This new downtown Baltimore food cart is popular, but not with the nearby Residence Inn.
Story by MELODY SIMMONS, Photos by JOHN BLOCH
At the corner of Light and Redwood Streets, lunchtime has taken on a whole new meaning.
The smell of grilled lamb and pit beef emanating from a silver food cart blast through the mid-town fizz. For five hours each weekday, beginning at 11 a.m., hungry patrons line up for unique street meat on a Kaiser roll at the recession-buster price of about $5 per sandwich.
But the cart is causing major indigestion for some. Managers at the Residence Inn, whose front door is located steps away from the shiny food stand, are engaged in a foodie turf war because they say the cart threatens the safety of its guests and cuts into the business of its new restaurant, 17 Light.
“This corner is not big enough for both of us to be here,” Patrick Miner, general manager of the Residence Inn, said he told the cart’s owner Maria Kaimakis. “My number one concern is safety. I told her ‘your cart causes problems with sight.’”
Miner insists he has not launched a vendetta against the food cart. Yet Kaimakis said that over a two-week period he has summoned a steady stream of official visitors to inspect her operation.
Among the visitors: Baltimore police officials, health department inspectors, city license and permits inspectors and Downtown Partnership mediators have all stopped by. Kaimakis said that the second day the cart was there, July 8, Miner sent a hotel employee outside right before the lunch hour to power wash the sidewalk – just as her grill was starting to smoke with lamb and beef for sale.
“I think they are trying to bully us,” she said in an interview last week. “They are a big corporation trying to bully the little guy.”
Maria Kaimakis serves pit beef and lamb from her cart at the corner of Light and Redwood streets.
Kaimakis has owned a city vendor’s permit for the cart since January 1991. The permit was originally for the corner at Water and Light Streets, but city officials relocated the permit and cart to Light and Redwood in the spring of 1992 because of traffic. At the time, there was no hotel located at the corner, only a string of small businesses that have since disappeared in the city’s effort to revitalize downtown.
In the 1990s, from that corner, Kaimakis and her husband, Vassos Yiannouris, sold felafel and chicken souvlaki from the food cart for two years. Their Greek chow became so popular, they opened a restaurant, Cypriana, in 1993, at 105 E. Baltimore Street. The restaurant is now located at the corner of Calvert and Baltimore Streets.
Kaimakis said she decided to return to her corner roots a couple of weeks ago because she noticed that lunchtime customers were hit by the recession and demanded a cheaper lunch alternative.
“These are good working people looking for an excellent lunch value,” she said, on Thursday while working the cart in the lunchtime crush. “This is what people want – to eat a good lunch for $5.”
Miner, who said he has enjoyed a grilled lamb sandwich from Kaimakis’ cart, said the business outside his front door has cut into the lunchtime orders of the hotel’s restaurant.
A sandwich board boasting parts of the menu sits next to the food cart listing daily specials: Little Italy burger for $10.95, chicken cheese steak for $7.95 and Baltimore fish and chips for $12.95.
“She’s right in front of my restaurant that I just opened in March and right now I’m getting three or four customers for lunch. This week was horrible,” Miner said. “She told me initially I was going to get more business. It hasn’t panned out. She is very busy.”
In addition, Miner said the food cart also hampers the hotel’s handicap entrance and blocks valet parking efforts and the stop for the Johns Hopkins Hospital commuter bus, which makes regular stops at the corner.
Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership, said he is working on solving the culinary street clash. He has requested officials in the city department that issues vendor permits relocate Kaimakis and her cart to a nearby spot and issue a new vendor permit.
He offered soothing words in hopes of a sweet resolution.
“Cypriana is an institution downtown and we love its story about how them moved from grassroots to the restaurant at Baltimore and Calvert Streets,” Fowler said. “They were acting on a permit that was given out when there was not a hotel there. Now there is. Times have changed.”
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