The Strip Mall on Route 97 That Quietly Became Western Howard County's Restaurant Group
As The Baltimore Banner reported, Anthony DiGangi describes the stretch of Route 97 where his restaurant sits, tucked into a shopping center in Glenwood between cornfields and not much else, as "the middle of nowhere, but the middle of everything." He wasn't being modest. Over six years, the group has grown from that one address to three restaurants and a food truck across three towns, and every new one still runs on the same short list of local ingredients and the same executive chef.
If you've lived in Glenwood for a while, you've probably already eaten at more than one of them without thinking of it as a group.
Walker's Tap & Table opened in October 2019 at 2465 Route 97, a 4,140-square-foot space that Howard County alcohol board records describe in the flattest possible bureaucratic language for what has become, by most accounts, the best-reviewed restaurant in western Howard County. Chef Chad Wells built the menu around brick-oven pizza, twenty beers on tap, and a habit of putting things like a Frito pie burger and a smoked meatloaf sandwich topped with a tater tot cake on the specials board. He'd already made a name for himself at Alewife in downtown Baltimore and picked up a Food Network appearance on "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" before Glenwood ever showed up on his resume.
The restaurant's own online reviews read less like recommendations and more like disbelief that a place this good sits inside a strip mall next to a nail salon. The Baltimore Banner quoted one customer saying the food is "so good I'd fight my future self for leftovers." It also quoted another calling Walker's "almost unbelievable that such a hidden gem is tucked away in a nondescript strip mall." A third drove forty minutes after finding it on a search, ordered at the bar, and left satisfied enough to say so publicly. In 2026, Chad Wells was named Best Chef in Howard County by Howard Magazine's Best Restaurants contest, an honor the group has now picked up in back-to-back years.
Glenwood had little foot traffic to spare and not much competition for miles.
The obvious move after a hit restaurant is to open the next one somewhere bigger. As The Baltimore Banner reported, DiGangi and Wells opened Rosie's Delicatessen on January 11, 2024, in the same shopping center as Walker's. It's a New York style Italian deli named for DiGangi's late mother, Rose, who ran the family's pizzeria, and it leans hard into specifics: bagels shipped in from Just Bagels in the Bronx, rolls from Liscio's Bakery in New Jersey, Boar's Head cold cuts, and a marinara recipe built from Rose's own notes.
Rosie's opened in the same shopping center as Walker's before the group added locations in Mount Airy and Marriottsville.
Early in 2025, the team launched a Walker's on Main food truck parked at Liquidity Aleworks, a taproom in Mount Airy about fifteen minutes from Glenwood. They'd planned to run a pizza menu off the truck and scrapped it, settling instead on snacks and sandwiches that travel better out of a mobile kitchen.
The real test came in October 2025, when Black Flag Social House in Marriottsville announced it was closing. The Baltimore Banner reported that owner Brian Gaylor had launched that location in 2024 alongside his flagship brewery in Columbia and found himself spread thin between the two, struggling with food costs at the Marriottsville spot specifically. Rather than shutter it outright, he called DiGangi.
The Baltimore Banner reported that Gaylor said, "They seem to have the formula down for this area."
Barrington Tap & Table opened in that same space at 2050 Marriottsville Road inside the Waverly Corporate Center before the 2025 holiday season, named after co-owner Lesley Salandra's hometown of Barrington, Illinois. The new team kept two of Black Flag's house beers on tap as a nod to what came before and honored existing gift cards through the transition. By the time a Tripadvisor reviewer stopped in this past June, the place had settled into a rhythm, complete with an accessible entrance, a patio ringed by greenery, and a bar built for watching a game. The current lunch menu includes a Barrington Burger built on local J.W. Treuth Angus beef, Palmyra Farm cheddar, and a Liscio's brioche bun, the same supplier that ships rolls to Rosie's forty-five minutes away.
The group's footprint also reaches beyond Glenwood. Marriottsville and Mount Airy are the same kind of in-between, underserved geography Glenwood is: places you drive through on the way to Baltimore, Frederick, or Westminster, where a good sit-down restaurant is genuinely hard to find.
Glenwood has never had much in the way of centralized gathering spots, and the ones it does have tend to repeat. The Howard County Farmers' Market sets up outside the Glenwood Library Branch on weekend mornings. Western Regional Park hosts the youth leagues that fill most weeknight schedules. The Glenwood 50+ Center inside the Gary J. Arthur Community Center runs its own calendar of classes and events. And every August, the Glenwood Lions Club runs a fair-food booth at the Howard County Fair, which turned 80 this year and ran August 8 through 15 with admission at ten dollars for anyone thirteen and older.
The group's restaurants are in Glenwood and Marriottsville, and its food truck operates in Mount Airy.
If you've been eating at Walker's since before Rosie's existed, you've had a front-row seat to something that doesn't happen often in a place this rural: a restaurant that stayed small enough to keep its regulars and still found room to grow.
VSells & Associates works out of Ellicott City, but we cross Route 97 for the deviled eggs more often than we'd like to admit. If the Barrington Burger or Rosie's Italian sub has become part of your own weekend rhythm, you already understand why this corner of Howard County is one of our favorite places to be.
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