Sitting at a high-top table at Cindy Lou’s Fish House inside The Canopy by Hilton at Harbor Point, Spike Gjerde takes a bite of panisse—a rectangular-shaped chickpea fritter that’s a popular dish in the South of France. He dips it in some garlic aioli, then breaks off a piece of rosemary-tinged fougasse flatbread, which is also rooted in that region.
The South of France has become the culinary reference point for his latest project that will focus on Provence, the seafood-rich expanse of Southeastern France that borders the Mediterranean Sea.
Between bites, he talks about the new 100-seat restaurant, which he’s named La Jetée (no, not a ballet move—that’s jeté—but French for “jetty,” a man-made structure that extends into water) and will open on Oct. 5. The name was inspired by the restaurant’s position on Harbor Point, a tract of land that protrudes into the Patapsco.
La Jetée also shares a title with a French film that the James Beard Award-winning chef has long loved. “It has a science fiction kind of quality,” he says of the film. “There’s some time travel in a sense, but it seems to be really more about memory and how we move between versions of ourselves in the world.”
As he gets ready to turn 63 on Oct. 4, Gjerde could well be speaking about himself. In this older, maybe wiser, version, his monastic dedication to sourcing has loosened a little, so he can continue to grow without being confined by the strictures that prevented him from using ingredients that are not locally grown.
La Jetée will allow him to stretch as a chef. “What I’ve done so far has largely been defined, starting with Woodberry Kitchen, by ingredients—and it still will be, but this represents the next chapter,” he says. “I’m still as excited and as committed as I’ve ever been to local ingredients and supporting our local food system, but there are ways to present it, which guests might find more interesting.”
The term farm-to-table is tired, he says.
“If we’re being honest, the farm-to-table moment has passed—the urgency in thinking about our food system is more important than ever, but using that term to interest people is not what it was,” he says. “It’s become almost a perfunctory thing. I needed to find new ways to reach people, but I will never fully be able to exclude thoughtfully grown from that equation.”
And while French food might feel like a departure for the unfussy chef, he maintains that it’s not. Unlike food from north-central France, with its heavy sauces and creams, Provençal food is, in fact, quite simple and seasonal.
“I thought it would be really interesting to take the culinary traditions and the joie de vivre of that region and overlay it with the great produce, and especially the great fish and shellfish, we get from the Chesapeake Bay,” says Gjerde. “I thought there was this great opportunity to really dig into a tradition that I love, but then stay with the Atlantic and Chesapeake. We won’t be flying fish from the Mediterranean, but we’ll be using a lot of the same approach and recipes.”
Of course, the mid-Atlantic’s regenerative farms will be celebrated with every dish. “We will still get the things that we can locally,” says Gjerde. “We’ve already started a process by which we’re introducing [the staff] to the local growers that we work with and getting them used to the fact that there are going to be farmers dropping product off, and people will be talking about their product constantly.”
Dining and Cooking