’s Urbanite Magazine is currently in the middle of its 2012 Healthy Food Challenge. The Project is an ongoing and multifaceted effort which includes a request for grant proposals, magazine articles, food policy themed events and...

We’ve always been of the opinion that Mount Vernon’s City Cafe is as consistently good as it is underrated. So when we heard that their chef Chad Gauss was opening a new restaurant in Hampden we had pretty high hopes. New restaurants open up all the time. Hell, new restaurants open...

Beyond the almighty blue crab, Baltimore cuisine often gets a bad rap- and it’s not entirely undeserved. Traditional dishes like shad roe and terrapin soup are little more than relics from 100 years ago, and the typical supermarket cart here is chock full of Esskay meats, Utz BBQ chips...

When we were traveling recently, we were able to sample a lot of great cuisine in Israel. Unfortunately for us, Turkey did not prove nearly as appetizing. Turkish food is unique and exotic, but as a vegetarian there was very little for us to choose from among the Kebap, Tantuni, Biftek, Doner...

We don’t often blog about food. Even though the Chop is actually a very good cook, it’s just not something we enjoy talking about too much, let alone reading about and writing about online. But in Israel recently we discovered Shakshouka, which is just too incredibly life-changing...

Well Baltimore, the heat has finally broken. The cold has snapped. The mercury is beginning to drop. Very soon the trees will be bare of leaves, the woodland creatures will burrow in, and birds will fly south for the winter. There’s also another species whose ranks are about to be...

If traffic has seemed to move faster and parking spaces have become more available in the last 24 hours, it might be because Baltimore City sent some obscure bureaucrat out onto the streets at lunchtime yesterday, a day after this article was published, to shut down the ever-growing fleet of...

The Chop is jumping on the Bolt Bus and heading up to New York for a party tonight. As much as we’re loathe to admit that any city anywhere has some advantage over Baltimore, and especially New York City, we can’t deny that there is one aspect in which the Big Apple is thoroughly...

You already know that The Chop Approves of Brunch. How could anyone not approve of brunch, really? In an age when most breakfasts consist of things like Nutri-grain bars, cereal, frozen waffles and drive-thru fare, it’s nice to sleep late once a week and wake up to eggs benedict, French...

If you’ve been following this blog with any sort of regularity, you might already know that we’re definitely not a foodie, but you definitely know that the last thing we’ll recommend doing is watching primetime TV.  In a bizarre twist of fate tonight, that’s exactly...

We know you like to eat, Baltimore. We know you like to eat well, too. You’re all about your farmers’ markets and your new restaurants and your local, sustainable, seasonal ingredients and everything else. We like to eat as much as the next armchair gourmet, but even more than...

It’s Mothers’ Day in Charm City, and that could only mean one thing; its time to sit down to brunch. At this very moment, cooks all over Baltimore are scrambling massive quantities of eggs, bartenders are making sure the Champagne is well-chilled, and servers are already...

Brace yourselves Baltimore, for the Chop is about to take another potentially unpopular position. Today we’re coming out against food. Did you know that your own humble Chop has been a vegetarian lo these 15 years? Of course you didn’t. We never mentioned it because we’re...

If you want to find the Chop on the town tonight, you might bump into us at Centerstage, where we’ll be checking in with the wildly successful Stoop Storytelling Series. This installment of the Stoop features seven speakers holding forth on Kitchen Confidential: Stories about cooking,...