As I had the EPCOT map up, checking his knowledge of the names of the three dozen restaurants in the different country sections, I thought about how fun a ‘trip around the world’ like EPCOT has would be. But not the tourist-ified version you would get there. Something more authentic.

After checking my bank account to see if I could afford to visit every country on earth, and asking my boss if I had enough leave to take off a few years, I realized that I would need to scale it back a bit. What could I do without leaving the confines of the Baltimore Beltway?

Baltimore is awesome. The Inner Harbor is great. But it barely scratches the surface.

The answer was shocking. You assume that cities like Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago would have vibrant culinary scenes with lots of options for eating out. But Baltimore? There are lots of restaurants in the downtown core, and around the waterfront from Fed Hill to Canton. But I didn’t figure a list of international restaurants would go much past 10… maybe 15 if I was loose with the limitations.

The Criteria

Almost every ethnicity I searched for came up with results of places that legitimate looked good and authentic! There were a few that I didn’t find good options for, but the vast majority had (what appeared to me to be) authentic Baltimore representation. And I had some restrictive criteria:

They have to be in the city of Baltimore. I bent the rules once for a Russian restaurant, but a trip to Laurel for good Cuban food was not in the cards. This was especially tough since the city, shockingly, has very little quality Chinese food.

Lean away from chains. Local chains were considered, but the only larger chains I would consider was if there were no other local options (looking at you Fogo and Nandos).

This is some random street in Mount Washington that has a Mediterranean, French, Creole, and Sushi place next to each other. Never would have gone here. And technically Baltimore City.

Try to spread them over the city as much as possible. I not only want to try different foods, but I want to explore more areas of the city.

Hole in the wall places had a leg up. There was a good Sushi place in Hamden that looked good, but it was in a strip mall and was away from the rest of Hamden. So it lost out to a Sushi place in Fed Hill that was close to Riverside Park.

Try to mix the price level a bit. A $75/person dinner is good for a special occasion, but a more reasonable place is preferable.

Bonus if I haven’t been there before. Sorry Kippo Ramen. You were amazing and we will be back, but you didn’t make the list because I am always in Fells, and I have already been to you.

The obvious one is to try as many different ethnicities of food as possible.

I also mapped out where they all are to make sure that I wasn’t clustering too many of them. Surprisingly, there is a bit of a cluster in Station North, which is an area I don’t really associate with great restaurants. You will also see the Russian restaurant is outside the city. But it was that or nothing, and its still in the beltway.

My process

That map includes some of my alternate choices. When searching for options, I would eliminate anything that didn’t meet my criteria from above (unless nothing met my criteria, and then we can evaluate from there). Then I would read reviews, look at the menu, and look at pictures. Usually, it was easy to figure out which ones were more authentic and pick those.

In some cases, there were two really good options. Then I would look closer and try to figure out how they were different. Japanese can be split into ramen and sushi. Spanish can go to tapas and cuisine. Greek was split into Souvlaki and the Samos Island. French was split into… French 1 and French 2. Whatever. They both looked good. Sue me.

I sometimes also put an alternate in case I want to change my mind later. Those are in the notes.

The List