Baltimore Magazine
May 2005
Timothy Dean comes to town
A wandering chef starts a bistro in Fells Point that's part Southern comfort, part French flair. By Bianca Sienra
Timothy Dean Bistro
Style: A cozy and elegant little bistro on the edge of Fells Point
Cuisine: Contemporary American prepared lovingly with French technique
You'll Find: A warm and friendly setting where the chef clearly cares about his craft and his customers
Timothy Dean is a young man but, culinarily speaking, he's been around. Dean learned to cook from the late, great Jean-Louis Palladin, when the legendary French chef held sway over The Watergate Hotel. He's had stints with the likes of Patrick Clark and Alain Ducasse, helped Palladin run his eponymous restaurant in New York, operated three of Thomas Catherall's restaurants in Atlanta, and run his own five-star restaurant in the St. Regis in Washington. Now Baltimore has got him, and here's hoping the peripatetic Dean will settle in for a long stay.
Dean and his partner Shedric "Rick" Wallace have already done an impressive job of turning their Eastern Avenue space into a tidy, cozy boite with both character and warmth. A separate bar from which you can look over the dining areas-with their rustic fieldstone and persimmon-hued banquettes-is a nice stop for a drink before going in to dinner. What you'll notice first is that everyone on the staff-from the expert bartender to the waitstaff to Dean himself-is working hard to make you feel at home.
My first visit to Timothy Dean-friend Colene in tow-was, I admit, a tad rough, service-wise. A large party was rocking in the upstairs dining room, and the staff was feeling overwhelmed and short-handed. We waited a long time for our drinks; a couple across the way, who'd ordered the same plates we had, were mistakenly given our food and then had it yanked away; our waitress seemed spacy and frazzled throughout the meal.
And yet, everyone was trying so hard and was so apologetic, we ended up not minding. Our tolerance probably wouldn't have stretched so far if the food hadn't been so good, and if the party atmosphere hadn't been so congenial. But they were, and we ended up feeling that, despite the glitches, we'd had a great time.
The staff is generous with suggestions; they'll lead you through the compact, carefully composed menu with cheerleading enthusiasm for their personal favorites. Colene was easily swayed by our waitress's devotion to the jumbo crab cake appetizer, and wasn't sorry. The lump crab is barely held together by a shower of delicate panko crumbs, and the rich bed of mildy hot jalapeno-cheese polenta and sweet corn coulis are redolent of Dean's Southern roots. It's a beautiful crab cake with spectacular acompaniments.
I'd already had my eye on the Palladin chestnut soup, whose silky texture and hint of sweetness were bested only by the discovery of a plump truffle quenelle floating in the broth. Dean clearly has a way with soups. Another night, I equally loved a smooth and soothing corn bisque studded with big chucks of lobster.
Appetizers were so good our first night that I decided to choose one for my dinner-you can order both the crab cake and my pick, pan-seared diver scallops in entree sizes. The large, crisp-bottomed scallops were soft as taffy and perfectly cooked, marred only by too much salt. The fat mollusks were perched on rounds of risotto cakes laced with smoked gouda, and these I found myself greedily lapping up; they certainly weren't oversalted.
Colene's Chilean Sea Bass was the winning dish of the evening, lush and unctuously creamy beneath its delicate crust of Yukon gold potatoes. Another night, our Peruvian friend Nicola, who fishes these creatures in his native waters and has been eating them all his life, pronounced Dean's sea bass the best he'd ever tasted.
I was delighted to drag Senor M to Timothy Dean on my second visit, and more delighted to find that, with no party to distract them, the staff was capable of running the show without a hitch and just as friendly and accommodating as they'd been on our first visit. M swooned over his Thai curry mussels appetizer-clean and plump, floating in milky broth scented with lemongrass, coconut, and Thai basil. He was also favorably impressed by an herb-scented entree featuring a fat little free-range roasted chicken. He was even more enchanted with the accompanying moussleine of potatoes-a cloudlike variation of prosaic mashed spuds enriched with heart-attack quantities of cream and butter and some undefinable quantity that rendered them nutty and sweet. When Dean came out to make his nightly rounds of the tables, Senor M intrepidly inquired about Dean's secret ingredient: The genial chef hesitated and fianlly replied, "Love".
My love went to a massive aged ribeye, smoked in-house and presented beautifully rare over a rustic shower of green lentils. I couldn't finish it-or wouldn't, given that I needed to try dessert. There was the usual creme brulee, but I chose the molten chocolate cake, another standard that never loses its charm, especially if it's a feather-light cake surrounding the requisite gush of potent, hot bittersweet chocolate. This one was all that.
I was happy to see on that second visit the place was packed. Dean clearly knows what he's doing when it comes to food, and the place is so full of goodwill that you can't help but wish for is success. As Dean hurried out into the cold night at the end of the evenening, we called goodbye to him with those best wishes.
"Well, you come back and I 'll tell you all about those potatoes," he replied.
Sounds like a deal to me.
Baltimore Sun Restaurant Review
Bistro menu's ambitious and delicious
"Fine French fare, inviting atmosphere and stellar service at Timothy Dean"
By Elizabeth Large
Sun Restaurant Critic
Originally published March 27, 2005
When is a bistro not a bistro? When it's a fine-dining restaurant? When it has expense-account prices? Both of those things are true of the new Timothy Dean Bistro in
Fells Point, and yet the name fits - I think because "bistro" is the new code word for "high energy" if you're under 40 and "noisy" if you're over.
In some ways, it's fitting that Timothy Dean opened at roughly the same time as Jeannier's closed. The latter was Baltimore's best example of a formal French restaurant before its chef-owner retired. It was an establishment that belonged to another era.
Timothy Dean, who trained under French chef Jean-Louis Palladin at the Watergate, also sprinkles his menu with quenelles, tuiles, mousselines, confits and mirepoix. The food is just as ambitious as Jeannier's was. (No prosaic steak frites here.) But the atmosphere is boisterous, the dress code all but nonexistent, and there's nary a white tablecloth to be seen: This is the new generation of French restaurants. Although Dean has described his food as American contemporary with French influences, there are a few too many truffles involved for me to completely agree.
The new restaurant is in the spot just off Broadway where Chester's Steakhouse and then Montego Bay Grille came and went. Rita St. Clair, the doyenne of Baltimore bistro design after her stellar work at Petit Louis in Roland Park, has created a chic, sleek setting to showcase Dean's good food. The dining room and bar are small, seating fewer than a hundred people, and the handsome copper-topped tables are packed closely together. Somehow, the effect is warm and convivial rather than cramped.
The current menu is short and sweet. (It's an introductory menu; eventually both the menu and the wine list will be more extensive.) Dean uses A-list ingredients and sophisticated techniques to turn out mostly wonderful food. You can sample his mentor's influence by ordering the Palladin chestnut soup, smooth as spun silk, with a whole chestnut and an ethereal, truffle-scented dumpling. A whisper of truffle shows up again in the only appetizer that isn't actually a light meal: two fine, fat scallops perched on two risotto cakes roughly the same size and shape. It's a witty dish; by candlelight, it looks like four scallops on top of each other.
Two other starters could be paired with a salad and you'd have supper. Dean invigorates mussels by bathing them in a spicy coconut milk sauce fragrant with Thai seasonings. A creamy sweet corn emulsion turns out to be the ideal accompaniment to an enormous crab cake, plenty of sweet crab with a minimum of binder. (But where oh where is its promised jalapeno cheese polenta?)
Dean rescues salmon from the ho-hum category by cooking it perfectly, bedding it on braised leeks and pepping it up with a delicate drizzle of barbecue sauce. Sea bass in a crisp-edged potato crust over asparagus with just a hint of parmesan is another thumbs up entree.
The meat, if possible, is even better than the fish, with the Oscar going to an enormous, pink-centered lamb chop, at once sweet and slightly gamy, showcased by a fruity but not too sugary fig sauce and beautifully matched with Savoy cabbage. Diners like me, bored to distraction by other restaurants' "squash medleys" and broccoli florets, will be happy with Dean's respect for vegetables.
That respect makes the handsome house-smoked rib eye steak all the more puzzling. This is a fine piece of meat, and it can almost stand on its own. It almost has to, with only a dark wash of lentil stew and red wine sauce covering the plate. It feels as if something is missing, and I don't mean frites.
Timothy Dean isn't really into carbs; there are some warm little rolls flavored with cheese that come straight from the oven - one apiece unless you ask for more - and two desserts. This is about the only place Dean wanders into cliche territory, but the creme brulee is enlivened with fresh strawberries and the molten-centered chocolate cake is rescued by, yes, truffle ice cream.
Our evening here starts badly. We're seated near a large group of people who keep taking flash pictures (Hey, with a digital camera we're not wasting film so we can take the same shot over and over again!) until someone at another table asks them to stop. Do they think they're eating at a Chuck E. Cheese? This is my new pet peeve -replacing noise, which I've gotten used to, and over-salting, which I haven't. Get a private room.
Next, a couple walk in with a baby, who cries off and on throughout their dinner. Probably the dining room noise is upsetting, and it's way past bedtime.
After taking our drink order, our waitress disappears for so long that we wonder if she's out buying the bottle of wine. But then she regroups and delivers stellar service. It says a lot about the quality of the food and the general niceness of the staff that we end the evening with the negatives almost completely forgotten.
Our meal is well paced, and we like the personal attention from Dean's partner Rick Wallace, who is a comforting presence in the front of the house. Even Dean comes out of the kitchen and checks with every table once his night's work is done. It leaves me with the feeling that if any upscale restaurant can succeed in this sketchy location, Timothy Dean Bistro will be the one.
Where: 1717 Eastern Ave., Fells Point
Hours: Open nightly for dinner, Tuesday-Saturday 5pm-10pm Tuesday-Thursday, 5pm-11pm Friday-Saturday
Prices: Appetizers,$14-$19 ; Entrees: $18-$34
Call: 410-534-5650
Food: *** 1/2
Service: ***
Atmosphere: ***
