The Dish: How The Royal Blue became all things to all people

The bathroom at The Royal Blue is a constant battleground: No sooner do the owners of the Station North bar and restaurant repaint the pale pink bathroom than someone tags it again with graffiti, scribbling a few symbols in white paint above the hand dryer.

Co-owner Randy Coffren said he and his business partners have considered just leaving the scrawl but decided against it for fear of alienating elderly customers who come in for a meal.

After all, The Royal Blue, which opened nearly four years ago, has found success in Baltimore by opening its doors to everyone, every day of the week.

Offering a fun and approachable lunch and dinner menu, it’s a casual lunch destination for the area’s office and remote workers, or for people getting inked at the tattoo shop next door. The owners of neighboring Le Comptoir du Vin have come over to borrow a cup of sugar. Some customers bring their suitcases on their way to or from the train station a few blocks away.

“You have people that just want to have a daytime drinking sesh,” said bartender Jaime Abbott, who is game for anything during what she calls her “old-lady shifts” from opening until 4:30 p.m.

Then things start to get spicy. On the weekends, older couples have been known to stop by early in the evening before going to a movie at The Charles, then return later in the evening only to be shocked at the bar’s transformation into a packed party bar.

With its own dedicated dance floor and disco ball, The Royal Blue is one of the few places where local college kids can reliably dance late into the night. Club Charles is closed again? Go to The Royal Blue, says Reddit. Local celebrities like the members of Turnstile, who are friends of the owners, often turn up when they’re in town.

“I think what really set us apart was being the late-night spot,” said Jimmy Crawford, co-owner and bar manager. On Fridays and Saturdays, last call is at 1:30 a.m., while the kitchen stays open until 10 p.m. most nights.

The Royal Blue’s success wasn’t a given when Crawford first moved to Baltimore to bring the restaurant to life. The former Johnny Rad’s bartender was living in Florida when Coffren and Rich Pugh, who also own Snake Hill Sausage Grill together, approached him about their newest venture: taking over The Gallery One, a beloved, longtime LGBTQIA+ bar in Station North that had hit the market. (A mural above the bar is a holdover from the Gallery One days.)

While the bar’s location was convenient to local universities and central to the rest of the city, Crawford said, there’s not a ton of people living in the Station North vicinity — and he wondered whether The Royal Blue would find an audience. “We’re not surrounded by residential,” he said over a watermelon and feta salad. “It could’ve went a bunch of ways.”

But after the second weekend in business back in 2022, Crawford said, word got out about the new pub with the built-in dance floor and surprisingly delicious smashburgers and salads. The Royal Blue has been busy since, Crawford and Coffren said. And it’s on an upward trajectory, with stronger-than-usual sales this past summer that Coffren believes reflect a boom time for the surrounding neighborhood. “I just notice more people out walking around,” he said.

There are little ways The Royal Blue sets itself apart, Coffren said, like making their own salad dressings and cooking all their meats sous vide. Each Friday, The Royal Blue’s chef, Megan Bayer, rolls out hard-to-resist comfort food specials like crab rangoon and surf-and-turf cheesesteaks. The kitchen keeps portions big and prices as low as possible.

But perhaps the biggest key has been simply being there. Starting with the pandemic, many bars and restaurants have scaled back operations to just a few evenings a week. They’ve stopped serving lunch, if they ever did. The Royal Blue, then, goes against both trends, opening at noon seven days a week with a full food menu.

And yes, it’s exhausting. Coffren said he’s “kind of jealous” of friends whose businesses close on Mondays. It’s not just the washroom woes. When you’re open every day of the week, equipment wears out. Every now and then, a customer is basically guaranteed to flush a vape down the toilet, and a plumber has to be called to remove the commode entirely. The sofas get ruined, and people try to use the shiny metal railings in the dance floor as poles. When something inevitably breaks down over the weekend, it’s not as if he has a day to get it repaired. Everything suddenly becomes an emergency — often falling to Crawford, who lives nearby, to fix. “I’m always on call,” he said.

But when Coffren entertains the idea of closing for one day a week, he just looks at the numbers. “We do 4 grand on a Monday,” he said. “People are willing to work.”

There’s one thing Coffren could give up: his war on the bathroom graffiti. He thinks about just leaving it up there. Maybe. “We’ll probably keep painting them for the next 10 years.”