Baltimore Is Making a Comeback—With Sleek Design Hotels and Bold New Dining

The Latrobe Building in central Baltimore has long been a symbol of the city’s shifting fortunes. It opened in 1912 as luxuriously appointed apartments for young men who’d found prosperity in what was then a flourishing port. But as the city went from boom to bust, so did the Latrobe. Over the years it has been a flophouse, a makeshift office block, and finally, when its owners went bankrupt, an abandoned shell. 

But the building has rediscovered its old glamour: it’s now the fabulously over-the-top hotel Ulysses, which opened in September 2022. When I checked in one recent afternoon, I was shown to a room that mixed the louche style of the 1970s with the richness of the Renaissance. The carpet was blue leopard print, and the claw-foot tub was encircled by silk curtains. Downstairs, the lobby was hung with brooding, Caravaggio-esque paintings, and orchids grew from silver planters with swan’s necks for handles. 

This is a long way from the Baltimore depicted in The Wire, the TV cop drama that began in 2002 and made the city infamous for its struggles with crime and corruption. When the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore, a sleek waterfront hotel, opened in 2017, it seemed to coincide with the beginning of a new chapter. The story was interrupted by the pandemic, but, as a new wave of hotels and restaurants illustrates, the momentum is back. 

In Hampden, a neighborhood of row houses in the north of the city, I spent a night at the Guesthouse by Good Neighbor, a property at the opposite end of the design spectrum from the Ulysses. In recent decades, Hampden has drawn young creatives pushed out of more expensive cities. Guesthouse by Good Neighbor encapsulates this dynamism. It was opened in September 2023 by Shawn Chopra and Anne Morgan, husband-and-wife design obsessives. With just seven rooms, it has a modest footprint but big ambitions. 

Chopra and Morgan have filled the guesthouse with a shoppable selection that includes ceramics by Baltimore-based Whitney Simpkins and glassware by Aaron Probyn, a minimalist London designer. The rooms also showcase the work of local makers, such as shoji doors with indigo-dyed panels created with Blue Light Junction and Maryland Douglas fir floors by Brick & Board. “People can come to the house and see what woodworkers and artists are doing,” Chopra told me. 

That night I went to dinner at Little Donna’s, a row-house restaurant in the Upper Fell’s Point neighborhood run by Robbie Tutlewski. Named after his grandmother, Little Donna’s made the New York Times list of America’s best restaurants in 2023. Tutlewski, who comes from a family of Yugoslavian heritage, was brought up in the Midwest before moving to Baltimore in 2021. His food is a delicious mélange of all three influences. Crab, for which Baltimore is famous, appears in the form of pancakes spiked with a hit of chili jam. Lobster pierogi transported me to Eastern Europe. Tutlewski’s pizzas are original takes on the Indiana pies he grew up eating. The night I visited, the special was a pizza topped with slices of persimmon, their sweetness balanced by sharp cheese and a sprinkling of rosemary. If this was the standard of home cooking during Tutlewski’s childhood, you’ll wish you were a Tutlewski too. 

Elsewhere, old establishments are being given a new spin. Woodberry Kitchen, the restaurant Spike Gjerde ran for 15 years in an old mill, was regarded by many as the best in the mid-Atlantic region, owing to the chef’s rigorously local approach. When the pandemic hit, Gjerde was forced to evolve. The result is the Tavern at Woodberry Kitchen, a miniature version of his old operation with an even more intense focus on the foodways of the Chesapeake. 

I sat down with Gjerde in the Tavern’s soaring dining room, where we shared a plate of ham stuffed with an aromatic mix of fresh herbs—the recipe for which is known only in “half a county of southern Maryland,” he said. This was followed by an oyster pie: a briny filling fresh from the Chesapeake, encased in crisp pastry. Gjerde’s localism is motivated not only by a fascination with food history but also by ethics—a desire to cut down on the miles food has to travel and to buy from producers he knows and trusts. “I have always been focused on the question of how we can feed ourselves in the best possible way,” he said. “Woodberry remains a sixteen-year attempt to answer that.”

Among the catalysts helping to invigorate Baltimore’s food scene is the redevelopment of its food markets, pillars of city life for more than 250 years. Among them is Lexington Market, which opened in the 18th century and moved into a glossy new downtown building in late 2022. The cavernous space, laid out over two floors, is a riot of international cuisine, with stalls selling everything from Malay to Dominican to Nepali. The redevelopment is giving new life to old stalwarts, too; the legendary Faidley’s Seafood, which opened in the market in 1886, has also made the move to the new digs.

Around the markets, businesses are popping up like mushrooms. One evening I traveled southwest of downtown to Hollins Market, which has also been revamped. Increased foot traffic there is drawing restaurateurs like Amanda and Joseph Burton, who opened Rooted Rotisserie down the street from the market in 2023. During the pandemic, the Burtons were both furloughed from their hospitality jobs, so to make ends meet they began selling at-home meal kits from their own kitchen. Then they went to Paris to celebrate their anniversary and had an epiphany at the Sunday market in the Bastille. “There was wine, cheese, and a rotisserie grill,” Amanda told me. They loved the casual, rustic side of French cooking they saw that day, and decided to take it home with them. Rooted Rotisserie is a model neighborhood restaurant, serving a narrow range of perfectly executed dishes. Go for the rotisserie chicken, stay for the double-cut pork chop.

On my last evening I checked in to Roost, an elegantly minimalist hotel that opened in 2023 at Baltimore Peninsula, a 235-acre, multibillion-dollar development along the Patapsco River. This network of shiny apartment buildings, offices, and stores was partly funded by Maryland native Kevin Plank, the founder of the sportswear brand Under Armour. In the waterfront tasting room of the Sagamore Spirit Distillery, which occupies a spot in front of a pair of disused piers, I tried a flight of rye whiskey, the distillery’s specialty. Drink in hand, I looked out at the piers stretching into the river—long-abandoned vestiges of Baltimore’s past that now form part of a bright future. 

A version of this story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Charmed City.”