The Dish: The Fishmonger’s Daughter isn’t your grandmother’s Faidley’s

For Damye Hahn, the opening of her first Catonsville restaurant, The Fishmonger’s Daughter, is like coming home.

“We’ve always been along this West Side corridor,” she said, admiring her now-open Frederick Road space.

The self-proclaimed fishmonger’s daughter lives along the major throughway in Ellicott City along with her mom and dad, Bill and Nancy Faidley Devine. In 1958, the couple met on a blind date on Forest Lane, about a mile from Hahn’s new storefront.

“It’s like my family has never left,” she said. Her great-grandfather, John Faidley, started the popular Faidley’s seafood business in 1886.

But her restaurant, which languished in a grueling construction and restoration process over the last six years, is more than a love letter to the family’s seafaring history. It’s also a cautiously optimistic pitch for the Faidley company’s future.

Rows of colorful buckets once used by the family to sell oysters sit above the bar — a callback to a time when local watermen thrived and weren’t seeking disaster assistance for the plummeting price of bivalves. Black and white photographs of Hahn’s family hang on the walls, most notably one of Bill Devine sucking on a cigar in a crabbing boat, “assessing everything” as if he were still in the Navy, as Hahn says.

Now, a drop in the number of blue crabs and new restrictions on cheaper crab meat from Venezuela are driving up prices and sending seafood companies out of business.

“You can count on two hands how many people are still processing [seafood] on the Eastern Shore. When I was a child there were a hundred,” Hahn said, adding that the number of watermen, too, are dwindling. “I fear we’re losing the links in the chain.”

While Faidley’s is still known for their crab cake — a top seller at their Lexington Market location — Hahn said the crab industry is becoming too volatile. “The devastation of the [blue] catfish is ridiculous,” she said. The business paid 35% more per can of crab this spring compared to last.

Hahn knows there are other fish in the sea, and her 22,000-square-foot space is intent on sending customers a not-so-subtle reminder. In the center of the new restaurant hangs an anatomically correct, 22-foot-long rockfish made from the salvage left by the restaurant’s now-demolished adjoining building.

It’s a critical “brand extension” she explained, adding that as the weather warms, skate will be available at Fishmonger’s. Catfish, porgies, mahi mahi, halibut and fresh flounder are also coming to the menu, as well as the seafood bar she set up in the place of a 1920s grocery market counter — a relic of the building from the previous tenant, a fancy neighborhood grocer, that closed in 1969.

“I wanted people to walk in here and wonder if we’d been here originally,” Hahn said. “That [grocery] business is so close to what our family did for all these years, which is feed people.”

As she set up the eatery, she counseled relatives of the Heidelbach family, who owned the grocer, as if she were tasked with organizing a museum exhibit. A coffee service station sits in the same spot as when the Heidelbachs owned it. Phone numbers of old customers found handwritten in pencil under wallpaper on the back walls are being preserved in a “history hall.” Rusted radiators have been painted gold and repurposed to prop up some of Hahn’s restaurant tables, ltheir surfaces made with oyster shells encased in epoxy.

Jim Heidelbach never expected his family’s legacy and former building to ”come alive again,” he said.

The 720 Frederick Road space sat in receivership before Hahn took it over. The structure was poorly maintained by a janitorial supply store and then a wallpaper business that occupied the building after the Heidelbachs, he said. But Hahn’s investment will allow the building to survive another several decades, adding to the community’s revitalization efforts and attracting new foot traffic to downtown Catonsville, where Heidelbach was born and raised.

The convergence of the two family businesses, each shaken by modernizing industries, is purposeful. Hahn carefully constructed the design, from the shipping and packaging center on the lower level to the catering and private event space upstairs. In total, she sunk about $11 million into the restoration.

Hahn acknowledges that is a hefty price, especially in an industry where food prices continue to rise. It’s the most the family business has ever spent on a concept — more than their long-overdue fish stall at Lexington Market in 2024 — and made worse by pandemic-era construction and shipping delays.

“It had to be more than a restaurant,” she said of the investment.

The building didn’t have enough water at first, she said. Hahn expanded the number of toilets from two to 13, installed four ice machines (and brought in experts to make ice cream in-house), removed steel from the facade to avoid new tariffs, built a patio for outdoor seating and raised the roof for multiple large kitchens. Then she used the leftover 100-year-old heart pine to custom-build the tables.

There’s more affordably priced takeaway food at the marketplace counter, off to the side of the expansive dining area. She also brought on Chef Scott Bacon of Magdalena at Baltimore’s Ivy Hotel to oversee the experience.

Bacon said the restaurant, which will host a grand opening on June 18, captured his attention because of Hahn’s focus on ethically sourced seafood and desire to craft a communal experience where customers can order an upscale dish like the filet of the day or a homier lobster roll.

“We don’t want it to be bespoke or withholding; people can make it their own,” he said. Bacon is also able to take approachable dishes such as a lobster mac and cheese and make it more refined, using his fine-dining background.

He’s excited to show customers the catfish sliders and smoked fish dip, which will be available on the market side of the eatery. His house-made breads, pastas and pickles are more examples of how Bacon plans to “push the envelope” for Catonsville dining and what people can expect from the Faidley name, he said.

The restaurant’s exterior alone is eye-catching along the crowded Catonsville shopping strip. Prior to the soft opening in late April, passersby peered in for a glimpse, leaving cloudy stains on the glass that Hahn said she had to wash multiple times. “We’re like monkeys in the window,” she said.

But the excitement is a good sign, considering the risk she has taken in bringing the homage to her family to life.

“I could be retired and walk off,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be another missing link in the chain.”