The Strip Mall on Route 97 That Quietly Became Western Howard County's Restaurant Group
"The middle of nowhere, but the middle of everything." That's how 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. He wasn't being modest. Over six years, that one address has grown into four restaurants spread 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. One customer wrote that the food is "so good I'd fight my future self for leftovers." Another called it "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.
None of that happened because Glenwood had foot traffic to spare. It happened because there wasn't much competition for miles, and the team leaned into that instead of running from it.
The obvious move after a hit restaurant is to open the next one somewhere bigger. 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.
Jenny Sinkule, who moved to a wooded part of Glenwood from Silver Spring with her wife and daughter, told a Baltimore Banner reporter that dining options were the biggest tradeoff of the move. She and her family ate dinner at Walker's the day they closed on their house. When Rosie's finally opened after construction delays pushed the launch past its original date, her only complaint was that it took so long. That's the pattern DiGangi has leaned into: customers grab lunch at Rosie's and dinner at Walker's on the same visit, or the reverse, because there's genuinely nowhere else nearby to split the difference.
Doubling down on the same half-acre of Route 97 before expanding anywhere else is not how most growing restaurant groups behave. It's how you prove a concept works before you risk it somewhere you don't already have a following.
The next move cost less to walk away from if it failed. 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. A food truck doesn't require a lease, a build-out, or a bet on whether a second town wants what Glenwood already loves. It's a cheap way to find out.
The real test came in October 2025, when Black Flag Social House in Marriottsville announced it was closing. 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.
"They seem to have the formula down for this area," Gaylor said when the deal was announced.
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.
That detail matters more than it looks. The group isn't chasing bigger markets. 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. The formula Gaylor referenced isn't a menu. It's a bet that rural pockets of Howard and Carroll County are underserved enough to support a well-run kitchen, and that the same crew who proved it once on Route 97 can prove it again wherever that gap shows up next.
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 restaurant group's spread across Route 97, Mount Airy, and Marriottsville follows that same small-institution logic. It isn't chasing scale for its own sake. It's serving overlapping populations of people who already commute past each other's towns and don't have many other options once they get there. When Walker's hosted ten-year-old Phoebe Dunkle, who was undergoing cancer treatment, as head chef for a night after her mother reached out for help, it wasn't a marketing stunt dreamed up by a corporate group. It was the same neighborhood-scale hospitality that's been running the kitchen since 2019, just with three more addresses attached to it now.
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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