Then and Now: The Fairgrounds Inn and Michael's Cafe

In 1977, a very young Glenn Haug was a kid customer at the Fairgrounds Inn in Timonium. He and his sister would hang out in a booth on weekends, sipping on homemade cherry sodas and tying straws together, while their dad enjoyed a beer and watched sports at the bar.

The Fairgrounds Inn was a cozy neighborhood bar, where locals could go and see their Timonium neighbors. Twelve years later, an older, still local Haug considered the place to be a favorite, comfortable spot, but he’d upgraded his childhood cherry sodas to beers.

“It was kind of like a Cheers to us,” said Haug, who's now a manager of in Aberdeen, MD. “You’d go in there and everyone knew who you were.”

By then, the Fairgrounds Inn was Michael’s Restaurant, bought by the Dellis family in 1984 and named after their son Michael. The Dellises had a vision, and began renovations and expansions, turning a dark, sleepy bar, which doubled as an Esso gas station, into a well-lit, posh gathering place for neighbors and travelers alike. In 1990, Michael Dellis unveiled the restaurant he had seen in his mind’s eye since his family first spotted the location, and was born.

Jimmy Vincent, who’s been a bartender at Michael’s Café for four years, regularly bended an elbow at the old Fairgrounds Inn years ago.

“It was dark, dank, and not very inviting,” he chuckled. “I remember there were a couple of pinball machines at the end of the bar here. And everybody would kind of hang out, up at the end where the kitchen was. And the bartender would go in the back and cook a burger if he had to, or make a shrimp salad sandwich. It was up this end of town, and we’d stop in here, as the last resort, before we’d head back to Towson.”

The place is definitely no longer the bar of last resort.

Michael, his wife LoAnn, and their son and daughter run Michael’s Café today. They expanded in 1996 and again in 1999. LoAnn said, “What we did was, we upgraded for the first five years with the same décor as the Fairgrounds Inn. But then, we changed it. We actually renovated the entire restaurant. We put a bigger kitchen in, we put a bigger bar in, and a dining room. The original location was just a bar and booths.”

Then they extended the entire operation even more, talking over an adjacent Safelight building and a barbeque pit beef place—Michael’s now offers outdoor seating in a patio bar and can accommodate 300 people.

“It’s been family owned and operated for the past 27 years,” said LoAnn. “We just had our anniversary a few weeks ago.”

“Bake” Price, the original owner of the Fairgrounds Inn, wouldn’t recognize the place now.

“But we still have regulars that still come in,” said LoAnn. “We’ve kept a lot of our old clientele in addition to expanding and drawing from a lot of areas.”

Folks drive down from Pennsylvania to dine on Michael’s Café’s famous crab cakes, and the “snow birds,” as LoAnn calls them, who leave Florida to travel north, make it a point to stop there and eat.

“We’ve gone from a neighborhood bar, and it now known nationally,” said LoAnn. “We ship our crab cake through the United States.”

Those crab cakes are still made from Michael’s mother’s recipe. Marcella Dellis, who passed away in 2003, centered Michael’s Café’s menu around her own crab cake recipe.

“We have over 100 things now on the menu,” said LoAnn.