For more than a decade, Michael Voltaggio honed his craft under top chefs and opened acclaimed restaurants on the West Coast. But it wasn’t until December 2024 that he returned to Frederick to share his food with his hometown. “We’re telling stories,” he says. “I think we’re telling stories now that are the most mature, grown-up versions we’ve ever been able to tell, and I think it’s because we’ve reached a certain level of confidence and left the insecurities behind.”
Like the other restaurants he runs with his brother Bryan, Wye Oak Tavern reimagines the steakhouse model. Voltaggio calls it a chophouse, but less formal, with a menu that leans more toward seafood than the beef- and pork-driven Voltaggio Brothers Steak House at MGM National Harbor. “But they both deliver the same type of experience in the sense that you can come in, cut and paste, and really curate your own experience based on what we’re offering,” he says.
Highlights include Voltaggio’s playful homage to the classic Maryland coddie, traditionally a fried cod fritter. His version swaps cod for smoked trout, shaped into a popsicle with a saltine crust, fried, and topped with trout roe. Other dishes include seabass with hushpuppies in shellfish broth and an edible cedar plank—made from a smoked oil tuile—as a tribute to the cedar-planked salmon he has cooked since 1998. “But now it’s a plank that you can eat with the fish,” he says. “It looks just like a cedar plank.”
Inside the Visitation Hotel, the dining room preserves the striking elements of the convent and girls’ Catholic school it once was—cathedral ceilings, stained-glass windows, marble angel statues, even a pipe organ overlooking diners from the second floor. While the setting suggests formality, Voltaggio insists the focus is simply on joy. “That’s all it has to be,” he says with a grin. “For so long we felt pressure—‘I need to win awards, I need to comply with the menu, I need to follow all that.’ Now we’re having fun, and our guests are having fun because we’re having fun. And if we’re not following all the rules, so be it, as long as we’re making people happy.”
