Why Spike Gjerde chose a hospital for his newest restaurant

Spike Gjerde is thinking globally and acting locally.

Within the past year, the Woodberry Kitchen founder has opened a French bistro in Harbor Point, a Spanish tapas bar in Mount Vernon and announced plans for an Italian market in Hampden. Now, he’s unveiling his latest project: a Levantine-inspired coffee shop inside The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Cafe Terracotta sits just inside the hospital’s newly renovated 1729 E. Monument St. entrance. The all-day menu features coffee drinks and pastries as well as wraps, flatbreads and customizable rice bowls. Breakfast sandwiches are set to come in the next few weeks, and grab-and-go options will arrive soon, Gjerde said.

The James Beard Award-winning chef said the new concept fits with his overarching goal of serving internationally influenced food sourced from local, eco-conscious farms.

“We’re recognizing as a company that if we’re serious about getting really great food to people, we have to meet them where they are,“ Gjerde said. Hopkins, which he said is ”the biggest, most important institution in the city," is just the place to do it. He’s also planning to open a similar cafe on the Hopkins University Homewood campus.

For Hopkins, the new offerings align with a recent emphasis on partnering with Baltimore-area businesses. The institution has committed to sourcing 40% of its dining food locally, with at least 15% coming from Baltimore businesses by 2030, said university spokesman Doug Donovan.

Restaurants including Koshary Corner and Kitsch Cafe have opened satellite shops on the university’s campus. The Daily Grind also has a branch at the school of medicine, said April Taylor, chief operating officer at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

When it came to finding an operator for the hospital cafe, Taylor said, “One of the things we heard from staff was they wanted us to partner with local businesses and local restaurants.” In its first few weeks in operation, the hospital cafe has been “hopping” with Hopkins staff and visitors, she said.

The two cafes at Hopkins are part of an energetic new chapter for Gjerde, who last year ceded control of Hampden’s Artifact Coffee to ex-wife Amy as he took full ownership of Woodberry Tavern, formerly known as Woodberry Kitchen.

Since then, Gjerde has opened La Jetée inside the Canopy by Hilton and Bar Dalí adjacent to the Hotel Ulysses, both through his new restaurant group, Ecco Project. He’s in the process of building out an Italian-inspired market inside the former Whitehall food hall, which has been vacant for about three years.

Despite having multiple new concepts to manage, Gjerde said he and his team aren’t done expanding. “We’ll see what we’re capable of,” he said. His ultimate goal is to support local agriculture and, in particular, regenerative farming. ”I think there’s a lot of room to make meaningful and measurable change.”

Though the Italian market’s launch is a ways off, the Whitehall space is already coming in handy. Gjerde said his team is using the kitchen there to prepare food that can’t be cooked at Hopkins, such as skirt steak for rice bowls, which is seared on a cast-ironn skillet before being chilled and transported to the hospital. Desserts and other treats like lemon bars from the team’s pastry chef are also baked in Whitehall’s ovens.

Woodberry Kitchen fans might do a double take at lemon bars, since Gjerde famously took the restaurant’s locally sourced ethos to the extreme, eschewing even lemons and limes, which can’t be grown in the area. But the restaurateur said he’s learned to make some compromises as he’s expanded his portfolio.

“To exclude citrus and spices, you’re never going to be able to replicate the flavors” of the Mediterranean or France, he said. “It’s kind of the acceptance to reach people where they are, we need to be a little more open to things that aren’t created or grown here.”

He’s even relaxed the no-citrus rule at Woodberry Kitchen, which now operates as an event space. “It’s hard to tell people that are getting married they can’t have a lime in their cocktail,” he said.

Customers to the airy and high-ceilinged Cafe Terracotta can expect that food will be sourced from the same sort of small farmers that provide ingredients for Woodberry, though getting their goods inside the hospital grounds has been slightly more challenging for Gjerde than at his restaurant in Hampden.

“At Woodberry, you have farmers just showing up with products,” he said, but it doesn’t work that way at Hopkins, which has several layers of security. The cafe is open to the public, but visitors must sign in at the entrance and present ID, so get your license ready — and that includes those picking up orders placed through Grubhub or Toast.