Since I moved here, one of my best friends has been telling me all about downtown Ellicott City and the amazingness you can find there. Now that I've taken a job in Ellicott City, I figured it was time to explore! My Baltimore BFF, CJ (you may remember her as Babe the Blue ox from a previous post!), and I decided to spend Saturday afternoon exploring. She was sort of my guide because she had been there before and knew where all the hot spots were! Finding street parking is just like in any city... you have to get lucky! But Main Street in Ellicott has a few, FREE, parking lots behind all the of the shops/cafes and they're pretty large and in charge so parking wasn't really an issue at all.
WE WERE PARKED AND READY TO GET THE FUN STARTED! AHH!
First: LUNCH!
We started walking down Main Street and spotted a nice little Italian place called Johnny's Bistro on Main. When you walk in, there's a little sign that says "Please order at counter" so we walked to this little counter and placed our order. They give you a number to place on your table and then you wait for your food. We did see some people walk in and just sit and order with the waitresses, so maybe you can do that too? Probably something the locals/regulars do? Who knows! Anyway... our food came and it was AMAZING. I can't even. CJ ordered the King of the Sea panini and it looked DELISH! It consisted of Smoked Alaskan salmon, dill havarti, cucumber, sweet onion and caper cream cheese. You can also get a side of Williamsburg slaw or shoe string fries, CJ got fries! I ordered the Grilled chicken caesar salad (hey, I have to get into a wedding dress in April, people!) and it was one of the best salads I have ever had. And I've had a lot of salads. I'm sort of a caesar salad expert in case y'all didn't know. CJ wanted to splurge so she ordered Creme Brulee. I highly, highly recommend lunching at this place. The next time I go, I'm going to order one of their personal pizzas because they looked like they were TO DIE FOR.
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| King of the Sea Panini |
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| Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad |
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| Creme Brulee |
OOOHH.MYYYY.GOOSSHHH. IT WAS SOOOO GOOOOD!!
After stuffing our faces, we mosied on down Main to check out some local shops. CJ raved about this one shop called Vintage Bliss. This place was certainly worth checking out. It had EVERYTHING. They had refurbished furniture, make your own jewelry stations, clothes, handmade items from vendors... I mean, EVERYTHING. Some of it was a little kooky but that made it even better for me. I LOVE finding unique things you will never find anywhere else. This shop also has paint parties using Milk Paint. You can bring pieces of your furniture in and they will teach you how to paint it or antique it. Super cool place if you want to redecorate your home! I'll definitely be visiting them again to spruce up our little house.
Here are a few pieces of Homemade jewelry. The necklace was super cool because it's made out of clock/watch faces!
Some pieces of clothing including homemade decorative bra straps. Ya know, in case you don't want to sport that strapless look, ladies!
This. This was so creepy. A bracelet made out of doll faces. DOLL FACES, Y'ALL!
A cute dresser and painted signs. Cute for a nursery!
Our next venture was to Caplan's Department Store. The jewelry and dresses at Caplan's are seriously just the cutest! They also had a ton of cool kitchen/household gadgets. I couldn't get enough!
We popped into a few other stores (I won't name every single thing we checked out) including a store for the pups called Work!Play!Bark! which was adorbs. CJ even bought a super cute birthday cake for her Boston Terrier, Prince. The birthday cakes are made from natural ingredients so the humans can nosh on them with their pooches! I don't know that I would eat one, but hey, to each their own! We also hit up a store called Love and Glitter that was going out of business and having a huge closeout sale so don't make plans to go there anytime soon, because it'll be gone! There's also a little Fair Trade store called HutCraft. The cool thing about HutCraft is they host painting parties! You can book them for private parties or just join an upcoming class. Not only do you get to bring home your own work of art, but you can bring your own wine or beer to drink while you paint! I don't know if that's the best idea for me because my artistic talents are pretty slim to none while I'm sober much less three sheets to the wind!
We ran into Yoda while we were walking around. No big deal.
Downtown Ellicott City gets two thumbs up from me for sure and I can't wait to go back and see what else they have to offer!
