Johns Hopkins University will get six dining options when new Student Center opens on Homewood campus

Johns Hopkins University will get six new on-campus dining options when the $250 million Hopkins Student Center opens on the Homewood campus later this year, including a full-service restaurant that serves alcoholic beverages and branches of The Urban Oyster, Koshary Corner and Connie’s Chicken and Waffles.

The largest venue will be Mo’s Place, a 96-seat restaurant planned by Progress Hospitality North LLC for the student center’s third level. Baltimore’s liquor board this month granted a Class ‘B’ Beer, Wine and Liquor License to Mo’s Place, which will be operated by Hopkins graduate Timothy Ma.

Ma, the founder of Tim Ma Hospitality and a member of Progress Hospitality North, is a chef who has opened more than a dozen dining establishments in Washington and Northern Virginia. One that’s particularly relevant to his Hopkins venture is a restaurant and bar called the Hilltop Tap Room at Georgetown University’s Healey Family Student Center – another restaurant within a campus student center.

Ma has also cooked at the White House and he co-founded the nonprofit Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate. This will be his first restaurant in Baltimore and the signature dining location for Hopkins’ student center. Ma and Stephen James Jones are the license holders. The license includes off-premises catering.

The first day of Fall 2025 classes for most Hopkins divisions is August 25; Hopkins’ School of Medicine starts sooner. The student center is nearing completion at 3290 N. Charles St. and will open to students starting on August 25, but it will be a phased opening as not all of the food vendors will be operational by then, according to Hopkins Director of Media Relations Douglas Donovan.

Mo’s Place is named after Morris Offit, a 1957 Hopkins graduate and former Board of Trustees chair, and will be connected by a pathway to the Brody Learning Commons. Hutchins told the liquor board that it will be the only restaurant on the Homewood campus to have a liquor license. The last on-campus dining spot to serve alcoholic beverages was the members-only Hopkins Club, which closed on campus several years ago. Its members now meet at the Engineers Club on Mount Vernon Place.

‘Pub-style menu’

Progress Hospitality North attorney Brooke Hutchins told the liquor board that Mo’s Place would open in “August 2025.” She said it will feature “a traditional pub-style menu” with a variety of appetizers, sandwiches, burgers and other entrees. She said it represents a capital investment of approximately $850,000 and is “designed primarily to serve the JHU community,” including students, faculty and staff.

Hours of operation will be from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday; from 8 a.m. to midnight on Fridays, from 10 a.m. to midnight on Saturdays and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sundays. The operators have signed a Memorandum of Understanding regarding their operation with the Charles Village Civic Association, which submitted a letter of support for the liquor license. To ensure that minors aren’t served alcoholic beverages, the restaurant will have a policy of checking IDs of all patrons.

“It looks like it’s a rather upscale operation for a college campus,” said liquor board chair Albert Matricciani Jr., during the July 10 hearing. “Are the students going to take advantage of it?”

“We hope so,” Hutchins said. “How nice, right, to be able to not have to leave your campus” for a restaurant meal. “It’s a beautiful building on the outside and the inside. I think the top floor restaurant is just fitting,” she added.

Matthew Moss, assistant vice provost for Hopkins Dining and auxiliary services, told the liquor board that Mo’s Place will fill a need for a space where students, staffers and faculty members can meet. “We don’t have another place really on campus where there’s that gathering space for people to come together in a social setting, and Mo’s Place really provides that space,” he said.

Ma, who didn’t attend the liquor board hearing, received a Master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2005 from Hopkins and later switched careers and become a chef. He told the Hub, the university’s online news source, that he wants his restaurant to offer a fine-dining experience that’s affordable.

“We’re always differentiating between what we do on campus and what we do just out normally,” the Hub quoted him as saying. “I come from a fine-dining background, and so it is interesting to have the challenge of approaching food from [the college] perspective and the fine-dining perspective, understanding that the client is completely different with a different set of intentions when they eat. We’re trying to find that happy medium where we’re putting out something that we’re super proud of while trying to meet a price point that the college student can afford.”

Other dining options

Moss told the liquor board members that the student center will have several more food-service operations on its first level. He said the area will be “similar to a food hall-type operation.”

According to the Hub, the first-level spaces will serve “dishes from Egypt, China, Maryland and beyond” and the area will have seating for 150 people. Ma will operate two of them.

The first-level dining operations include:

Koshary: Koshary is an offshoot of Koshary Corner, a food stall operated by Iman Moussa at R House in Remington. According to the Hub, the business has a “plant-forward, Mediterranean-inspired menu” and “takes its name and signature dish from Egypt’s most popular street food, the koshary bowl, which combines rice, lentils, pasta, tomato sauce, chickpeas, and fried onions.” Other menu items at Koshary Corner, the Hub notes, include beef and chicken shawarma, Egyptian-style falafel and a variety of eggplant dishes.

Connie’s: Brothers and co-owners Shawn and Khari Parker are opening a satellite of Connie’s Chicken and Waffles, which is named after their mother and has locations at Lexington Market and Charles Plaza. Besides chicken and waffles, the Hub says, the Hopkins location will feature chicken sandwiches, chicken tenders, wings, fish and breakfast sandwiches. For this location, the name has been shortened to Connie’s.

Urban Kitchen: This is a satellite of The Urban Oyster at 914 W. 36^th St. in Hampden. The owner is Jasmine Norton, who became the first Black woman in the United States to open an oyster bar when she launched her Hampden business in 2017. Besides burgers and chicken sandwiches, the Hub said, the menu will include smoked brisket banh mi, oyster mushroom fritters, and broccoli Caesar salad.

Norton told the Hub that Moss and Hopkins Dining approached her about opening a food stall at the student center.

“They set the bar high,” she was quoted as saying. “To even have the thoughtfulness to reach back to the community and local business owners — I have absolutely loved our experience. I’ve loved how thoughtful they’ve been in this entire process, how much I’ve already learned being a small business, self-taught chef…I know that I’ll gain even more just from working with the dining department of Johns Hopkins.”

More from Timothy Ma: Two additional first-level operations will be operated by Ma, a coffee shop and a “fast-casual Chinese-American food stall,” according to the Hub.

Hopkins officials considered more than 100 local food vendors before selecting the companies that are opening in the student center. According to the Hub’s Claire Goudreau, finalists came to the Homewood campus in March for a food expo, where more than 200 Hopkins students, staff and faculty members sampled their offerings and voted for their favorites.

“We’ve ended up with a great selection from across the Baltimore landscape,” Goudreau quoted Moss as saying. “We were very intentional about going local and really being able to celebrate the restaurant scene here in Baltimore… Food is such an emotional tie to your community. We hope these partners bring that taste of home.”