Restaurants

“Honey, I can hear that stomach growling,” you’re just sure she’s thinking. “You’ve come to the right place.”

    So has everyone else in Baltimore, apparently. Filter through the ubiquitous crowd in the comfortably upscale casual restaurant that bears her name, and to the left of the hostess stand you’ll notice a photo of the late Shirley McDowell, the woman who inspired the revolution.

    “She would think all of this is a hoot,” proprietor Eddie Dopkin says.

     “This” is the positively cult-like following Miss Shirley’s has amassed since opening in 2005, four years after the death of its namesake.

The believers gather every morning, often spilling out onto the Cold Spring Lane sidewalk, clutching their buzzers, happily waiting 45 minutes for the chance to delve into an extensive menu that offers savory twists on breakfast classics and hybrid dishes that combine old Dixie and contemporary cooking.

    “The idea was Southern-style eclectic,” Dopkin says.

“It kills us when people come in here and get two eggs with hash browns. We’ve taken some of those obvious things off the menu. You can get them, but we don’t want you to get just a short stack of plain pancakes. There’s so much more.”

    Open for breakfast and lunch, Miss Shirley’s accepts the confines of neither. Waffles are garnished with chocolate syrup and chips. A banana split with organic Greek vanilla yogurt, strawberry slices, blueberries, and pineapple topped with house-made granola is wake-up food.

Miss Shirley’s Cristo means jumbo lump crab meat, smoked ham, and Swiss cheese sandwiched between deep-fried French toast, drizzled with honey mustard and citrus aioli and dusted with powdered sugar and Old Bay.

    “To me, Southern cooking means southern Maryland cooking,” says Executive Chef Brigitte Bledsoe, who created the menu, which changes twice a year. A Baltimore native, she blends the freshest seafood and seasonal ingredients from the Chesapeake Bay and beyond to imagine a new style of comfort food.

    Dopkin never envisioned reinventing the region’s brunch scene while he was growing up working in his family’s food businesses. His parents started what is now the Classic Catering People in the 1970s, and one of their earliest hires was a cook from the Carolinas named Shirley.

    “She never measured anything,” Dopkin recalls.

“My mother and her would get into it all the time because Shirley didn’t follow the recipes. We had Shirley’s chicken salad and the company’s chicken salad. She was very heavy-handed on sugar and butter. Anything sweet. She loved to cook, and she was a wonderful, wonderful cook.”

    The pair formed an unlikely friendship. The white son of the company’s owners and the poor black woman 10 years his senior shared a passion for food and laughter, and a weakness for the lottery.

Shirley always thought her fortune lay a scratch away.

    “She had the biggest smile in the world,” Dopkin says. “No matter how mad anyone was at her, she had this smile that would make you forget about it.”

    A lifelong smoker, Shirley succumbed to lung cancer in 2001. When Dopkin decided to open a small breakfast and lunch joint in leafy Roland Park, he drew conceptual inspiration from his late friend.

    “It was supposed to feel like a country club restaurant for people that didn’t belong to a country club, or that place at the beach you knew about but everybody else didn’t,” Dopkin says. To achieve that goal, in part, Dopkin shuns reservations.

    “Everybody’s the same here,” he says.