First course
Restaurants work in Baltimore
Baltimore diners search by neighbourhood and by dish. People look for crab cakes near the Inner Harbor, for a late table in Fells Point, for lunch within walking distance of their office downtown. The searches are local, they happen on a phone, and they happen close to the moment somebody decides where to eat. That is the demand available to a restaurant here. The city has a dense restaurant scene, from long standing seafood houses to new kitchens in Canton and Hampden, and the searches split across all of them. Chains hold some of the ground near the malls and the highways, and owner operators hold the neighbourhoods. Both compete for the same map results and the same short list of names a diner sees first.
