"Mr. Beverage" is back at the Midtown. Nathan Beveridge, who owned the Midtown Yacht Club in Mount Vernon from 1998 to 2005, is back at the helm, the interim operators having been pushed overboard in November.
And that's the last of the nautical references, because the Midtown Yacht Club is now Midtown BBQ & Brew. You can just call it "Midtown," Beveridge says. Many folks always did anyway.
In the 1990s, Beveridge earned a following, along with, inevitably, the "Mr. Beverage" nickname, at the bygone Conservatory high atop the Peabody Court Hotel, where the views of Mount Vernon were giddy. Lawrence Heinze remembers the night at the Conservatory in 1998 when he and Beveridge were admiring the view. Heinze says he pointed out the Midtown Yacht Club on Centre Street. "We should buy that place," Heinze said he told Beveridge. And they did.
Formerly O'Henry's, the Midtown Yacht Club flourished in the Beveridge years. The old barrel of free peanuts remained, Thursday night's "full-contact" karaoke became a neighborhood institution, and the food, pub fare with Tex Mex highlights, started to be pretty good.
In 2005, Beveridge sold the business (but not the building) and moved his family to Easton, where he opened a sports nutrition and vitamin business named Muscle Inc. Beveridge, cherubic when he left Baltimore, has returned as a walking advertisement for his Easton business.
Beveridge will remain in Easton, with the new Midtown under the care of part-owner Tony Harrison, a longtime "barbecue fanatic" ā he builds his own smokers ā who introduced his new beefy, porky menu at Friday's reopening. Harrison's specialties are ribs (not baby-back, either), pulled pork and the Midtown steak sandwich. Heinze is not a partner this time, but Beveridge and Harrison have promised him that the eight-strip BLT will be returning to the menu.
For now, the free peanuts are still there, and karaoke will be back soon, Beveridge says, as will the meat-lovers' Sunday brunch.
Midtown BBQ & Brew is at 15 E. Centre St. Call 410-835-2472 or go to midtownbbqandbrew.com
Warning: centennial ahead The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is coming in April, and commemorations are bound to be berserk. Baltimore has long been a port of call for Titanic scholars. "A Night to Remember," still considered the definitive account of the disaster, was written by Baltimorean Walter Lord.
You can get a jump on the Titanic craze, and dine like an Astor, on New Year's Eve in Canton, where Langermann's will host a New Year's Eve Titanic Dinner, featuring a multicourse meal inspired by the final first-class meal served on the ship.
Chef Neal Langermann said he got the idea for the Titanic dinner on one of his periodic dives into old cookbooks. "I was going through the library in Bowie, near my house, and found a cookbook about the last meals on the Titanic." Published in 1997, "Last Dinner On the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner" attempts to re-create the meals served to the first-, second- and third-class passengers on April 14, 1912.
The book's publication launched a mini-craze for last-meal Titanic dinners, but Langermann's menu is less a replication than a condensation of the one the book's authors believe was served to first-class passengers on the night of April 14.
For starters, Langermann has pared 10 courses down to a manageable five. "Dinner took 41/2 hours," Langermann said. Other changes, he said, were matters of taste and availability. "Some of the food is just not available."
His version of Consomme Olga, for instance, uses scallops instead of "vesiga," the dried spinal marrow of a sturgeon. Existing menu records don't indicate what sauce accompanied the dinner's beef course. Langermann is going with the authors' guess, a Forestiere sauce (more precisely, his interpretation of the classic wild mushroom-pearl onion gravy over tender beef and potatoes).
For the New Year's Eve dessert course, Langermann's is presenting desserts that "are true to the ingredients and presentations that would have been served that evening" ā a Waldorf bread pudding and peaches in Chartreuse jelly.
"And as our final play on the fateful evening," Langermann says, they are presenting chocolate eclairs in the form of an Odette, the heartbroken princess transformed into a swan who chose a watery end.
The New Year's Eve Titanic dinner at Langermann's is $50 ($75 with suggested wine pairings). Langermann's is at 2400 Boston St. Call 410-534-3287 or go to langermanns.com.
richard.gorelick@baltsun.com