Going beyond the coffee on the menu at Zeke’s

As Baltimore Positive gets ready to celebrate its 27th Anniversary and the Maryland Crab Cake Tour will feature our 27 favorite things to eat in Baltimore, we set the stage at Zeke’s Coffee with a caffeinated discussion about menus, pastries, sandwiches and meals of happiness with Dan Rodricks, who shares his culinary peppers and eggs philosophy to Thomas Rhodes and Joe Robinson on Harford Road.

Nestor Aparicio, Dan Rodricks, Joe Robinson and Thomas Rhodes discuss the culinary and community aspects of Zeke’s Coffee in Baltimore. Nestor highlights the shop’s coffee, sandwiches, and special events, including a liquor license for happy hours and music shows. Thomas, the chef, details the in-house preparation of items like biscuits, hot honey, and various meats. They reminisce about their long-standing relationships, including Nestor’s Raven road trips and Dan’s involvement in local theater. The conversation also touches on personal anecdotes and the shop’s history, emphasizing its role as a neighborhood gathering spot.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

coffee shop, Baltimore, Zeke’s Coffee, Thomas Rhodes, Dan Rodricks, sandwich, hot honey, biscuit, liquor license, neighborhood, brunch, scratch kitchen, pastry, corned beef, Labor Day sandwich

SPEAKERS

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Joe Robinson, Dan Rodricks, Nestor Aparicio, Thomas Rhodes

Nestor Aparicio  00:00

Welcome home. We are W, N, S T. Am 1570 tasks in Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. My sandwich is still over there. I think we are at Zeke’s coffee. We’re having a good time. Dan Rogers is hanging around where six gonna join us. We are pressing our luck. For sure, I have these new scratch offs. I’m gonna have the Raven scratch offs next month as well. Crab cake tour goes on respite a little bit today for a couple weeks, and our 27th anniversary will be back on August the third with my 27 favorite things to eat in Baltimore. One of them is right down the street at Cocos, where I met this guy, Thomas Rhodes, here from Zeke’s coffee. Dan Rogers, showing us, said, and I tell you what I got. Are you the chef? I don’t know, Joe.

Joe Robinson  00:44

Joe Robinson, I’m the chef here at Zeke’s.

Nestor Aparicio  00:47

You employ this guy? Yep, this guy made that sandwich. Yes, sir. Is that what you’re saying? He grew

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Dan Rodricks  00:51

the chicken? No, I see all you know. I mean, what do you want to say about the sandwich?

Nestor Aparicio  00:55

Well, the sandwich. First of all, I was a little scared, because I’m afraid of heat. I just need to let you know. So a little bit spicy. So I saw honey on it, and I thought to myself, all right, I’m gonna take a gander. I did this in the last segment, I went and hit my tongue. That’s hot, so I got coffee. And I think after the first bite, the sweetness hit me a little bit. But it was a biscuit with an egg and fried egg, delicious chicken. And it had some, it had some other like, spread on it. What did it have on

Joe Robinson  01:26

just the hot honey. Yeah, just the hot honey, the fried egg and the chicken. It’s delicious. Oh, thank you. Does the baker make the biscuit? The baker does make the biscuit. So, yeah, so the hot honey is made in house. We buttermilk, grind the chicken overnight, and bread it, you know, individually, and frying

Nestor Aparicio  01:40

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order. Joe here and Thomas, it says coffee here, right? And I think of Zeke’s, and I think coffee, coffee. Give me coffee. But when you we got a shop like this, you want to have a whole lot more. And sure, that’s what you leave with your coffee everywhere on the city, your coffee is served and all that. But this is really the mothership. And I think here is where you get your taste testing kitchen. And I always see you putting specials up. You’re always doing so part of the neighborhood being that kind of neighborhood, right?

Thomas Rhodes  02:06

Yeah, neighborhood. But, you know, we shoot for the city. I mean, one of the things we have that most coffee a lot of coffee shops don’t have, is a liquor license. So we try to incorporate happy hours and and whatnot. But you know, on the weekend,

Nestor Aparicio  02:21

music in here, in this space,

Thomas Rhodes  02:23

we have had a couple shows, yeah, yeah.

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Dan Rodricks  02:26

It’s a good meeting place if you don’t live in off of Harford road, but you need to meet somebody for a cup of coffee. This is a great place to meet

Nestor Aparicio  02:33

Yeah. So I do the show at Cocos all the time, but we back down there next month as well, with Marcella. I’ll be featuring the coconut shrimp, because that’s my thing there. I’m not doing crab cakes at any of my places. I’m doing the things other than crab cakes you should probably eat. And I met Thomas and I, we’ve known each other probably 20 years. He made coffee for my Raven road trips for years. He would set up a little coffee stand back in the aughts.

Dan Rodricks  02:55

Well, we go back a ways. Yeah, that’s what I learned. I remember the last time I saw you? Well, I

Thomas Rhodes  03:00

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saw you once since, but the first time I met you was when I was a barista at the daily grind.

Dan Rodricks  03:04

At the daily grind Fells Point. Oh, yeah, another good place. Like, what are

Nestor Aparicio  03:08

we talking here? Tom one,

Dan Rodricks  03:10

right century though, on Tim Street, Yep, yeah. Well,

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Thomas Rhodes  03:16

it was the old one too. I get here

Dan Rodricks  03:18

seven in the morning, and, oh, the old daily grind next to the Orpheum cinema. Yes, sir of George figgs, yeah, George, yeah, good old George.

Thomas Rhodes  03:25

I did a play with him one time. Did you really went to

Nestor Aparicio  03:27

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another one? He’s casting right now for 66 oh yeah, there’s running. Coffees busy. I think here nobody. So this is small tomorrow. I come in at 715 and I’m plugging it in the corner, and as a gentleman who’s still here, setting up with his laptop, turning this into his I call it’s my Arnold’s, if I was the fox, you know what I mean? Like, my place, yeah. And I said to Thomas, I’m like, I got Dan Rogers, who I know Dan. Haven’t seen dan in a while. I’m thinking, that’s Baltimore, right? And everybody knows. Everybody find that out every time I do this. I said Dan’s like, I did Mickey Coachella show last week. I’m like, Oh, that’s my neighborhood. That’s what made you a colonist 45 years is guys like him employing guys like him, making sandwiches for people like this. That’s Baltimore.

Dan Rodricks  04:12

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. It is. It is called Small tomorrow, for a reason. Yeah, I agree with that 100% yes. Not only

Nestor Aparicio  04:19

do you know each other. You know each other from two daily grinds ago for a quarter of a century. Yeah? And you’re trying to bring people, I mean, for your location here, what was the vision for this and what did it become? Did it always have a disco ball? Yes. Okay, so

Thomas Rhodes  04:34

actually, the shop down the street that’s right beside advanced auto, it’s something else. Now, was this

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Nestor Aparicio  04:42

before this? Was this

Thomas Rhodes  04:43

before we were here. It was a Beauty Academy. Before that, it was Montebello Ace Hardware. So this was

Nestor Aparicio  04:50

a hardware store, Ace Hardware, yep. Well, it all has a history, right? I mean, it’s Baltimore, right? This neighborhood I grew up in Colgate. But my Venezuelan Uncle, I’m not sure if he was documented or not, was 1974 he worked at Chesapeake Cadillac as a mechanic, and he lived on Tyndale road, a half a block from where rasig has lived since 1984 and so this part of the neighborhood for me, I used to shop for records here, vinyl discoveries. So I mean, you know, Gil’s pizza up the road. I mean, all the things that have been around here all these years. Why did you settle in this neighborhood?

Thomas Rhodes  05:26

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I live right down the street. Yeah, my we, we started our family here,

Dan Rodricks  05:33

right? What you wanted to make a neighbor, neighborhood coffee shop, but it, but I didn’t want to have bigger it’s bigger than just a corner shop,

Thomas Rhodes  05:40

right? Well, it’s not bigger than what we used to

Dan Rodricks  05:43

have, yeah, oh, remember the old place? Yeah, did

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Nestor Aparicio  05:46

you want to have a coffee shop? Or did you want to brew coffee?

Thomas Rhodes  05:49

Well, I always roast coffee. That’s by the Safeway. That’s a whole separate operation, right? That’s our wholesale

Nestor Aparicio  05:55

came first you were making coffee. Said, I make coffee. I gotta have a coffee shop, right? Yep, so this was an extension of that, or original vision of that. I

Thomas Rhodes  06:05

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didn’t want to have a coffee shop at first, but you sort of need to have one, and then you need to have a chef. Yes, here we did over at the other place. It was so tiny, but it was just coffee.

Nestor Aparicio  06:16

Well, I want to say this. I’m a biscuit guy. My mother was Southern, from South Carolina, so biscuits were a thing that was delicious biscuit. But I, I’m bad at biscuit. You’re a cook. Dan, I mean, yeah, squally,

Dan Rodricks  06:32

do biscuits?

Joe Robinson  06:36

Having a bluebird bakery? Yes. He His nickname is actually biscuits. Oh yeah,

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Nestor Aparicio  06:41

that egg thing you do every year, he has a peppers

Dan Rodricks  06:44

and peppers and eggs. So there’s something you could put on that menu. So when I was growing up, of course, my mother and then sub shops would sell peppers and egg subs. He’s just a green or red pepper sauteed and scrambled eggs. And it’s

Joe Robinson  07:02

funny, you should say that we actually have a sandwich kind of like that. We call it the hay cowboy, but it’s peppers, sauteed peppers and onions, eggs and some ham,

Dan Rodricks  07:11

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not something like that. No. Two other things. Two other things, all right, I keep telling just peppers and peppers and eggs, gotcha. Maybe you can slip a slice of provolone in there, gotcha, but it makes a nice sub. And that used to be the fishing sandwich, like my mother would make those for us when we went fishing. And then aroma of that in the car on the way to fishing

Nestor Aparicio  07:31

yours, because I’m you got me moving, my wife will tell you, I’d like I read Rodricks, and I’m like, he’s talking about, I love peppers. My wife does not like peppers

Dan Rodricks  07:40

at all. These are sweet peppers. This is nothing. Are you going Red? Orange, yellow? We should just use Cubanos or just a green bell pepper. My mother olive oil, salt and pepper. So, so it was a cheap, it was a cheap lunch, right? But she would make it. My father for for work too. He put it in his lunch box, take it to work for fresh peppers from the garden in the summertime. So I decided I announced it as the official sandwich of Labor Day, because I associated it with work working class people of modest means. Is a depression sandwich. But anyway, so, so then every year, I write about how this is the official sandwich of Labor Day, and I hope it catches on so I’ll come here and make a fuss about it. I’ll bring it. I’ll bring you some business too. Because people, I know, several people, love the peppers and egg sandwich. See,

Nestor Aparicio  08:29

when you say peppers, my wife flinches because she’s familiar with green peppers that are Look, can be a little bitter, right? I i got a salad at Pizza John’s the other day, and I brought it home, and it had a yellow pepper on it, yeah. And I said to her, it tastes citrusy, if you, if

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Dan Rodricks  08:48

you it might. And I gave the same pepper. It is different stages of ripeness. Correct to go from what does it go from yellow to red to green.

Joe Robinson  08:58

Red is the final yellow degree

Nestor Aparicio  09:02

pepper. It’s the same pepper. Dr, Steve Elliot, yesterday has his own little pepper patch, and he gave me a purple pepper. Peter Piper

Joe Robinson  09:10

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didn’t pick it. I took it

Nestor Aparicio  09:14

home, but I’m gonna make it with eggs this weekend. Honor you. Yeah, okay, the sausage I got,

Dan Rodricks  09:20

honor me. They

Nestor Aparicio  09:21

brought me sausage last week, and I had to check because I thought they were sliding me scrapple, and I can’t have that. You know what I mean, Chef, what else you do out here? It’s open to come and seeks. I want to get we’re singing here, but I want to get you back in the kitchen. It’s Friday morning.

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Joe Robinson  09:33

Oh, I mean, we’re pretty much a full scratch made kitchen during the week. We’ve got breakfast and lunch all day long, everything from we know. We do a wonderful reuben sandwich. We make our own corned beef in house. We make our own corned beef. We make our own locks in house. So if you, if you’re a feminine locks and cream cheese, come on in. Get a LOX bagel. Try our house made locks. We roast our own turkey. Roast our own roast beef, sausage, sausage, make our own sausage in house. Damn you. You make your own sauce. We do. We do just Sausage, sausage. It is like a sage sausage. Yeah, we make patties for sandwiches. That’s what I had for breakfast.

Nestor Aparicio  10:07

I ordered the apple Danish. She just went, like,

Dan Rodricks  10:12

you walk in and look at that case over there. I mean, look at that case over there. And I don’t, I’m not. I avoid pastry. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t

Nestor Aparicio  10:19

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avoid it this morning. I couldn’t. He brought the pastry over to me. He’s like, couldn’t come on. And I’m like, he’s like, come on. The Portuguese game. Now he’s got a fork and he’s got, come on. And I knew was about you worried about,

Dan Rodricks  10:32

yeah, but so you’re looking good. So I don’t usually do that, and I treat

Nestor Aparicio  10:39

he’s a thespian.

Dan Rodricks  10:41

I’m gonna look at that. You’re gonna go do a close up over this. He’s

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Nestor Aparicio  10:45

got, he’s got a big gig coming up with the every man where he’s gonna be the main actor. So he’s got to keep his is

Thomas Rhodes  10:52

Vinnie still area is he has he left already?

Dan Rodricks  10:55

Vinnie land, cheesy, yeah. I wrote a story about him. He’s, he’s leaving at the end of next season I

Thomas Rhodes  11:01

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I’ve worked on, I worked with video on his on first incarnations of of every man over on Charles Street in the church bowling alley. Oh, no, the bowling

Nestor Aparicio  11:09

alley. Designer, guy, right? Builder, okay, yeah.

Dan Rodricks  11:14

So the they were in a church at first in Charles village, but then they went to the former bowling alley near the Charles theater, yep, right, right across every man theater. He did a great job of that theater. And

Thomas Rhodes  11:25

we used to go up like he said, Baltimore, mess around and pretend we were bowling, that we’re bowling alleys up top, I think, or down, either way. I can’t

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Dan Rodricks  11:34

really I think it, I think it was above. It was duck pins in the building there, next to the Charles theater. That’s where

Nestor Aparicio  11:43

Baltimore’s duck pants, right?

Thomas Rhodes  11:44

Come on. I don’t know if the gutters were big, so I don’t know if that means anything.

Nestor Aparicio  11:50

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I want to step back, take a break, get you back to the kitchen. I want everybody to come by and fresh corn beef. I mean, you’re so, yeah, a couple of things. The locks, not so much. But I’m trying to think of the things that you know, like you

Joe Robinson  12:01

said, Try pastrami, Joe. I love pastrami. Have you tried making you know, I have a little more involved it is, yeah, cuz you got the smoking process, yeah. But I do love it.

Thomas Rhodes  12:09

Yeah. We also have a bikes and burger night on every third Monday. Joe makes a fantastic burger.

Dan Rodricks  12:15

Other brunch

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Joe Robinson  12:16

every you know, on the weekends, come join us for brunch. You know, we’ve got shrimp and grits, chicken and waffles specials

Dan Rodricks  12:22

every week, day off? No,

Joe Robinson  12:25

I just, I live in the basement.

Nestor Aparicio  12:27

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Well, pastries are what I think of when I think of Zeke’s, right? You want us to think more than that, right? Oh,

Joe Robinson  12:32

yeah, we’ve got a little something

Thomas Rhodes  12:34

for everybody. The bagels are made right there. I mean, everything except for English muffins and the wraps,

Joe Robinson  12:41

yeah. Other than that, although all the bread is made it in at bluebird here, right next door to

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Nestor Aparicio  12:45

us. Great. All right, we got bakery, we got food, we got lunch, we got brunch, we got great coffee. We’re at Zeke’s coffee. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland lottery. I’m pressing my luck here today. We’re gonna give a SIG in. I’m gonna keep Dan’s like, Can I leave

Dan Rodricks  12:57

now? Say that I didn’t say that you need I thought maybe you needed some space here. That’s

Nestor Aparicio  13:04

all space for you, because I love you. I

Joe Robinson  13:07

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didn’t ask. Great, talking to you. Dan,

Dan Rodricks  13:10

same here, Joe, you do peppers and eggs on Labor Day weekend.

Joe Robinson  13:13

We might have a plan.

Nestor Aparicio  13:16

Okay, okay, you have to drop the mic. You’re okay. I’m gonna take a break. All right. What would this segment have been without Rodricks? I think it would

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Dan Rodricks  13:23

have been fine. You would guys back

Nestor Aparicio  13:26

more right after you.