The Baltimore Sun
June 2, 1999
RESTAURANT REVIEW
Not since hotspot À La Carte opened in 1992 has a restaurant appeared on the Baltimore food scene with such well-deserved fanfare as Piquant.
From start to finish, dining at Piquant is more than a meal—it’s an event. No wonder twenty-nine-year-old owner Mickey Campbell was just picked as one of BON APPÉTIT’s Ones To Watch in the new century. After four years running the kitchen at the Boathouse, Campbell decided to trade her TOQUE BLANCHE for an owner’s hat, and the result is a perfect fit.
Head chef Wes Isaac, formerly of Dish and whose smoldering good looks could as easily find him on a movie screen as in a kitchen, is the perfect partner for Campbell’s dramatic culinary vision. No stranger to bold flavors, his daring menu—which includes a three-chile ceviche, and a smoked sea bass over wasabi angel hair—will heat up even the coolest palate.
Housed in an old bank building, Piquant’s décor, like the restaurant’s innovative dishes, is a blending of both old and new elements. Vivid Alexander Calder–inspired mobiles spin above original upholstered booths where customers once viewed their safety deposit boxes. The teller window now serves as the restaurant’s bar, where head bartender Lucas Conway serves up signature cocktails like the Smoke Screen, a devilish concoction of mezcal and mesquite. Even the original vault door has been preserved; you’ll find the restaurant’s lively kitchen just beyond it.
And if you don’t have room for dessert, don’t worry. The expert waitstaff will gladly send you home with your meal’s closer packaged in—what else?—a mini safe. (And trust me, their bourbon butterscotch tart is a valuable you’ll want to keep locked up just for yourself.)
1
1999
BALTIMORE
“No walls.”
When Mickey Campbell led the first contractor through the old bank building two years ago—even before he plucked the flat pencil from his back pocket and drew with it in the dust-speckled air to show her where he planned to start framing up first—she told him firmly that she didn’t want walls in her restaurant.
“But people like walls,” he told her. “People need walls. Especially when they’re eating.” Then he shot her a smile that was nearly all gums. “Trust me. You’re going to want walls.”
But Mickey didn’t trust him—and she didn’t hire him. Instead, she found a ponytailed preservation contractor who loved her vision of turning an old bank into an upscale restaurant, and who was as excited as she was to keep the historic fabric in place. A contractor who, with the exception of the bathrooms, didn’t erect a single new wall.
But tonight, trying to stay out of sight in the restaurant’s office on the second-floor mezzanine, Mickey would give her right arm for just one wall.
The review from the Sun sits in the middle of her desk. She’s picked it up a dozen times in the last two hours, scanned every glowing word to memory, and she still can’t believe it’s real. A restaurant owner could go her whole career and never earn a review half this good. Before opening Piquant, Mickey was a head chef for four years. She knows this is true.
She also knows that she should be downstairs celebrating her success with the rest of her hardworking staff, winding her way through the collection of two- and four-tops, stopping to make sure her guests are enjoying their meals, checking the pass and the bar for what’s selling, all the things she does every night at Piquant.
Instead, she’s up here alone and about to jump out of her skin, nursing a flat Diet Coke in her bare feet, her red leather pumps cast off into the corner while below her the restaurant roars with life. It’s a soundtrack she knows well: The cheerful hustle of her beloved servers, expertly zigzagging through the sea of tables like synchronized swimmers. The clatter of plates picked up and set down. The clink of ice and the thump of popped corks as Lucas and his barbacks cruise the gleaming counter where bank customers used to fill out their deposit slips.
And, of course, just beyond the old vault door, the restaurant’s beating heart: Wes’s kitchen, her boyfriend’s commanding voice rising above the din of the hiss and sizzle of garlic in a hot pan, the even chop of a blade mincing herbs, the chime of finished plates landing in the pass. Coming up the ranks, from runner to prep to sous, Mickey had worked for chefs who treated their kitchens like libraries, hushing anyone who dared to raise their voice. She endured the tombs of their cooking temples and vowed that when she finally had her own restaurant, she would insist on noise. Lots of it.
Her naivete infuriates her now. That she really believed ensuring a lively kitchen would be all it took to keep a restaurant in the black.
She gathers the clutter of past-due notices into a pile and shoves them inside her desk. Not so unlike the way she used to cram dirty clothes and magazines from her bedroom floor into her closet when her friends came over after school. If only she could clean up this mess so easily.
She’s always known the chance of financial failure for new restaurants is high, that almost sixty percent of them close their first year, and of those that do survive, only twenty percent will still be around in five years. It was Wes who reminded her of the odds within fifteen minutes of their first meeting years earlier, when Mickey had asked him to join her for a cup of coffee at the café down the street from Dish, where he was head chef and creating quite a stir in the industry, quickly becoming known as one of the most innovative—not to mention attractive—young chefs in Baltimore.
When she began thinking seriously about opening her own restaurant, Mickey made a wish list of chefs she wanted running her kitchen, and Wes Isaac was at the top. When he seemed uneasy about signing on with someone who had never owned a restaurant before, Mickey told him what she lacked in experience she made up for in passion and nerve, which piqued his interest enough to grant her a second meeting, then a third. Back and forth they went, phone calls and more after-hours coffee conversations, until, four weeks later, Wes showed up at her doorstep with a bottle of single malt and a shake to seal their agreement. When his hand closed around hers, Mickey felt the electricity of attraction sizzle up her arm, but both agreed they couldn’t muddy their partnership with romance—a vow they maintained, miraculously, for almost two months. Until one night in the restaurant’s half-finished kitchen, tucked in with takeout and going over possible menus, they stopped to compare kitchen scars. Within minutes, they were like grizzled swordfishermen, hands thrust out over the gleaming stainless countertop, palms up like they were having their life lines read. Wes tried to impress with a brick-oven burn on his wrist, and Mickey matched it with a half-moon on her middle finger from a paring knife that earned her four stitches. He displayed a healed gash on the side of his hand from a Santoku blade, and she raised him the ghost of a blister from a kitchen torch, their bodies leaning closer with each reveal. When she bared a scar on the meat of her thumb, he traced the faint pink thread so slowly that she puddled like an undercooked pot de crème. After they christened the mezzanine (and the floor behind the not-yet-stocked bar) they swore over the rest of their Chinese food that they wouldn’t—couldn’t—act on their feelings again. But not twenty-four hours later, they were tumbling into her unmade futon. From that night on, they were inseparable—partners in the kitchen as well as the bedroom. A team.