At 35, Linwoods restaurant changes owners in Owings Mills, but enduring formula stays the same

While still in high school, Tom Devine first met Linwood Dame when he walked into Dame’s buzzy French bistro in Virginia, The Butlery, looking for a job as a dishwasher.

“He’s like, ‘I don’t need dishwashers. I need chefs,’” Devine recalls. “And he sent me on my way.”

But Dame held on to Devine’s resume. Three years later, Devine had graduated from culinary school and was working at a hotel in Lake Tahoe, California, when Dame called him with a job offer. Devine accepted, kicking off a four-decade working relationship that brought him to Baltimore County and culminated in 2023 with a new role: co-owner of the Owings Mills restaurant previously owned by Dame.

Though Linwood Dame, 69, launched his culinary career in Richmond, Virginia, he is better known in Maryland as the founder of Linwoods, which is renowned for its elegant New American cuisine and genial service. He ran the kitchen for more than three decades, while his wife, Ellen Dame, 68, was a key figure in the “front of the house,” where customers are greeted, seated and served.

Linwoods marked 35 years in business in 2023. It also marked the end of the Dames’ tenure: Devine and Erena Vedensky, the restaurant’s longtime chief financial officer, seamlessly took over earlier in the year as the new owners.

By now, Linwoods regulars are all up to speed on the change, but a more occasional diner might not even register the difference. Vedensky and Devine recognize the value of 35 successful years, and they’re not looking to alter the formula that has made Linwoods an enduring favorite.

“Customers ask all the time: When are you going to make major changes? What are you going to do?” Devine, 57, said. “And I tell them all the time, this restaurant will always be called Linwoods. Linwood is always the man of the house. He and Ellen are the foundation that started this, and I have the privilege to carry it all on.”

Early days

The Dames met in Richmond while Linwood was running The Butlery and Ellen was working as a TV reporter, and decided as a couple to move to Baltimore, where Ellen grew up. They wrote up a business plan for Linwoods — originally called Linwood’s Cafe-Grille — in 1986, using Ellen’s college typewriter.

At the time, most of the area’s fine dining was concentrated in downtown Baltimore.

“We found that a lot of people were going from the suburbs to work in the city, and then they’d come home at night, and there wasn’t an awful lot of options in the county for restaurants,” Ellen Dame said. “During the week, the restaurants in the city would be quiet, and then they’d get super busy on the weekend. And we thought, you know what? The restaurants that are in the county are very busy every night of the week.”

Linwoods opened quietly in September 1988. At first, there wasn’t even any signage on the dining room, which was tucked away in the McDonogh Crossroads office park.

“It was almost like a speakeasy,” Linwood Dame said. “You just would walk into this sort of nondescript office building. And all of a sudden, here’s the restaurant.”

Thanks to word of mouth and a strong support network, Linwoods’ popularity quickly took off. Ellen Dame credits her late grandmother, Marie Rothschild, as one of the restaurant’s biggest original boosters.

Rothschild “was the best PR person,” she said. “She knew everybody, and I’m sure she told everybody she knew.”

Diners were drawn to the restaurant’s New American fare, a novelty on the Baltimore scene, where most fine dining establishments were still serving traditional French cuisine or steak and potatoes. By contrast, Linwoods was inspired by the work of leading California chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters. The restaurant’s menu featured seasonal produce paired with fresh halibut, beef tenderloin or veal scallopini, as well as more casual options, such as burgers and pizza.

In that era, putting burgers and steak on the same menu was guaranteed to raise some eyebrows, Linwood Dame said. So was putting hot and cold food — a piece of beef with a salad — on the same plate.

The dining room also featured an open kitchen that invited guests to sit at a counter where they could watch their food being prepared. It wasn’t so popular in the restaurant’s early days. “People just weren’t used to it,” Linwood Dame said.

The goal for the Dames was to create a restaurant that could be a part of the weekly rhythm for locals, whether they wanted a fancy date night, a special occasion meal or a casual weeknight dinner.

“We really wanted to make it upscale but at the same time, be a neighborhood restaurant,” Ellen Dame said.

Secrets to success

That kind of attunement to customers’ needs is likely a key ingredient to Linwoods’ success, Devine says. From the restaurant’s early days, Linwood Dame would walk the dining room floor, looking for feedback on the kitchen’s work. Staff members are trained to familiarize themselves with the reservations each day before the restaurant opens.

“This is what people really love, because it’s a connection,” says Vedensky, 58. “It’s a recognition, respect, you know, from the owner to the diners.”

Vedensky, an accountant with a master’s degree in economics, moved to the U.S. in 1995 from an area in the former Soviet Union that’s now Ukraine. At the time, Linwood Dame was keeping track of all the restaurant’s finances and needed someone to take the bookkeeping off his hands. Vedensky modernized Linwoods’ accounting practices when she joined the restaurant, balancing books using computer software and producing regular reports. While Dame and Devine focused their creative energies on the kitchen, she became the restaurant’s financial anchor.

“I learned from Linwood and Tom, and they learned from me,” Vedensky said. “Because I knew to succeed, you must analyze the business. And they are chefs; they’re like: ‘Why? Why do you need so many papers?’”

These days, Vedensky manages a payroll of 120 people, as well as the restaurant’s catering arm.

“It’s a separate part of the restaurant that has a different world to the proposals, the prices, the cost, the analysis reports. Basically, it’s two different businesses,” she said.

For Devine, who is now in charge of the kitchen and front of the house, Vedensky is the right counterpart.

“I don’t think I would have been able to do this deal with Linwood unless I had a partner like Erena,” he said. “My job is the operations, hers is to take care of everything that I don’t know about. It’s been a good partnership for the two of us.”

The Dames saw something special in their teamwork, as well.

“When it was time for me to think about selling the business or stepping back, I looked at a number of different ways to go,” Linwood Dame said. “Could I sell it (to someone) outside? That doesn’t really work out. Do I want to close the restaurant? No. I think Tom and Erena were always the answer.”

The path forward

Other than a design refresh in 2010 and tweaks to the menu, not much has changed at Linwoods in its 35 years.

“The concept’s the same as it was in 1988,” Linwood Dame said. Devine and Vedensky don’t have any major plans to change what’s tried and true.

Regulars have taken note. During a recent dinner at the restaurant, a customer stopped the Dames to compliment the new owners.

“I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is a good start,’” Linwood Dame said.

Now that the couple is no longer tied to the restaurant, they are focused on travel: Recent trips include Cape Cod and Nantucket in Massachusetts, New York and the Caribbean.

“It’s the kind of freedom that we haven’t ever had,” Ellen Dame said. “We’ve been married to each other, but also married to the restaurant for 35 years. And now we’re enjoying not having to worry about a broken pipe or an oven door that doesn’t shut.”

Not that they’ve been able to keep their distance from the restaurant entirely. Linwood Dame is still a consultant for Linwoods, and the couple checks in frequently with Vedensky and Devine.

“We love hearing from both of them,” Devine said. “And he may be a consultant for X amount of time, but I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be talking indefinitely.”