Here’s a fun game of musical chairs: A bakery is moving into a former butcher shop, and a board game bar will take over what used to be a funeral parlor.
Some Baltimore drinking and dining spots are on the move this summer — in search of more space and a change of scenery. One restaurant announced it’s leaving the city altogether, to pursue “bigger” projects in New York.
I have an update this week on where they’re all headed.
No Land Beyond ventures to a new neighborhood
When the bar first opened in 2018, No Land Beyond took up a tiny retail storefront on North Charles Street in Station North. The goal, said co-owner Mike Cohn, was less about making money and more about “creating a community gaming space.”
No Land Beyond’s popularity grew so quickly that it soon had to find a larger footprint in Old Goucher to make enough room for a library of more than 300 games like Risk, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. Now, enthusiasm for the concept is straining its second address.
“We’ve been growing and growing,” Cohn said. “Almost every day, we’re often full to the brim.”
This fall, No Land Beyond will move once again. The venue, this time, is a former funeral home at 108 W. North Ave. that was acquired in 2022 by John Renner, a developer who is also involved in the revitalization of the North Avenue Market building down the street.
The space initially housed pop-ups like Memento Mori, a temporary art exhibit focused on death. No Land Beyond made the cocktails for an accompanying pop-up speakeasy.
Renner was looking for a permanent tenant when he heard the board game bar was looking to move. “It just makes so much sense,” he said of the match. “They appeal to a really eclectic crowd that is perfect for Station North.”
With the help of a $60,000 grant from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, facilitated by the Central Baltimore Partnership, Renner has been updating the space for the bar’s relocation. No Land Beyond will start its own round of construction this summer, with a goal of moving in by the end of October, when its Old Goucher lease is up.
The bar will take over the first floor and the basement of the former funeral home (Renner plans to lease the building’s top floors as art studios and private office space). In addition to multiple rooms for gaming, there will be an outdoor courtyard that faces Graffiti Alley.
The new No Land Beyond will also have a full kitchen, which means it can expand on the menu of pizzas it currently serves. Cohn and co-owner Mark Brown are working with Casey Jarvis, the owner of mobile hot dog vendor Glizzy’s Wagyu Dogs, to build a selection of “tavern food”: burgers, fries and, of course, franks.
Jack Danna, director of commercial revitalization for the Central Baltimore Partnership, said the bar’s expansion will “complement a critical mass that’s growing” in the Station North arts district, alongside other recent additions like The Royal Blue, The Club Car and Mobtown Ballroom & Cafe. In addition to the DHCD grant, he helped secure a $250,000 grant from the state to cover more than half of the building’s $432,500 purchase price, per property records.
“It’s small but it’s pivotal,” he said of the project. “It gives you the sense that we’re moving in the right direction.”
As for the building’s morbid past, Cohn and Renner are unfazed.
“We have a joke already that there’s not going to be any ghosts because this is a place where people were purposefully put to rest,” Cohn said.
Butcher shop to bakery for Doppio Pasticceria
For the past couple of years, Megan Cowman and Luke Ilardo have been steadily building a customer base for their Sicilian bakery, Doppio Pasticceria. They started with pastry and coffee sales at local farmers markets before diving into a yearlong residency at R. House.
Over the weekend, their tenure at the food hall came to an end, but the couple already has another pop-up in the works. Beginning Thursday, the bakery will take over the butcher shop inside what used to be JBGB’s at 2600 N. Howard St. in Remington.
There, they’ll have more room to grow Doppio Pasticceria’s wares: In addition to coffee and baked goods, they plan to sell pizza, soft serve ice cream and grocery items like house-made pasta, sauces and fresh ricotta.
The new pop-up will bring some action to a building that has been vacant since early January, when two-year-old JBGB’s shut down. Owner Robert Voss told the Sun that sales weren’t strong enough to keep the Remington business viable.
Before JBGB’s, the building housed another restaurant/butcher shop, Parts & Labor, which was owned by chef Spike Gjerde.
The new Doppio Pasticceria pop-up will tide the bakery over until a permanent home for the business is ready at 300 W. 29th St. Ilardo and Cowman had hoped the space — the former Cahoots Brothers retail shop and a Pizza Boli’s before that — would be done by now, but the project has been delayed by utility work.
Katie Marshall, a spokesperson for Seawall, the building’s developer, said that work is “almost complete and the Doppio-specific bakery and cafe buildout began this week.”
“While we knew the buildout for our permanent location was going to take a while, it was hard to know just how long it would take,” Ilardo said. “We’re definitely going to be using this space as kind of a workshop for the things we’re going to be offering over there.”
Visitors to the pop-up can take their food to go or sit at one of the tables outside. After the bakery has had some time to settle in on Howard Street, Cowman and Ilardo plan to start offering dinner service, too.
Fans of the fire pit outside of JBGB’s and Parts & Labor might even see its toasty return: “If people want to sit out by the fire in Baltimore in July, then maybe,” Ilardo said.
As for the space Doppio left behind at R. House, a new coffee-centric tenant will be taking its place soon. Tuesday, the food hall announced that Kitsch Cafe, a small restaurant near Johns Hopkins University, will open a second location at R. House in July. On the menu: breakfast staples like egg sandwiches, overnight oats, and avocado toast, as well as lunch items like sandwiches, mac and cheese and potato salad. The stall plans to add dinner options and a happy hour in the fall.
Home Maid says bye to Baltimore
Home Maid, the brunch spot that got its start in Towson before moving to Federal Hill in 2016, has closed as owner Derrick Faulcon turns a focus to other projects.
The restaurant closed “so we can do bigger things with bigger people in bigger places in a much more nomadic form that will inspire the culture,” Faulcon wrote on Home Maid’s Instagram page. “Now it’s time to step into (a) brighter light and a bigger stage that will expose the world to what we have created in my city.”
As with his other business, Cloudy Donut, which has two locations in New York City, Faulcon plans to establish a footprint for Home Maid in the Big Apple. The brunch spot hosted its first NYC pop-up in the SoHo neighborhood earlier this month, where rapper Offset showed up to sample some blackened salmon and grits.
Though the restaurant is shut, it’s not the last Baltimore will hear from Home Maid: Faulcon said both Cloudy Donut and the brunch concept will pop up at Good Neighbor’s Design Week event in Hampden in late July.
