Unrated during the pandemic
Cindy Lou’s Fish House boasts location, location, location. The Domino Sugar sign shimmers in pink from across Baltimore’s Harbor East, lending a sense of romance to the restaurant’s waterfront views. Its diverse and ambitious menu firmly brands the place as a fish house with Southern flavors, and that narrative presents an exciting starting place — and a big challenge.
Creating a Southern-themed restaurant requires navigating people’s perceptions of authenticity and sense of place. Several weeks after opening, Cindy Lou’s, the latest in Tony Foreman and Cindy Wolf’s mini-empire, is certainly trying hard to find its footing in each.
My work as a culinary historian helps me view the Chesapeake as a culinary and cultural hinge of the southernmost Mid-Atlantic and the northernmost Southeastern Tidewater, with all the possibilities therein, especially as Maryland leans far more toward the latter. Wolf sees the connections, too. “It has always been very important to me to understand the pathways of Southern cooking,” Wolf told me. In her kitchen experiences in Charleston, the city the duo named their flagship restaurant after, she watched great chef Edna Lewis forage to enhance the kitchen at Middleton Place and saw how cooks drew sustenance from the water. Between those experiences and Foreman’s North Carolina-meets-Baltimore heritage, the menu speaks to their personal journeys and evolution.
Cindy Lou’s space in the Canopy by Hilton hotel is immediately inviting, hospitable and intimate. The outside patio on the two unseasonably warm nights I visited had just enough space to make me feel like part of the ambiance but perfectly safe when it comes to coronavirus guidelines. The staff was lovely, cheerful and attentive; the vibes were good.
Let’s talk about food. Two visits about two weeks apart showed a few issues with consistency. On the first, the cornbread sticks and rustic sunflower seeded bread were warm and fresh, and they came out quickly after we were seated, so they felt less like a formality than a welcome surprise. The butter was softened just so, making it perfectly spreadable on the cornbread, which struck a nice balance between savory and a tad sweet. On round two, all the breads (including black pepper biscuits) seemed more like an afterthought: perfectly fine, but neither warm nor special.
The big hit on the list of starters was the benne seed Brussels sprouts, roasted crispy — Cindy Lou’s does crispness impeccably — and with a beautiful umami pop from a soy- and honey-based glaze. I appreciated the nod to the Carolina Lowcountry in the use of benne or sesame seeds but wanted some menu or website context to connect them and other touches to the restaurant’s vision. Cindy Lou’s culinary notes are not necessarily pan-Southern but specifically Tidewater and Lowcountry, and I’d love to see the restaurant explain a little history — transatlantic trades, the movement of goods up and down the Southern coast or of dishes during the Great Migration, Baltimore’s heyday as a gourmet city — all of which Wolf and Foreman have cited as influences.
Beyond supporting the branding, such context would help create a target for flavors and set diner expectations.
Under the direction of executive chef (and Baltimore native) Ryan Shaffner, the kitchen spares the drama in its pretty, simple plating. Cooks thinly slice green tomatoes before frying, then arrange them in a stack with just enough sprouts, cooling ricotta and hot pepper jelly to make the dish feel rebooted. The Carolina rice and field peas (basically an elemental hoppin’ John) benefited from the remains of the pepper on my fork from the tomatoes, but the peas were plump, and the rice was just right in texture, having absorbed a stock that Foreman called “an evolved version of something my North Carolina grandmother used to make.”
The crab fluff — basically, deep-fried crab cakes — also hit the spot: crispy and light, served with a slaw that invited a quick menu hack with the accompanying mustardy aioli. (The “Old Bayoli” that came with other dishes might have been more welcome, especially because Old Bay appeared almost as a “gotcha” in the yummy and dense green apple stack cake.) Tempura batter made another appearance in the lobster beignets used in the lobster roll/po’ boy hybrid, far more the former than latter, and tasty but at $26 questionably priced.
As a “fish house,” the place sometimes hits and sometimes misses. Its fresh fish dishes aren’t necessarily “Southern,” but they look and taste good. I was pleased to see rockfish, oysters, crab and a robust-sounding seafood perlau (a moist Lowcountry pilaf) starring on the menu, with hush puppies to boot. The crab cakes are pricey ($39) but honest with little filler and simply seasoned — maybe a little too simple, but satisfying.
The fried chicken felt like a deconstructed sandwich: four pieces of moist, crispy bird on top of a sheet of thyme-flavored gravy next to a pile of puckery bread-and-butter pickles and a black pepper drop biscuit. Still, it could have used a hit of fresh textured salt, pepper and/or paprika coming out of the fryer. The chicken fried steak, made with a beautifully braised short rib and served with grits softened with cream, looked great, but the cornmeal crust was a bit greasy, and it needed more oomph in the seasoning. The seared duck breast, juicy and tender, was a real treat.
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The crab-flavored spaghetti had a chili-laced, briny aroma and a rich crab broth base — but not a lot of crabmeat. Some of my dining companions loved the circles of fresh jalapeños on top; others did not. As an early champion of the heirloom Maryland fish pepper, I saw the choice of jalapeños as a missed opportunity to give the dish some heat while telling a more engaging story about local flavors, without going too deep.
Cindy Lou’s is already a nice place to be, even as it grows and improves its game. As we work toward a post-coronavirus world, I’m interested in returning with friends in various seasons to see whether the menu and its offerings can tell us more about where the restaurant fits in the larger story of Chesapeake-meets-Lowcountry cooking. Mostly, though, I just want more duck, another bowl of Carolina rice and field peas, a touch more benne seed Brussels sprouts — and a second attack at that fried chicken.
Twitty is author of “The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South” (Amistad, 2017).
Cindy Lou’s Fish House1215 Wills St., Baltimore (in Canopy by Hilton).443-960-8670.cindylousfishhouse.com. Open: Indoor and outdoor dining 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. weekends. Takeout available. Prices: Appetizers $12 to $17, main courses $17 to $42. Accessibility: Indoor seating, patio and restrooms are wheelchair-accessible.
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