At the bottom of the hill I live on, there's this restaurant/bar called The Falls. I love the place, even though it's still imperfect. It's the place I most often go when I want to drink coffee or beer 'out'.
The hill is really one side of the valley that opens onto Baltimore city and eventually onto the Harbor of Baltimore. From the continental perspective, it's the spent end of the vast, rolling coastal plain that you descend onto when you climb down out of the Blue Ridge heading east. The Falls is where you end up, by one route or another, if you are immigrating from Appalachia, looking for factory work, fleeing the shift and final collapse of the economy that supported household farming through 20,000 years of settlement culture. You sell the dirt and head up the Blue Ridge, across the swaying backbone of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and the Virginias, you cross the rivers and horse pastures of Western Maryland, noting how curiously well the grass still thrives over Antietam, Harper's Ferry, Gettysburg. You pick your way along country highways, the meanderings of which seem to have forgotten whatever historical logic first trod them into being, until with Baltimore in the distance you travel the last sleeping suburban Main Streets and the growing disorienting swarms of wallboard mansions. Finally you come to modest old neighborhoods inhabited by the hand-to-mouth middle class, teetering above the collapsed industrial dead zones of Baltimore City. Welcome.
Finally, you peer down Sulgrave Avenue, over the last several million years of eroded time, and there at the bottom is Jones Falls. Falls is a regional word for 'river', and Jones Falls is the river that Baltimore used to power its mills, choked into a coma, and then built a highway over so as not to have to think about it. And curiously, most of the beautiful buildings along Jones Falls, under the roar of Jones Falls Expressway, are old stone and brick mill buildings that are a hundred times better able to shelter actual human warmth than the mansions you've climbed down past to stand here, at the bottom of Sulgrave, in the neighborhood of Mount Washington, in front of The Falls restaurant.
The Falls is not housed in one of these beautiful old mill buildings, but it squats near the warmth of the last one, near the expressway, the lightrail tracks and Jones Falls. God, I really hate the racket from the expressway, but there is some deep principle of gravity that draws us all to this intersection--me and the river, the highway, the edge of the neighborhood. I'll happily sit out in the heat and roar on a summer morning and scribble just for the pleasure of being near this sense of gravity. Even though it feels poisoned in some ways.
The Falls opened about two years ago in a storefront that for years had a Korean grocery with nearly nothing on the shelves. There was then a struggling and failed deli. The corned beef was awesome; the lighting was death. The place was just too big, inorganic somehow, yucky. You ate the too-expensive corned beef and fled, wishing them well but unable to stay. When the place closed it was depressing because, while there are several other restaurants in the same little part of Mount Washington Village, there was no place for people from the neighborhood, really. We have expensive taste but no money. Mount Washington Tavern is an expensive sports bar with bad beer that attracts aggressive young professionals on the prowl. Ethel & Ramone's does often-good Cajun fusion but it's expensive and dark. I don't really know why I don't like it there. Their gumbo is excellent and I've had a couple great evenings eating late on their front sidewalk on warm summer nights. The crepe place next door to E&R can be a great place to take one of the girls to talk and eat snails but I don't like the fussy little tables. Everything is like doll furniture that got sent through a bigulator, including the food, sort of.
The Falls always has nine beers on tap, often really interesting and beautiful, often local. Always an IPA, and always a stout or porter. The the food is only adequate but they make a good burger and there's also more interesting stuff if you want to try, and there's always veggie stuff if you're with a veggie, which I really appreciate. But what makes it part of the landscape to me is the restlessness of the owners, the way they've gradually made a restaurant that fits the weird L-shaped space, found lighting that drew the room towards its centers, filled in corners with bottles of whiskey and tequila, glasses of various shapes, drawn the eyes up with clay busts, with paintings and photos, books. And the wait staff and bartenders are smart and polite in a very human way. None of the particular decisions is all that important in itself, although the beer is crucial and the lighting was deathly and bad bread is really sort of literally depressing. What makes the place work is something else.
Luca Turin has called perfume "the most portable form of intelligence," which reframed some of my thinking about art. That is, art--for me, anyway--is defined in part by intelligence. All kinds, obviously. If something is artful or elegant it is in some way just right, fitting. And when something is fitting in an unexpected way, there is the delightful pop of discovery, that clicking in the brain when a new synaptic pathway switches on. And something that continues to grow with those sorts of clicks and shifts is alive and enlivening. To know a restaurant as a form of intelligence, to be around for some of the attempts to make it fit the place: these are, in the modest scale of an ordinary life, great pleasures.
The Falls is slowly becoming a place where they know the food and drink that they serve. They have chosen it mindfully and they eat and drink it themselves with real pleasure. They stand around and taste and speculate over the relative quality of the new charcuterie platter. They understand the pleasure of drinking good beer, and there I don't have to feel self-conscious about noticing and sometimes talking about the layers of sensation and flavor. It is becoming a place where a person who wishes to locate himself or herself in the senses can attempt to do so with some of the resources and types of thinking required to do that. No small thing.
The continent is behind you. The Falls is just down there, at the bottom of Sulgrave Avenue.
