Old Line Kitchen & Wine Bar

Columbia, Maryland

There's a particular kind of disappointment that only comes from a restaurant with real promise, the kind where you can see exactly what it wants to be and watch it miss by inches instead of miles. That's Old Line Kitchen & Wine Bar in a nutshell. Thirty years of cooking for people who could afford to send back anything and everything taught me to tell the difference between a kitchen with no talent and a kitchen with no discipline. This was the second kind, and honestly, that's the more frustrating one to write about.

I went in on a July afternoon craving something better than Maryland's ubiquitous crab houses or the chain restaurants that colonize every strip mall in this state. What I found was a wine bar tucked into a dense industrial park in Columbia, surrounded by medical offices and laboratories, which is its own kind of statement before you've even parked the car. The lot had the feel of what I imagine Siberia looks like. Empty. Vacant. Desolate. Not a soul in sight, not a single other car, just asphalt and the low hum of HVAC units from the office buildings next door. I sat there for a second wondering if I had the right address.

Then I walked in, and the place redeemed itself immediately. Dim, low lit, almost clubby in an old school way, minus the mahogany and leather you'd expect from that kind of room. Comfortable in a way that surprised me given the parking lot I'd just crossed. Whoever designed the interior understood something about atmosphere that the kitchen, as I'd soon learn, didn't yet understand about food. I settled in at the bar, already softening toward the place, ready to be won over.

The wine list did some of that work and undid some of it too. I looked for a proper sparkling wine, something bottle fermented, something with a little backbone, and found only a couple of cloyingly sweet options and the obligatory prosecco. Life is too short for prosecco. A wine bar that can't offer a real fermented sparkling wine has already told you something about its priorities before you've ordered a single dish. But the rest of the list made up ground. A lovely pinot noir from Willamette, and a smaller Napa producer I hadn't come across before, both well made and fairly priced, at least by the bottle. The pours themselves were stingy for fifteen dollars a glass, but I'll get to the math on that later.

Food started strong, genuinely strong. I ordered the mussels, and they were cooked to perfection, timed exactly right, plump and tender with nothing rubbery about them. There was a generous, plentiful amount too, no complaints there. The menu listed ground chorizo as part of the dish, and I understood that to mean an accent, something to round out the broth with a little smoke and spice. What arrived was closer to a chorizo dish with mussels wandering through it, chorizo doing nearly a third of the bowl's real estate instead of playing its supporting role. Not a kitchen failure exactly, since it was listed on the menu and nobody misled me. Just a portioning choice I'd have made differently, and one that buried a genuinely well executed dish under too much of a good thing. The bartender, to his credit, offered to make it without the meat next time, which told me the front of house was paying attention even when the kitchen's calibration wasn't quite matching my taste.

I should have stopped there. But I'm an eternal optimist when it comes to a kitchen showing me one good dish, so I ordered the cream of crab soup next, and this is where the afternoon turned. Before the spoon even reached my tongue, the smell of flour hit me first. One spoonful, not even a full sip, because a sip would have implied the soup was still liquid enough to sip, was enough to tell me everything. I pushed it aside and sent it back. To their credit, nobody questioned it. No defense of the dish, no explanation offered, no attitude. It came off the bill immediately, which I respect. But the soup itself was a rookie mistake, the kind of thing anyone with more than a six month old culinary degree, or honestly just one real season in a working kitchen, should know better than to let out of the pass. Flour in a soup exists to bind, not to take over. This one was completely over roux'd, thickened into something closer to wallpaper paste than a Maryland crab soup, and the poor crab itself never stood a chance. Reduced to playing second fiddle in its own bowl, which is a special kind of insult when the entire point of the dish is the crab.

One bite later, I moved on to something new, hoping the kitchen would redeem itself again the way it had with the mussels. The crispy rock shrimp appetizer did, technically. The shrimp was, once again, cooked with real skill, lightly breaded in cornmeal, not a second over or under done. The line cook back there clearly knows his temperatures and his craft, and I want to be fair to that person specifically, because two dishes into the meal I could already tell the hands in that kitchen were more capable than whoever was writing the menu. But whoever is writing this menu seems to believe everything needs to be laden in an all too rich creamy sauce. If you're going to serve something already as rich as fried shrimp, you need acidity to cut through it, especially in a room built around wine, where the entire point is to open the palate up course after course, not leave the customer bloated and scrambling for the door. Which is exactly what I did.

By the time I paid the tab, I was doing math I shouldn't have had to do at a wine bar. If a bottle retails at fifteen to twenty dollars, a restaurant, especially a wine bar with this many options by the glass, should be pricing a glass around eight to ten dollars. That's a fair markup, the kind that makes sense for the overhead of pouring by the glass. Here, a fifteen dollar bottle produced a fifteen dollar glass. A little too aggressive for my taste. The price itself isn't the issue. I've paid plenty for wine in my career, both as a guest and as the person buying for other people's dinner parties. The ratio is the issue, and ratios are the kind of thing that tell a returning customer whether a place respects them or is just hoping they don't do the math.

The amateurness of the crab soup made me question the kitchen's judgment altogether, and the rock shrimp, cooked beautifully but drowning in cream, only reinforced it. Imagine a crisp, acidic, chimichurri style sauce alongside that shrimp instead. It would have opened the dish up, kept me at the bar a while longer, made me want to order a third and a fourth thing instead of asking for the check. Instead I left unable to imagine wanting to feel that full again without the joy of actually happy taste buds.

Here's what stays with me about Old Line Kitchen & Wine Bar. The talent is there. The line cook understands temperature and technique better than most kitchens I've reviewed. But the person designing this menu doesn't understand balance, and in a restaurant built around wine, balance is the entire point. Every dish needs to leave room for the glass next to it, needs a little acid, a little air, something that makes you want to keep drinking and keep eating instead of pushing back from the bar. A kitchen that can nail protein and texture this consistently deserves a menu that gives the food room to breathe, and gives its wine list an actual reason to exist. Right now it's two good ideas, a talented cook and a genuinely nice room, being let down by a menu that hasn't figured out what kind of place it wants to be.

“I've cooked for the best. Mediocre isn't going to cut it.”