Our Smalltimore roots seemingly never cease to end as two longtime WNST and Baltimore Positive supporters reunite at The Fishmonger’s Daughter in Catonsville as Dennis Koulatsos and Damye Hahn tell old Lexington Market tales from Faidley’s and the wisdom of a father to another father’s son about being prompt and keeping your word.

The conversation focused on how Damye has carried the Faithley’s Lexington Market legacy into Fishmonger’s Daughter while expanding the concept in Catonsville.

Project Focus

• Damye said the restaurant was designed to preserve the look and history of the original market stall while adapting it to a full restaurant setting.
• She described the space as a major restoration project and said more historical pieces still need to be installed.

Menu Direction

• Damye said the restaurant exists to better showcase Chesapeake seafood, Maryland watermen, and fish varieties that were harder to feature in the market stall.
• She said the menu will keep core items like crab cakes and sides while rotating seasonal dishes, with chef Scott Bacon emphasizing local seafood first and regional ingredients second.

Open Questions

• When will the next seasonal menu launch beyond the stated target of the end of September?
• Which remaining historical pieces will Damye add now that the building work is complete?

• Install the remaining preserved historical items from the basement into the Fishmonger’s Daughter space to further highlight the family seafood legacy.
• Develop and launch a fall menu at Fishmonger’s Daughter by the end of September, plus subsequent winter and spring seasonal menus, ensuring the signature crab cakes and favorite sides remain on the menu year-round.

Lexington Market Legacy

• Nestor, Dennis, and Damye reflected on their shared history around Lexington Market and the long presence of the Faithley’s stall.
• Damye explained that the new market location includes a mural and design choices meant to recreate the feeling of the original stall.

Restaurant Restoration

• Damye described Fishmonger’s Daughter as a large restoration effort focused on preserving history throughout the building.
• She said the team is still adding historical artifacts and finishing touches to the space.

Food and Menu Strategy

• Damye said the restaurant lets the family serve a broader range of Chesapeake seafood and regional dishes than was practical in the market stall.
• She said the menu will always include crab cakes and strong side dishes while rotating seasonal offerings built around local ingredients.
• Scott Bacon was identified as the chef helping shape that local-first seafood approach.

Dennis Reflection

• Dennis shared that Bill Devine once taught him the importance of being early and prepared, a lesson he said influenced his work habits and later success.
• He also praised the restaurant for honoring local history and encouraged support for local businesses.

Nestor Aparicio 0:01
Welcome home. We are WNST. AM 1570 Towson Baltimore. We’re Baltimore positive. Trying to keep my equipment working here. We’re here at Fishmonger’s Daughter. We are in beautiful Catonsville. I usually see her down at Lexington Market. Dennis Galatis is out here on the west side of town with a beautiful story, and I I invited Dennis to come on once or twice a year, we talk football because Koons Ford sponsored. He did a show. Everybody knows Dennis, right? Give him the phone number, Dennis. 410-218-0337. Set your cell

Damye Hahn 0:30
phone. It

Dennis Koulatsos 0:31
is.

Nestor Aparicio 0:32
It rigs on his hip, as the ad said for 20 years here. So I invited Dennis over because I love Dennis. I’m in Catonsville. I needed guests. I wanted someone that would appreciate the space. Dennis is dined with me at State Fair at Beaumont. I know he’s in Catonsville. He’s around the corner. I I knew he had already been in here, so I hit him and I’m like, Hey, I’m doing a show to Fish Mall because you want to come by. He’s like, What time? You know, and you had your floor and we had this, and I invited him on and he’s like, You do know how much I love Bill Devine, right? And Dennis isn’t on social media, so he was concerned because your dad’s a little. He’s like, “Bill’s okay, right? I’m like, “Bill’s cool, and then he sent me this picture. It almost made me choke up a little bit because, like, he had dark hair. He was good-looking, young Greek. Yeah, I remember him. You remember that? He was a little young for me, but I remember him. Let’s go! Let me hear what. Look at you guys. Oh no, we were

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Damye Hahn 1:24
young and in the market. There were a lot of good-looking people that that worked down there. I’m

Nestor Aparicio 1:28
not going to ask who’s older or young. I don’t even want to know. Oh boy, I brought trouble. I didn’t think

Dennis Koulatsos 1:33
I would blush on your show, Nestor.

Nestor Aparicio 1:34
You, but you love her. Her family was like they had the big stall at the market, right? I looked at them all

Dennis Koulatsos 1:41
day long, and they were busier than we were. So they were busier from sun up to sun down. A lot of traffic. I was there from 8080, actually from 80 till 8086.

Nestor Aparicio 1:50
Wow. Yeah. And you’ve known each other all this time, and I didn’t know you knew each other. No. We we we we knew of each other more

Damye Hahn 1:58
than knew each other because

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Dennis Koulatsos 2:00
keep in mind, I’m a shy introvert, so unless you came to my stand, I wasn’t going to come looking for you. Yeah, and and I did go to the stand because I loved those those heroes. Yes,

Damye Hahn 2:10
I mean, I I had at least once a

Nestor Aparicio 2:13
week’s food.

Damye Hahn 2:14
Absolutely, I loved them. See, these

Nestor Aparicio 2:17
years I’ve known both of you. This is embarrassing that I’ve eaten more Figgly’s

Dennis Koulatsos 2:22
crab cakes than I can count.

Damye Hahn 2:23
Yeah,

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Dennis Koulatsos 2:24
yeah, hundreds. When

Nestor Aparicio 2:26
you and I started first doing business together a couple 10 years ago, whenever it was, I went in in that old Coca-Cola scoreboard sign that’s on the other end of the old market. Uh

Speaker 1 2:34
huh.

Nestor Aparicio 2:35
I remember walking in there as the littlest boy. You know, like my grandmother was alive, so we’re talking like 71, 72, 73. But that, I, Lexington Market didn’t look like any other place. I to this day, I don’t know that I’ve ever been any. Maybe an Asian market or something, but even Asian markets don’t look the way an American market would look in 1972 to a little boy, and the parts of it that were the same, and I thought about this because this picture here-you can’t see it on screen. This is from the old counter that the brick-that you even have brick here that emulates that a little bit. Absolutely. And certainly, have you been to her new spot in the new Lexington Market? You have not been there, right? I

Dennis Koulatsos 3:16
haven’t been to the market in years. People come to

Nestor Aparicio 3:18
her new spot, and it looks so much like the old spot on television that they think it’s the same spot. I’ve seen

Dennis Koulatsos 3:24
a new spot on your show, though. I’ve seen it online.

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Nestor Aparicio 3:26
I just

Damye Hahn 3:27
we’ve put it. We put a we took a 180 degree like panoramic photo of the stall and put it up as a mural behind the stall of the old stall in the new stall, so you still feel like your dad’s great, and then built in front of it, so you have that picture of the old stall behind the new. Look at the way

Nestor Aparicio 3:50
she’s almost. She’s not even Italian. I’ll think she’s doing all this. Yeah, that’s great. Listen, she’s told me for 10 years about this dream. Your dad found this what six years ago, whatever it was, dirt before the plane, seven years

Damye Hahn 4:01
in 2019, seven

Nestor Aparicio 4:02
years ago, and she said we’re going to turn Tisha’s wallpaper store here on Frederick and Evan next door. Evan’s coming over a little bit too. He’s got a meeting like you had today. We’re all doing meetings today. Good weather’s good, but like this has been the project of your life for every piece of this that I took them up into your Plymouth Room and showed them that this was used to be the ceiling and these were the roofs that were put together and this came from here and there like the elegance that this place shows and Bill Ko’s coming on later he was here a month ago but like people come in here and they’re really wowed by right you’re seeing that every oh oh

Damye Hahn 4:37
absolutely in the

Nestor Aparicio 4:38
look of people’s eyes when they walk in

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Damye Hahn 4:40
absolutely well it was a huge restoration project. I mean, from from start to finish. So there’s we we really preserved history here.

Nestor Aparicio 4:50
Look at these ropes. I mean, I’ve been in here six times, I think, and every time I come in, I notice those cans, those different things that you’ve done. Are you done, or are you still walking? Oh no, I don’t like this. I don’t like. Are you the interior decorator every day?

Damye Hahn 5:06
I still, I still have things in my basement that I need to put up, and then there are pieces of history that I, I need to overlay. Now that the building is done, we’re going to be putting a lot of the history pieces back in. Can you imagine

Nestor Aparicio 5:17
five generations doing this kind of practice? And you’ve known her, you know, and you know three or four of the generations. As an

Dennis Koulatsos 5:23
immigrant, it’s really, really humbling to to be to see this story come to fruition and understand, you know, what went into the labor of love that that they have just for Baltimore, for people, for the market, for seafood. It’s just

Damye Hahn 5:38
and this man knows hard work.

Dennis Koulatsos 5:39
Yeah, yeah, and

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Damye Hahn 5:41
I mean it is. I mean, it it takes people that are willing to do. It’s labor. It’s

Dennis Koulatsos 5:46
labor intensive. It really is. It’s it’s it takes a toll on you too. It really does. It’s not easy. It’s not for everybody. You have to be wired a certain way to be successful in this business. Well, not only

Nestor Aparicio 5:54
that, except that you decided to do it all over again with your son and your family and your family’s family to come out of here. And I don’t know that I’m ever going to meet anybody that’s had a more challenging project than you’ve had here over six and a half years. To you could have taken over something at a strip mall over security, or you know you could have taken over a building. You could have taken a restaurant down the way here that wanted to sell and moved into a space that would have you could have made your own, but you and your father specifically, you know, and he’s got the best Bill Devine story I’ve heard that isn’t yours. So

Dennis Koulatsos 6:28
I’m sure there’s more stories than I have. Oh, he’s got a lot

Damye Hahn 6:30
of stories.

Dennis Koulatsos 6:31
We we couldn’t wait for this place to open. My wife and I, we you know, we’re always on the strip dining at various restaurants, but we could not wait for this place to open. We drive by here about once or twice a month, just to see if it’s opened. That we’re that excited, and we came here. It did not disappoint. It just exceeded our expectations. Really did.

Nestor Aparicio 6:48
What do you want to tell them about your place? That that we don’t know. Like just because you’ve eaten here and the decor, but I’m not eating any of this. But when I come in, the menu and Tisha talked about the sides and your family recipes. So many things that you’ve had in your life, and I’ve known you personally. I’ve been in your family’s home that you have in your life that it just wasn’t appropriate to serve in a stall, a licensed market, right? And that was your prime business, right? Oh yeah,

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Damye Hahn 7:10
and we’ve we’ve you know we’ve we’ve been ambassadors to the Chesapeake for you know 140 years, and there’s so much that the Chesapeake Bay in the in the region have to offer, and I I wanted to be able to have some place that we could showcase that, especially the seafood, and especially to to to showcase what the Maryland watermen work so hard to go out and get every day, the oysters, the the crab, and all the fish, and you know, I’ve told you this before. A lot of people have no clue the amount of fish and the types of fish that we have in the Chesapeake because a lot of places just don’t carry them. And I wanted to be able to carry them, and I have a really good rock star chef that wants to wants to do the same thing with me. That’s Scott Bacon, and so we’re we’re going to try to do what’s local first, and then what’s regional in a way that’s a little bit different, you know, but in a Maryland style. Like right now, we have a rockfish on our our menu, and the flavors are all a blend of what you get in Maryland. It’s the corn and the tomatoes and the layered, you know, greens and whatnot that are the local flavors with the rockfish on top. You know, and and we’re we’re trying to do that, and we’ll we’ll change that seasonally. We’re we’re getting ready to roll out another menu probably by the end of September. We’ll have that fall menu, and then we’ll have a winter menu, and then we’ll have a spring menu, and we’ll always have the crab cake on the menu. We’ll always have the great sides on the menu, but we’re going to try to add things in that are seasonal and regional, and and and do it a little bit differently than the same thing you see everywhere.

Nestor Aparicio 9:08
One of my best friends named John Keller. He’s from Little Rock, Arkansas. He’s from Dundalk, but he’s lived in Little Rock 26 years. Comes in every year. They came in for the BTS and for the Foo Fighters, and they were here all week. And he hated all my sponsors because he he does, and he said Sunday’s our day. We’re gonna do fishmonger’s daughter. You got to come with us, and we were gonna do noon, and then we were gonna do 1030, 11 o’clock, and they had this and that and family. I sat right at that table, and you’re gonna be so mad at me because I wasn’t all that hungry. It’s like 1030 in the morning. I saw all the sandwiches come out. The potatoes were unbelievable. Don’t be mad at me. I ordered the banana bread. It was too much. It’s just something I wouldn’t have gotten at Faithley’s at Lexington Market. That’s all. No, no. And I had coffee, and you know, and I had a bite of everybody’s sandwich. And Hal’s got the the the soft crab sandwich.

Damye Hahn 9:55
Yeah, the soft. Well, he got the soft crab eggs Benedict.

Nestor Aparicio 9:58
Right. That’s what he got. Yes.

Damye Hahn 10:00
So was the eggs Benedict or the soft crab?

Nestor Aparicio 10:02
Get in here for brunch. Damian’s here. Dennis, I’m gonna get you out. You gotta go sell cars, right? You got

Dennis Koulatsos 10:06
it, man. Look, did you need him

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Damye Hahn 10:07
to tell that story? It’s

Dennis Koulatsos 10:08
a pleasure and it’s an honor to be here with you guys. I

Nestor Aparicio 10:10
told it, but I okay. No, no, no, no, no. We had a technical problem. I think when you were telling that story, I want you to tell the story. I

Dennis Koulatsos 10:18
love to retell it again.

Nestor Aparicio 10:19
Well, give the background of your family again, in case somebody just came in. That your family now. Where was your stall down there and all that? And how did you come into other people down there? You know what I mean? Like, well, why did Bill Divine sashu? I tell you why.

Dennis Koulatsos 10:34
Well, we were right. I mean, we we when we looked up from our stall, we could see Phaleys, and they could see us all day long, and their team members would come over and have breakfast, and and we’d go over there and have lunches. It was back

Nestor Aparicio 10:47
to that handsome fellow that Damie saw. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, back in ’82. Yeah, so I was there. I got married

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Damye Hahn 10:53
in ’82, so I mean, I was you know I was already all right. I was I was a little bit I’m the older one. All

Nestor Aparicio 11:00
right, look at this picture.

Damye Hahn 11:03
I know that’s a great photo. That’s

Dennis Koulatsos 11:06
a great picture. That’s

Nestor Aparicio 11:07
Dennis right there. Yep, yep. Look, yep. Look at out. Look at out. So look at how. Now look at that. Look at that.

Damye Hahn 11:12
Look at that. So now you’re looking at that stall, and that one of the things I did in this building is take some of those things from the old Lexington Market. You look over at my market stall, and the lights are almost the same.

Dennis Koulatsos 11:25
That’s great.

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Damye Hahn 11:25
You know, we wanted to make sure that you had that feeling of the old market. Yeah, no, it’s great. You know, when you came in here. No, it’s

Dennis Koulatsos 11:32
wonderful. It’s a wonderful feeling. So you

Nestor Aparicio 11:34
knew Bill Devine when you were very little boy. I’m 20

Dennis Koulatsos 11:37
years old. You know, I’m green, but you finally is located

Nestor Aparicio 11:40
him for a lot. Oh yeah, you know he was

Dennis Koulatsos 11:42
he you know he was legendary and iconic back then. I was afraid of him, right? Although that was bigger than him. He always had a cigar, his demeanor. So one day we’re doing an offside event for the market. So it’s Mount Olympus and Fayette Lee. So I show up late. I’m out of sorts. I’m not prepared. I’m trying to fire up my grill. He’s just sitting there, just you know, shaking his head and grunting. He said, “Young man, he said, “You know, you should never be late. You should always be prepared. He said, “Now you’re young enough to learn from this from this experience, but don’t you ever be late again. And you know what? That left a mark on me, and he changed me. And I’ve never been a day late in my life. And he really, and I don’t think he knows that. Never had a conversation after that, but he really left the mark on me. And you know, my wife will tell you, anybody’s ever worked with me, I’m never late for any event. You know, I’m always super early, super prepared, and the reason was because of him. And he was right. I was young enough to change because you know, as a young man, you just don’t you just don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. But that day, he taught me something I didn’t know, and I learned from it, and I kept it with me, and it’s been part of my success in my career too. It’s really paid a lot of dividends, and it’s something that also imparted younger people. But but her dad was just amazing. I asked him if his

Nestor Aparicio 12:53
dad would have asked him that way, and he said, “Yeah, but it means something different when somebody else says, especially

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Damye Hahn 13:01
somebody that you you see and respect. Yeah, yeah. I mean,

Dennis Koulatsos 13:04
he has big, beautiful, successful business, and you could just see the family passion here. You know what what it means to them, and I do encourage everyone to support the fishmonger’s daughter, Faye. These are kind of companies. You can see the passion, and you know what? Passionate people also they they sell great food, right? You can see the love in that passion, and you know support local businesses. It’s what it’s all about.

Nestor Aparicio 13:25
Give me a hug. It’s good to see you, man. Good to see you. Dennis Galato’s is here. Koons Ford. You can still buy a car these years. His numbers on 14 2180337. You can find him. Damn, you’re gonna hang around a little bit. Got Bill Cole over here. He’s hanging. Man, no roofs are getting done. Cole Roofing out of business today. Farnan and Dermot, nothing’s going on over there. They’re all sitting here. Get some orange crushes out, man. Let’s go. Let’s open the bar. We’re Fishmonger’s daughter. She is the fishmonger’s daughter. We’re in Catonsville on Frederick Road. It’s all brought to you by friends at the Maryland Lottery. I have Raven scratch-offs to give away. T-shirt and get one here. Your lucky number today is six. Paul Blair. There you go, number six. Also, our friends at GBMC and Farnand and Derma. They are the Comfort Guys. Back for more. We call this the Maryland Crab Cake Tour because she’s got good crab cakes, and we’re here at KC. Yeah, we do

Dennis Koulatsos 14:11
every

Damye Hahn 14:11
day.