"This is the old Spike & Charlie's, right?"
That's the No. 1 question I've been getting about Ryleigh's Oyster Mount Vernon, a new restaurant from Brian McComas, who owns and operates the original Ryleigh's in Federal Hill and a second, Ryleigh's Hunt Valley, on Padonia Road.
Yes, this is where Spike & Charlie's had its long run, a multilevel restaurant space smack in the middle of the cultural corridor, directly across from Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and within oyster shell-tossing distance of the Modell Performing Arts Center at the Lyric.
Spike & Charlie's closed in 2004, and the three restaurants that followed in the space had such disappointing runs that people started to feel funny about the location.
I think they can stop worrying. Restaurants, like people, have their roles to play, and Ryleigh's Mount Vernon has the primary job of feeding dinner to people who are on their way to the symphony or the theater. The best thing about the new establishment is that it understands its role and is comfortable performing it.
Its diners, Ryleigh's understands, are looking for moderately priced, pretty good food served quickly. When we visited, we had more hits than misses.
There are some dishes, like an excellent spicy jambalaya, that you'd order again and again. This savory rice-based dish was full of spicy Andouille sausage, firm and buttery sauteed shrimp, and juicy grilled chicken.
I was a big fan, even if no one else at my table was, of the crab cakes. But I should tell you that I prefer old-school crab cakes made without jumbo lumps. Ryleigh's crab cakes are that kind: strong on natural crab flavor but short on snowy white lumps.
What I wouldn't order again was the butcher's-cut steak, which was rubbed with a barbecue sauce I found too sweet, and definitely not the fish and chips, which were underseasoned and not fried well enough.
Our meal was for the most part smooth, but it wasn't glitch-free. One of our appetizers, a crab pretzel, was delivered cold, and it took us a while to get our waiter's attention. Dessert options are very limited. When we visited, the only choices were warm chocolate chip cookies with chocolate sauce, a simple bread pudding and ice cream from Taharka Brothers, just enough choices to satisfy a sweet tooth without clogging up dinner service.
The surest bets are seafood specialties from the steamer and from the raw bar. The steamer specials include Old Bay-steamed shrimp, by the pound or half-pound, served with soft pearl onions. The raw bar focuses on oysters from up and down the Atlantic seaboard, stretching from Prince Edward Island to Virginia, and including Ryleigh's own proprietary oysters, the sweet and plump Avery's Pearls.
The raw bar shares space with the U-shaped bar that dominates the main bar area, and shuckers share the space with bartenders. This main bar area, when we visited in the crush before a Thursday night event at the Lyric, was crowded, loud and very lively — more so than I've seen it at any time since the closing of Spike & Charlie's. People seemed very happy to be there.
Beyond this space, and partly separated by a wall, is the main dining room, which has been named the Sigsbee Room in honor of a 1901 Chesapeake Bay skipjack, for whose upkeep and maintenance Ryleigh's lends continuing financial support. This room, which has been decorated with photographs of the skipjack, still had a slightly unfinished look about it a month into Ryleigh's tenure, with a haphazard feel to the table arrangement and a visual dead space at the back.
There is a third space at Ryleigh's, a narrow, glass-walled lower-level bar space on the building's side that I've always had good feelings about. I came here on another visit recently before a Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert, where a skilled bartender was gamely keeping pace with the orders being thrown at him.
Ryleigh's primary role is to serve the pre-theater crowd, but there are encouraging signs that this new restaurant and its appealing tavern fare will be able to attract a steady clientele for off-nights, too. In the spring, Ryleigh's will debut a renovated patio, and there are plans to make the basement space into a separately named live-entertainment venue.
Ryleigh's, as they say in show business, has legs.
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Nearby reviews: Dish Baltimore - Mount Vernon / Midtown