Though he’s moved on from his Frederick restaurant Thacher & Rye , celebrity chef Bryan Voltaggio is cooking up another Maryland dining spot.
The “Top Chef” alum’s next project will be Wye Oak Tavern, slated to open inside the forthcoming Visitation Hotel in downtown Frederick. He’s staying mostly tight-lipped on the details for now, but diners can expect a mid-Atlantic influence on the new restaurant’s cuisine.
Much of the same cooking style, and many of the locally sourced ingredients, once found at Thacher & Rye “will be intertwined into the menu here,” Voltaggio said last week. “All the things you would expect.”
While he’s also opened restaurants in Washington, D.C., and Santa Monica, California, links to the Old Line State are abundant in the Frederick native’s cooking. Take, for example, a recent summertime update to the menu at Voltaggio Brothers, the restaurant at MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill that Bryan runs with brother Michael Voltaggio, a fellow “Top Chef” contestant (Michael bested Bryan in season 6 of the cooking competition series).
A “pop tart” appetizer at Voltaggio Brothers features sweet blue crab meat dusted with Old Bay, and cuts of steak are sourced from Roseda Farm in Monkton, while other new dishes call back to the Voltaggios’ Maryland childhood, like “Voltaggi Os,” an adult spin on SpaghettiOs with arrabiata sauce and a giant chicken parmesan meatball.
“It’s part of our upbringing, being close to the Chesapeake, and the landscape of Maryland, Virginia and D.C. is definitely throughout the menu,” Bryan Voltaggio said.
He brought that background to his first restaurant, Volt, which opened on Frederick’s Market Street in 2008. Local goat cheese and peaches shared space on a tasting menu that also featured global influences (foie gras macarons, butternut squash ponzu) and playful flourishes, like yogurt frozen in liquid nitrogen.
Voltaggio was on the vanguard of a culinary renaissance for Frederick, which has since flourished into a foodie town also known for craft brewing and distilling.
“When I opened Volt back in 2008, we didn’t have distilleries, wineries and breweries in downtown Frederick,” Voltaggio said. “That’s all dramatically changed since then.”
In 2020, in a pandemic-era pivot, he rebranded the restaurant as Thacher & Rye, named after his eldest son, Thacher, and rye whiskey, which has a long history of being distilled in Maryland. The dining spot dumped tasting menus for a more casual experience , with classic dishes like ravioli and sausage and gravy.
Thacher & Rye closed in late June, making way for a new, Appalachian-inspired concept called The Ordinary Hen. The change offered Voltaggio a chance to step away, though he said he’s still serving as a mentor to new restaurant’s executive chef, Bradley Butts.
“I was there for so many years and people expected me to be there everyday,” Voltaggio said of his time at Volt and Thacher and Rye. Now, Wye Oak Tavern “will certainly be where you’ll find me on the daily.”
The restaurant will take over a former chapel space inside Visitation Frederick, a 67-room boutique hotel on the former campus of Visitation Academy, a Catholic boarding school for girls. The mixed-use project will also include condominiums.
Wye Oak Tavern’s dining room will preserve stained glass and marble from the chapel and offer “a distinctive locavore” experience “where the ever-evolving menu is inspired by the season, landscape and bounty of the region,” according to the hotel’s website .
“It’s an historic building; it’s been a big part of Frederick for 200 years and it was really important we do something special,” Voltaggio said of the project, promising more details soon.
The restaurant is the latest for the chef, who previously operated Aggio and Family Meal in Baltimore. In addition to Voltaggio Brothers and the forthcoming tavern, he also owns Showroom in Frederick.
Though the last of his Baltimore restaurants closed in 2018 , Voltaggio maintains a connection to the Baltimore region.
He was in Baltimore County last week, pulling plastic bottles and other trash out of the Back River as a volunteer for the Back River Restoration Project because, he said, “I care about the region and I care about the city.”
Could that mean future projects in Baltimore?
“I’m never going to say that that door’s closed,” he said.
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