With the opening of The Duchess on The Avenue in Hampden on December 6 (a ticketed grand opening celebration December 4-5 will benefit B’more for Healthy Babies), Foreman Wolf Restaurant Group makes its first foray to the Western Pacific Rim, bringing Baltimore the bold flavors of the tropics.
It’s a definite departure for the restaurant group—also behind Charleston, Cinghiale, Petit Louis Bistro, The Milton Inn, and Johnny’s—which is known for exploring classical European cuisine.
The vibe is that of an “authentically styled English pub,” says co-owner Tony Foreman, though the menu will feature the cuisine of the Mariana Islands— which includes Guam, the birthplace of executive chef/partner Kiko Fejarang, previously of Johnny’s in Roland Park.
“Some people are confused by the idea of the restaurant,” Foreman says. “A public house has nothing to do with being English—it has to do with a place where life happens, and people get together. There’s storytelling there. Public houses can take so many different forms. For example, in the West End of London, there are public houses that serve Thai food. A public house has to do with the neighborhood.”
In that sense, The Duchess fits very well into eclectic Hampden, though it’s also an ode to the chef’s own environs.
“The Duchess is an homage to where I grew up with a lot of Asian influence,” explains Fejarang, whose hometown cuisine is known as Chamorro. “Guam is similar to Hawaii in that it’s a tropical island with a melting pot of Asian flavors, including Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and even some Spanish cuisine.”
Fejarang says she wants to “play with ramen when it gets cold and even make sinagong [tamarind soup].” “There will be versions of fried rice, like maybe a kimchi fried rice or a pork belly fried rice with maitake mushrooms,” she says, “and lumpia (sweet or savory spring rolls.)”
The veteran chef attended the culinary school at the Art Institute of Seattle, but her first cooking school was her family’s kitchen.
“Growing up, the first thing you learn to do is rice,” Fejarang says. “Everyone in my family is known for something. My mom is known for her red rice. My aunt for her tityas [a type of tortilla]. My dad was always on the grill, so you’ll see chicken skewers with Chamorro marinade.”
Other offerings will include tuna poke bowls, tempura-battered fish and chips, Spam musubi with furikake rice, pork belly skewers with miso-barbecue glaze, and duck donburi (a Japanese rice bowl of sorts).
“The names might be unfamiliar,” Foreman says, “but the flavors will be there. I want her to cook what’s in her heart.”
The bar lineup, says Foreman, will include eight beers on tap, a “jazzy but compact wine program that makes sense with the food,” and tropical-inspired, rum-based drinks—though he’s clear that there will be no skulls or umbrellas. The bar will be open evenings until midnight, with the exception of Sundays. (The restaurant will be closed on Tuesdays.)
The project on the site of The Avenue’s former Café Hon—which closed in 2022 after three decades—has been many years in the making.
Former Café Hon owner Denise Whiting approached Foreman in 2021. “She had always been a customer and was like, ‘Do you know anyone who is looking for a space? I want to get out,’” he recalls. “Maybe she wasn’t soliciting me directly, but I thought about it and I was like, ‘That is literally the best corner in Hampden and down the block from Louis and Johnny’s—and it wants to be a real institution.’”
At the time, Fejarang, who had left the restaurant group to care for her grandmother and work for Pabu Izakaya by Michael Mina in San Francisco, came back to Baltimore to help with the opening of The Milton Inn. “She was like, ‘I just want to open a restaurant by the time I’m 40—and I want to do my food,’” recalls Foreman.
Foreman and Ferjarang, now 39, discussed the prospect of her taking on the Hampden project when Foreman had a major health crisis and things came to a screeching halt in 2022, shortly after he signed the lease on the property.
“We started talking about it and I took time out to get my nose fixed,” jokes Foreman, who had a rare double organ transplant at the University of Chicago, necessitating a move to the Windy City for close to a year in 2022.
Foreman, who has struggled with the effects of congenital heart issues for decades, admits that he had several contingencies based on the outcome of the surgery.
“After a while you get good at writing the plans,” he says. “And you send it to your lawyer and your CPA. For the fifth time, I rewrote the plans—plans for me to be dead, plans for me to be disabled, plans for moving forward.”
“I’ve lived with it for 20 years,” he adds matter-of-factly. “I’m either going to be here or not, and if I’m going to be here, I’m going to do the best I can. I’m going to enjoy it.”
Standing in the space, pouring over the blueprints on a September morning, it’s clear that Foreman is doing exactly that. He shows off the construction zone like a proud papa. All the furniture, from the tables to the barstools to the oversized mirror, has been reclaimed, recycled, or refinished. Most of it was bought at auction from England and northern Europe with the help of his lead interior designer Katie DeStefano of Katie DeStefano Design and Brian Thim of Hall & Co.
“There will be live music over there,” he says pointing to one corner of the dining room, still covered in sawdust. “And a long marble bar.”
Pink and magenta are part of the color scheme in the 110-seat space (with seats for 18 at the bar) that’s modeled after an English pub, albeit one that has a touch of glamour.
In fact, the name of the venture drove the design. When Foreman was contemplating a name for the restaurant, he landed on Duke’s as a working title. “I’ve found that when I give things complicated or hard-to-pronounce names, it doesn’t go well,” he says. “People still call Charleston ‘The Charleston’ and Petit Louis is pronounced ‘Pet-it Louis.’”
The team agreed on Duke’s until Foreman Wolf’s Director of Restaurants, Joey Campanella, suggested feminizing the name. “Joey was like, ‘You know, you always put a woman in charge, and he looks over at Kiko and says, ‘Why don’t you just call it The Duchess?’” Foreman recalls. “It made sense, and gives you an excuse to lighten the interior and have a little more fun with it. There was a famous duchess who came from Baltimore,” he says of Wallis Simpson.
Also on board as a consultant for The Duchess is Amy Gjerde, co-owner of Woodberry Tavern and Artifact Coffee in Hampden-Woodberry. Gjerde—who ran the front of the house at the former Woodberry Kitchen and was responsible for giving the James Beard Award-winning restaurant its rustic farm-to-table charm—was brought in to assist DeStefano in design details.
“I wanted some of Amy’s taste,” Foreman says. “She has an excellent eye.”
In addition to helping with uniform selection (remember those mad-for-plaid shirts the servers wore at Woodberry Kitchen?), Gjerde will help train servers.
“I’m putting together a food glossary,” Gjerde says, “and I’m educating the staff about what we are doing here and being able to translate that to the guest in a warm, unobtrusive way. You have to be able to read who wants to nerd out and who wants to get fed. We want you to be excited about the food, but it’s not serious. It’s pub food in that it will be delicious and shareable and you can always find something you like.”
Campanella notes that opening in hipster Hampden will also be a departure for the restaurant group whose spots have mostly centered around the more upper-crust neighborhoods of Harbor East, Roland Park, and more recently, Sparks.
“The city is evolving,” he says, “and this fits perfectly. The Duchess will be a little hipper, a little younger, a little louder, a little spicier than some of the other places.”
As for Foreman, since starting this project, he’s a little older, a little wiser, and very much ready to take things a little less seriously after getting a second chance. His plan is to perch at the bar, replete with TVs, rooting for his favorite English soccer team, Everton—one of the oldest soccer clubs in England.
“Everton is a working-class neighborhood in Liverpool,” Foreman says. “Historically, it’s a neighborhood that’s a lot like Dundalk. There are a lot of parallels to Baltimore.”