Bits & Bites: Downtown Baltimore’s Alewife building finally has new tenant on the way

You may have heard there’s no such thing as a free lunch. While generally a good rule of thumb, there were actually quite a few free — or nearly free — lunches to be had in turn-of-the-20th-century Baltimore bars.

“The Neighborhood Corner Bar,” a newish exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, delves into the history of these watering holes, which are still a staple of the city’s landscape. I spoke with curator Rachel Donaldson about the significance, and the peculiarities, of the corner bar for this week’s column.

But first, some restaurant news. After sitting vacant for nearly six years, the hulking, historic building that used to be home to Alewife is finally getting ready to welcome a new tenant.

And in Howard County, a one-time pirate bar is walking the plank.

A successor for Alewife

Baltimore beer lovers were distraught when Alewife closed without much warning in the summer of 2018. The gastropub, once featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” left behind a very big hole to fill: 6,076 square feet to be exact, according to a leasing brochure.

The 170-something-year-old former bank building has hand-carved mahogany bars, marble walls, stained glass windows, fireplaces, chandeliers and even an elevator. But at a time when most restaurants are looking to shrink their overhead, such a spacious footprint can be a tough sell.

Not for Denville Myrie, the owner of Jerk At Nite, who immediately saw the building’s potential.

Myrie, who already operates two locations of his Caribbean restaurant in Washington, D.C., with business partners Kadeem Todd and Caple Bennett, has been looking to expand in Baltimore for quite some time. From 2021 to 2022, he ran a Jerk At Nite location in the city’s Rosemont neighborhood, but decided to close it after customers complained about car break-ins when they came to pick up their food.

In late 2022, he was just weeks away from opening a new location of Jerk At Nite in Pigtown when a fire derailed the project.

Myrie was determined to find another spot to open in Baltimore when he stumbled on the Alewife space.

“We were driving past, and I saw this building on the corner of Eutaw Street. I couldn’t believe it,” he said. He reached out to a restaurant broker and soon had a lease signed for the building, which he hopes to eventually purchase.

Renovations are already underway for what will become Jerk At Nite’s largest restaurant yet. On the ground floor, Myrie plans to serve the restaurant’s Jamaican staples, like “Rasta Pasta” topped with jerk chicken and alfredo sauce, slow-cooked “Kingston Kurry Chicken” with sides of rice and cabbage, and “Slammin Salmon” marinated in a jerk-teriyaki sauce.

Upstairs, he’s plotting a new experience: a wine bar called The Nest, which will offer an “exquisite, upscale dining experience” featuring dishes like dry-aged steak. Late at night, the bar will be a speakeasy, with a password required for entry.

Myrie said he hopes to open as soon as late May, if new funding comes through and construction stays on track.

“We’ve been getting inquiries since the beginning of coming to Baltimore,” he said. “On social media, whenever we post something people are commenting ‘Well, what about Baltimore?’”

“We need to hurry up and get Baltimore ready.”

Mutiny hoists the white flag

Mutiny Scratch Kitchen & Fresh Bar is closing in Elkridge, three months after shutting another location in Pasadena.

“The wind has gone out of our sails,” owners Rob and Steve Wecker wrote on the restaurant’s website. “Every pirate’s journey ends at some point, and this is the end of ours.”

The brothers started their tropical-themed bar and restaurant in Glen Burnie in 2011. In 2017, they announced their plans to move, closing Glen Burnie in favor of two new locations in Pasadena and Elkridge.

“We set sail years ago looking to have a great time and gather the best crew we could, and we believe we did just that,” they wrote in their farewell note. “Thanks for sharing the oysters, the rum, the laughs, the shipwreck burgers, the mostly-in-tune karaoke, the trivia nights, the parties, the New Year’s Eves, the fun times, the tough times, and all the memories. Mark Twain once wrote ‘Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.’ You all gave us that chance, and we will be always grateful for that.”

The Wecker brothers still own The Iron Bridge Wine Company in Columbia. Rob is also the restaurateur behind Bushel and a Peck Kitchen & Bar in Clarksville, while Steve operates Cured and 18th & 21st in Columbia.

A shot of history

Imagine walking into your neighborhood bar, ordering a pint and then being presented with a spread of snacks: pickles, hard boiled eggs, bologna sandwiches — all free for the taking.

That was the norm for corner bar regulars in late 19th and early 20th century Baltimore, where the “free lunch” was a very real phenomenon.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the meal came with an ulterior motive. From the 1870s until 1920 — the first year of Prohibition — breweries in industrial cities from Chicago to New York and Baltimore found themselves in fierce competition with each other. So their strategy was to go directly to the consumers, financing lunches at local bars that served their brews through an exclusive distributor contract or even opening bars of their own.

Offering food “was a way to attract and maintain regulars,” said Rachel Donaldson, curator of collections and exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. “Where competition was stronger between breweries, the lunches were better.”

They also tended to be salty, a surefire way to make customers thirsty for more beer.

Corner bars were prolific in this era: Donaldson estimates there were more than 1,000 in Baltimore. They were typically narrow, with tin ceiling tiles and a long bar for standing or sitting on stools. You can still find examples of the genre today — think Venice Tavern in Highlandtown, Southside Saloon in Riverside or Mary’s Tavern in Upper Fells Point.

Besides being a place to score some free food, corner bars played a key role in the daily lives of many Baltimoreans, particularly the white working class. Many bars were linked with specific ethnic groups or industries. To accommodate the working schedules of their patrons, they were often open long hours, closing for the night at 2 a.m. before reopening just a few hours later, at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m.

They also served as a sort of unofficial organization at a time when private clubs and fraternal societies were all the rage. Steelworkers who were regulars at the same bar, for instance, could blow off steam about work and find out about job openings if they needed work.

“This was something that you didn’t have to pay dues, you didn’t have to go through some initiation rite to get into,” Donaldson said. “They were seen as working clubs.”

The corner bars of this era were not welcoming, however, to minorities and women. The BMI’s exhibition also includes photographs of some Black-owned bars of the era, which tended to be more inclusive to women and also featured more live music, Donaldson said.

Though corner bars were limited to male customers, women were sometimes allowed in their back rooms to attend community and union meetings. They would enter through a side door which bypassed the bar and led straight to the back.

A chunk of Donaldson’s research on this bygone bar era was derived from an unexpected source: Prohibitionists, who commissioned meticulous sociological studies on bars and their function in the community.

The thinking, Donaldson said, was “if we want to shut down the saloons, we have to understand the role they play in the communities, because we want to replace them with something.”

The BMI’s exhibition, which opened late last year and will be part of the museum’s permanent collection at 1415 Key Highway, lets you immerse yourself in an old-school corner bar, complete with a spittoon, while reading up on the era and perusing pictures of Baltimore’s bygone bars.

You’ll have to go elsewhere to grab a drink, though. Might I suggest one of the corner bars on nearby Fort Avenue?