“You don’t need anything special to see the world in a red canoe. Just climb in with a paddle and go!” says Nicole Selhorst, who owns a bookstore café with her husband, Peter, called the Red Canoe. “Books have always been a way for me to see the world.”
Photos by Caryn Coyle
The Red Canoe, 4337 Harford Road, started as a bakery and children’s book store in November 2004. Within a year, Nicole and Peter were selling lunches as well as fiction and non-fiction — a small selection of books for everyone.
The Red Canoe is open Tuesday through Saturday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“We were at a point in our lives when we’d done the work of making a family and career. We decided to seize the moment. I always wanted a bookstore, and Peter always wanted to bake,” adds Nicole.
“I ‘muffinize’ the things I like to eat,” explains Peter, who will blend cornbread, sausage, and maple syrup for a special muffin he only sells on weekends. Ten to twelve different kinds of muffins are available every day, from the exotic Quiche Loraine or spinach cheddar for $2.75 to the familiar blueberry, raspberry, or banana nut for $2.50.
I ate one of Peter’s cranberry, chocolate chip glazed muffins ($2.50). It was tangy and sweet. Perfect. The chocolate chips balanced the tart cranberries, and each delightful bite was a treat. The muffins are huge, too. Quite filling.
Peter says he serves roughly one hundred people each day at the Red Canoe, “You can create your own p
anini. Choose the meat, cheese, and sauce, and we’ll grill it in a sandwich for you, same with our pizzas, which we serve on Thursdays.” He reports that his veggie chili and macaroni and cheese “have quite a following.”
The Staudenmaier-McCarthy family had come directly to the Red Canoe from the airport where they had just returned from a trip to Wisconsin. Maggie Staudenmaier explained, “We were hungry, and we’ve been away for a whole week.”
“The Red Canoe is a great addition to the neighborhood,” said her mother, Terry Staudenmaier. “It’s a nice, casual place and we always see neighbors here.” She was making her own Panini, which the Red Canoe offers for $6.75. “I’m putting chicken with basil pesto and mozzarella in mine.”
Dan McCarthy, Terri and Maggie Staudenmeier
Maggie had ordered the tomato bisque, which Peter makes with a dill base for $3.75 (cup) or $4.50 (bowl). “The tomato bisque is my favorite thing here. It has lots of taste, and I can dip the bread in it until the soup cools down.”
Gabe McCarthy was having a chicken BLT Panini, “I like to have the chicken every time I come with something different, like Ranch dressing.”
Dan McCarthy called the Red Canoe “a neighborhood hub.” The family lives in the Lauraville neighborhood near the bookstore café, as Dan says, “Last winter we were here in four feet of snow – we just walked over. The Solhorsts are such nice people. I can order any book I want, and they will get it for me.”
I had the apple turkey wrap for $6.75, which was served with rippled potato chips. The wrap was slightly spicy and had savory apple chutney blended with garden greens and roasted turkey. The “kick” from the chutney stayed with me, and the taste was balanced with the sweet apple.
Peter Solhorst
My companion tried the apple/mango/pecan muffin for $2.50. “It’s like a healthy desert!” she said, “Yum!” Covered with poppy seeds, the muffin was “a fruit with a muffin, instead of a muffin with fruit. Sometimes the muffin is too heavy, but not this one!”
“It is gratifying when you feed people, you get immediate feed-back,” Peter says. For years, Peter did not put labels on the muffins he sold. “I wanted people to come in and ask us what they were. I wanted communication, to get people to talk.”
Indeed, the word one might use to describe the Red Canoe is cozy. There is no television set, no sports channels diverting anyone from a conversation. It is not overwhelmed with children, either. The customers appear to know each other and move about the bookstore café as though they were in their own homes.
“On holidays, families come from other towns and countries, and we see them year after year. We get postcards from all over the world,” says Peter.
The Red Canoe had just hosted a party, launching local author Deborah Rudacille’s Roots of Steel with wine, hors d’oeuvres, and a table of books being signed by Rudacille in the front of the shop.
Peter, who worked for Bethlehem Steel for thirty-three years, is frequently quoted in the book. The first of Deborah Rudacille’s acknowledgments reads, “Red Canoe, Pete and Nicole Selhorst’s coffee shop in northeast Baltimore, became my second home during the writing of this book.”
Everyone who comes in here brings something to the Red Canoe,” says Nicole. “The English poet Alexander Pope said, ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ Peter and I got lucky. We’ll take credit for being the fools who opened the doors. But the people of this community are the angels. And the result is so much bigger and better than I ever fantasized.”
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