The Dish: Hooters may be gone, but Harborplace now offers local bites

If it’s been a while since your last visit to Harborplace, you might not recognize it.

Inside a restaurant that’s been vacant for almost two decades, you can now grab pizza and a beer. Downstairs, there’s globally inspired vegan fare, plus fried chicken and crab cakes. Soon, the mall will welcome a new concept from one of the city’s biggest names in food.

Sure, in some ways, Harborplace still looks like the neglected 1980s-era shopping center that it is. Look no further than the former Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., its nautical décor still gathering dust on the wall more than two years after the eatery shut down. Hooters finally closed this year.

The mall’s owner, MCB Real Estate, is still preparing to demolish the pavilions and rebuild the site with a plan that includes high-rise apartments and (possibly) a gondola. Voters will be able to decide whether to greenlight the MCB proposals on the general election ballot in November.

In the meantime, the place long dominated by national chains is bustling with new vitality and scrappy small businesses like Oleum, which launches there this week on the ground floor of the Light Street Pavilion. Owner Alisha Adibe admits that the surroundings are unconventional. “We are in a mall that has been abandoned,” she said. “But I think that if you’re providing an experience for people, that no one’s going to really care about what else is going on.”

At her new spot, customers will be able to brunch on vegan pancakes and virgin mimosas with some of the nicest views Baltimore has to offer.

While the site awaits the wrecking ball, the landlord is offering business owners like Adibe some of the “primest waterfront real estate” in the city at “deeply, deeply” discounted rents, said Adam D. Genn, vice president of MCB Harborplace. Almost all of the new tenants are women or minorities.

Adibe said she’ll pay $400 per month in rent, an opportunity that was too good to pass up.

For some, it’s the chance of a lifetime. Genn points to Good Food owner Allan Koikoi. When Genn first met him, he was cooking up breakfast sandwiches to go on a hot plate in front of nearby Rash Field Park. Now Koikoi runs a stall outside the Light Street Pavilion that serves fried chicken and crab cakes. He also runs a small clothing store inside where he offers etiquette classes and other educational programming to young people.

Harborplace “is a story of resilience,” Koikoi said. Because people assume everything’s shut down, it can be hard to market his business. But he’s not deterred. “We’re doing it,” he said. “We’re making it happen.”

And there’s much more to come: H3irloom Food Group, run by chefs David and Tonya Thomas, is planning to launch a concept at Harborplace this fall. They will join tenants like Crust by Mack and Matriarch Coffee.

Together, it’s all meant to give residents a preview of what’s to come in the overhauled shopping center, Genn said. “These are the types of vendors that people are going to come and support.”

While not all of them will be successful — or necessarily have a place in the revamped Inner Harbor — for now, they have the “opportunity to test whether they can make it in this industry,” said Jenenne Whitfield, executive director of the Harborplace Experience.

At the same time, they’re serving tourists who come to the area looking for food. “People that are coming from out of town don’t know this is like an abandoned mall,” Adibe said. “They’re walking in here looking for things.”

Upstairs from Oleum, local chain Angeli’s Pizza started a weekends-only pop-up in the former Capitol City Brewing space, which shuttered 17 years ago. The initial plan was to just do it during the summer, but now that word is getting out about the stand located in the Light Street Pavilion right by the Visitor’s Center, co-owner Juniet Ozturk is considering keeping it going through the winter.

Though he wouldn’t disclose how much Angeli’s is paying in rent, he said MCB is “very generous and they are helping a lot.”

What happens next is anyone’s guess: “At the end of the day we don’t really know what is going to happen to Harborplace,” Ozturk said.

Operating inside an all-but-abandoned mall comes with its own set of challenges. Oleum’s new storefront has just a small kitchen with all-electric appliances. Diners should expect to wait for their vegan pizzas — and don’t look for food to be brought to the table in a specific order. “Things will come out when they’re ready,” Adibe said.

Adibe is used to setting up shop in unexpected places. For the past couple of months, she has been working out of the old Stratford University in Little Italy at a shuttered culinary school that’s now a commissary space called La Chow. Adibe said she was constantly hearing from customers there who were confused by La Chow’s pickup system and wanted to dine in. “Literally, every day, people are like, ‘Are you open yet? Do you have seating? Do you have outdoor seating? Do you allow dogs?’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘I don’t have any of those things.’ ”

But as of this week, she does. Plus, a view of the harbor.

Baltimore Banner reporter Hallie Miller contributed to this article.