• 1. Where to Stay
• 2. Where to Eat
• 3. What to Do
• 4. Insider’s Tip
• 5. An Oddball Day

The dining room of the Paper Moon cafe.    (Photo: Max Glanville)

Ogle American Apparel–clad wait staff at Golden West Café, a colorful, laid-back post-show hangout in Hampden. Order new-Mexican breakfast, like the scrambled-egg-and-Jack-cheese quesadilla, any time of day. If you'd rather have dinner, try Asian-influenced comfort-food dishes like the zesty green coconut curry with poached eggs and buttery naan. Hang out in the adjoining Long Bar after hours and you’ll bump into Ottobar revelers trickling in around midnight.

Trip out over the Technicolor décor at the Paper Moon, a 24-hour (on the weekends) diner with fairy dolls hanging from the ceiling, and lasciviously dressed mannequins staring out from corners. The Big Dipper, a fried egg tucked between two thick pieces of French toast, is the late-night hangover cure of choice. Vegetarian options are plentiful.

You'll need extra napkins at Gunning’s Seafood, which serves seven-ounce jumbo-lump-crab-cake platter with two sides and a warm roll. The casino carpet and sports-bar ambience is a perfectly kitschy backdrop to a basket of fried green pepper rings downed during the boisterous, five-hour happy hour.

Just south of Hampden, veteran restaurateur and chef Spike Gjerde (the Keith McNally of Baltimore) has opened Woodberry Kitchen, an upscale foundry turned chic farmhouse that's focused on sustainable, local foods. Order the salmon with lentils and leek custard or start off with dressed-up side, like a salad of beans and Carolina Gold rice topped with sunflower seeds.

Published on May 14, 2008 as a web exclusive.