Ellicott City’s favorite Chinese restaurant is coming to Baltimore

Customers regularly drive 40 miles round-trip from Baltimore to dine at one of the country’s top Chinese restaurants, housed in an unassuming Ellicott City strip mall. Starting this fall, though, they’ll only need to go to Remington.

Pepper House, the Sichuan eatery Yuan Shen opened with her husband Frank Liang in 2021, is adding a second location in Remington’s R. House food hall. Set to open in mid-October, the stall will feature the same menu as the restaurant’s flagship in Howard County, as well as a few other dishes.

“The environment is really nice,” Shen said, “much better than our first location.”

The Howard County branch of Pepper House has been a foodie favorite for years, attracting the attention of local chefs, who praise their Chengdu dumplings, house-made chili oil, and variety of noodle dishes including the classic Sichuan dish, dan dan noodles.

In 2024, the restaurant made it to the 11th spot on Yelp’s list of top Chinese restaurants nationwide — a development that brought a flood of new traffic and attention to the spot. And more recently, customers have encouraged Shen and her husband, a musician, to open an additional branch. “We want to make authentic Sichuan food more accessible,” she said.

This will be the first time in its almost 10-year history that R. House will have a permanent Sichuan stall among its lineup, said Jon Constable of Seawall Development, which owns and operates the food hall at 301 W. 29th St.

“We saw there was a demand for it in our neighborhood and the city,” he said, noting that temporary Sichuan pop-ups have proven popular in the past. “When the opportunity arose for a permanent spot, that was a food genre at the top of our list.”

At R. House, Pepper House will take the place of the Chopped Broadway Bodega & Deli pop-up, and sits next to a space formerly occupied by Molina Pizza, which closed this spring.

While new for R. House, Pepper House will join a growing roster of authentic Chinese offerings in North Baltimore. Nearby Charles Village has seen an uptick in the number of Asian eateries, such as Lao Sze Chuan and Mahjong, near Johns Hopkins University, which has a large Asian student population.

“Lots of Chinese students [from Hopkins] come over to us” in Ellicott City, Shen said. Soon, they’ll be able to walk from campus.