Bring me a fork: Spoons goes Italian

Spoons in Federal Hill is glamming it up. The menu has expanded, and a new (old) face is in the kitchen. Champagne Tony is back in town.

The Federal Hill cafe, which opened in 1999, has shifted gears slightly. Spoons will still operate as a classic coffeehouse during the day, serving breakfast and sandwiches, the kind of place where folks curl up with a laptop for hours. Laura Lippman will still be able to come in to pound out a Tess Monoghan procedural.

But at night, Spoons gets a little more romantic, a little Lady and the Trampish, maybe. The cafe shut itself down in August for some remodeling and moving things around. And a new face has joined the kitchen. Pauli Santi, aka "Champagne Tony," who owned his a self-named Canton restaurant and headed the kitchen at the Owl Bar. This is back in the late 1990s, when I knew him. I lost track of Santi, even before he left Baltimore.

I wandered into Spoons during the OysterFest -- I had heard about the changes but not about Santi He told me that he's had his own restaurant in left Baltimore for a while, ran a restaurant in Hagerstown and opened the restaurant operation at a Delaware Country club.

On Santi's evening menu -- a fettuccine Bolognese, a Mediterranean chopped salad, and an oyster appetizer with pancetta, spinach and Sambuca. Spoons, meanwhile, will be gentling in a few more cosmetic changes.

Keep your eye on it.