The Sundry now has an all-day menu with great takeout dinners

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The Sundry Market & Kitchen, the combination urban grocery store and cafe at 1706 Baltimore, doesn’t use a paper menu. If you want to know what’s cooking, you have to walk up to the counter at the back of the retail selections and look up at the chalkboard.

Until three weeks ago, the chalkboards changed at the Sundry at least twice a day: once for the lunch crowd and then again, in the late afternoon, for dinner choices (which, unlike the lunch business, is mostly carryout). The Sundry’s owners, Aaron Prater and Ryan Wing, decided to simplify the process, and now the handwritten menu on the chalkboards is an all-day array, with rotating daily specials and featured new dishes.

“There are certain things we can’t take off the menu,” says executive chef Noah Gough.

Those dishes include the red-lentil falafel and, more recently, Gough’s sweet chili pork — served with house-made rice dumplings and radish kimchee — which has become a new best-seller.

The Sundry stays open until 8 p.m., but so far, the dinner business has been hit-or-miss.

“Our lunch business is great, but those are people who work in this area and only have an hour to eat,” Wing says. “Most of those customers eat their lunch here in the store. Our dinner business is growing, but it’s mostly people who live downtown and want to grab dinner on their way home.”

Gough wants to expand the limited selection of cold grab-and-go deli-style offerings in one of the refrigerated cases (currently chilled pasta salad, potato salad, boxed heat-and-eat flatbreads, a few sandwiches), but  Gough’s kitchen crew is smoothly efficient when it comes to preparing and tastefully boxing up the more substantial items on the menu, which are somewhat pricey but very, very good.

In fact, Gough’s Cuban sandwich, traditional in every respect except for the bread — the Sundry uses a house-made ciabatta, brushed with Spanish olive oil and grilled on a panini press — is perhaps the best Cubano in the city right now, with succulent slow-roasted pork, ham, house-made pickles, swiss cheese and, as a condiment, a blend of  spicy Dijon mustard and the familiar neon-yellow mustard. It was so delicious, I couldn’t resist eating it in my car on my way home to, supposedly, dinner.

Yesterday was the burger-special day at the Sundry. I almost balked at the $12 price tag, but it lived up to its billing: two grilled patties of Barham Family Farm beef smothered in smoked provolone cheese, a thick slice of tomato (from Powell Gardens), red onion and mustard, and sided with a pile of extra-crispy battered fries.

The Thursday special is another signature dish: a BLT sandwich on fresh, pillowy focaccia, with crispy house-made bacon (from Windhaven Farms pork).

For the other daily specials at the Sundry, click here.