A Washington, D.C.-based restaurant operator will take the helm at Rye Street Tavern, the Baltimore Peninsula’s waterfront restaurant.
Clyde’s Restaurant Group has signed a long-term lease on the 12,000-square-foot tavern, the team behind the Baltimore Peninsula development, formerly known as Port Covington, announced Monday.
The restaurant group plans to make “significant improvements” to Rye Street Tavern’s two-story building, according to the announcement, and will also build out an expansive outdoor dining and bar area.
The updates, designed by D.C.-based Grizform Design Architects, will include a remodeled kitchen, an oyster bar and the outdoor space, which will feature a 75-seat bar as its centerpiece. The redesign will add “art and artifacts that celebrate the rich heritage of Baltimore” to the tavern’s bar, dining and private event areas, according to the release. Clyde’s aims to reopen Rye Street Tavern in early 2024.
Rye Street Tavern first opened in 2017 next to the Sagamore Spirit distillery and was previously run by James Beard Award-winning chef Andrew Carmellini’s NoHo Hospitality Group. The restaurant, which highlighted mid-Atlantic cuisine, closed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and then reopened for outdoor dining for several months in 2020. In May 2021, NoHo announced an effort to “reimagine” the restaurant’s role on the South Baltimore waterfront. Most recently, it has been used as a private event space, a Baltimore Peninsula spokesperson said.
This will be the first Baltimore location for Clyde’s Restaurant Group, which operates 12 other properties in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia. A Clyde’s restaurant on the Columbia lakefront closed in 2020 amid the pandemic and was recently replaced by a new restaurant called Offshore.
Jeff Owens, the chief financial officer for Clyde’s, said Rye Street Tavern “will celebrate Maryland culinary traditions” under his restaurant group’s direction. The tavern “will offer a vast selection of seasonal and classic cocktails, locally sourced beers and a broad international wine program,” he said in a statement.
But there will only be one brand of rye whiskey on the menu: Sagamore Spirit, produced next door and owned by Baltimore Peninsula investor and Under Armour founder Kevin Plank.
In a statement, Plank said he expects Rye Street Tavern “will become the heart of the neighborhood.”
“Clyde’s Restaurant Group is an ideal partner for us, with their emphasis on high quality food and service in a fun and active environment,” he said.
The 235-acre Baltimore Peninsula project is slated to transform a once-industrial swath of land south of Interstate 95 into a new community with up to 14 million square feet of mixed-use development and 40 acres of parks and green space. The first phase of the development is underway, with two apartment buildings that have started leasing, a Roost hotel and an office building that counts CFG Bank as a tenant. New York-based MAG Partners is the project’s lead developer, alongside San Francisco’s MacFarlane Partners. Sagamore Ventures and Goldman Sachs Asset Management are also investors.