Baltimore’s Foraged to open food truck at Mount Airy vineyard

Foraged will open an on-site food truck in the dining area of Black Ankle Vineyards this summer. Courtesy of Black Ankle Vineyards

Later this summer, Mount Airy vineyard Black Ankle will welcome Baltimore’s “hyper-seasonal eatery” Foraged to its grounds.

Foraged has made waves in the greater Baltimore area since opening in 2017, for its creative, regionally-influenced preparations of local ingredients, from lion’s mane mushroom-based “crab cakes” to a full suite of cooked-to-order “pig parts.” Six years after the restaurant’s opening, its menu propelled owner and chef Chris Amendola to James Beard Foundation Award semifinalist status in the Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic category. Now, he is slated to open a food truck at Black Ankle Vineyards in late June or early July of this year.

With locally-sourced ingredients and seasonality as key tenets of both Foraged and Black Ankle’s business philosophies, Black Ankle co-founder and winemaker Ed Boyce said that the development of this collaborative food truck was “pretty close to a no-brainer.”

“We’ve had food trucks, and we’ve had caterers. The trouble for us is how to match both the style and quality of our wines with the existing options out there — and we’ve never really been happy with them,” said Boyce. “For Chris and the people from Foraged to do this with us is just fantastic.”

The truck will boast a rotating “wine-inspired” menu featuring sheep, pork and seasonal fruit from the Black Ankle’s on-site farm. These offerings will be formulated with estate wine pairings in mind — an exciting selling point, said Amendola.

“Black Ankle is one of the few wineries around that focuses their wines toward food, and I think their wine pairs really well with food,” said Amendola, who has kept Boyce’s wines on the Foraged menu on a “semi-constant” basis. “Seeing our company ethos was very similar made this a very natural partnership.”

As fans might expect from licensed forager Amendola, foraged goods will be a key tenet of the food truck’s menu.

“We have 115 acres of grapes, but we have almost 600 acres of land that we own that those grapes are on,” said Boyce. “I’m looking forward to, at some point, having Chris come around and teach us what we should be eating out of our forests.”

Have a news tip? Contact Jane Godiner at [e-mail] or on Instagram as @JaneCraves.