My friend Renata has been eating breakfast at Cunningham’s Café & Bakery in Towson for going on six years, and she still texts me every few months to say I need to come back. Not to try something new — just to come back. That’s the thing about this place. It doesn’t chase you. It waits.
The café sits on York Road in Towson, a few blocks from the county courthouse and close enough to Towson University that you get a real mix: students hunched over laptops, lawyers in suits grabbing a quick lunch, older couples who’ve been coming since the place opened in 2014. The building is low-key to the point of being easy to miss if you’re new to the neighborhood, but the regulars — and there are a lot of regulars — navigate the parking lot like they own it.
Ida Mae is why I keep going back. She’s been working the dining room there for years, and she is one of those rare people who makes a restaurant feel like a place rather than a transaction. She remembers faces. She asks about your kid’s soccer season or your mother’s surgery, and she means it. The first time she called me by name — two visits in, after a single brief introduction — I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself. I mentioned it to the woman sitting at the next table, and she laughed. ‘Oh, she knows everyone,’ she said. ‘That’s just Ida Mae.’
The food is good enough to justify the trip on its own, though. Cunningham’s does American café cooking with real attention — the kind of menu where everything is made in-house and nothing is precious about it. The crab cake Benedict at brunch is the one people talk about first, and fairly so: real lump crab, good hollandaise, and they don’t drown it. The grilled salmon salad is better than it sounds on the menu. Soups rotate and are worth asking about. At lunch, the turkey club is the kind of sandwich that makes you annoyed you wasted the last several years ordering other sandwiches elsewhere.
Baked goods are taken seriously here. The scones are flaky and not aggressively sweet, which is harder than it sounds. The coffee is solid — not destination coffee, but it’s hot and it keeps coming, and no one makes you feel like you’re overstaying.
Prices land in the reasonable-for-what-it-is range: brunch dishes run roughly $13–$18, lunch sandwiches mostly $12–$16. Weekend mornings fill up fast, especially after 10 a.m., so if you’re not a waiter by nature, aim for a weekday or get there early on Saturday. Street parking on York Road is hit or miss, but the lot off the side street usually has room.
What Renata keeps texting me about isn’t the crab cake, even though the crab cake is good. It’s the fact that Cunningham’s has assembled a dining room where people feel genuinely comfortable — comfortable enough to linger, to come back, to text their friends about it six years in. That’s mostly the food and the ownership, but a fair amount of it is Ida Mae moving through the tables like she’s been there forever, because she has.
Go on a Tuesday morning if you can. Order the Benedict. Let Ida Mae refill your coffee. She’ll ask if you want anything else, and she’ll mean that too.
