A stark black-and-white facade with the word “welcome” tiled into the ground now greets visitors on a quiet stretch of West 24th Street in Old Goucher, marking the arrival of Werewolves Welcome — a bar seven years and roughly $1 million in the making. The two-story cocktail bar at 17 W. 24th St. began welcoming early patrons in a soft opening the week before publication, with a grand opening planned for September.
The project traces back to 2017, when Bryan Ranere and his wife Caroline Ranere relocated to the East Coast, partly so Bryan could be closer to his brother, according to The Baltimore Banner. Bryan had hoped to open the bar as early as 2020, drawing on experience working as a bartender at Foreign Cinema in San Francisco and later at Pen & Quill in Station North. He fell in love with a former barbershop at 17 W. 24th St. that would eventually become Werewolves Welcome, a two-story building that the couple set out to transform.
A Renovation That Kept Growing
What was initially estimated to cost half a million dollars ballooned to approximately $1 million by the time the doors opened, per the same account. Once work began, Bryan discovered the old building had essentially been held together with string and gum, the Banner reports. The renovation ultimately required reframing the entire second floor and relocating all of the building's utilities upstairs, though the brick double-sided fireplace was left intact.
Then the pandemic hit, drying up funding for new hospitality projects across the industry, the report notes. Bryan also broke his clavicle and several ribs after being injured while riding his bike home early one morning, another setback that pushed the timeline further out. Between the structural surprises, the funding freeze and the injury, what was meant to be a straightforward buildout stretched into a seven-year undertaking.
Designing From Bed
Caroline Ranere played an integral role in designing Werewolves Welcome, but she did much of that work from the couple's bedroom. Caroline has myalgic encephalomyelitis, a condition that causes debilitating fatigue — according to CDC data from 2024, the illness known as ME/CFS affects up to 3.3 million people in the United States, and roughly a quarter of patients experience symptoms severe enough to leave them bedbound or housebound. Caroline told The Baltimore Banner, “Never underestimate what you can achieve from bed.”
Bryan credited his wife's vision for the finished space, saying the bar is a triumph of Caroline's design skill and artistic vision, the Banner reports. The interior blends old, new and personal items in a mixed-century style, featuring German commodes, artistic black-and-white tile, and a textile based on one of Caroline's own paintings. She is also working on blue velvet upholstery for an upstairs screening room that nods to filmmaker David Lynch — a space directly inspired by Foreign Cinema, which opened in San Francisco's Mission District in 1999 and became known for projecting films onto a courtyard wall during dinner service, according to Foreign Cinema.
A Menu Named for a Real 18th-Century Legend
The bar's name and cocktail menu draw on the story of Peter the Wild Boy, who was said to have been raised by wolves and later lived in the royal court of Princess Caroline, where he reportedly devoured onions and guzzled gin. Werewolves Welcome has named its gin martini after him, serving it with pickled onions as a nod to that history.
The bar's limited snack menu includes tinned fish, charcuterie, and hot dogs prepared in a vintage steamer — an idea inspired by Bryan's pilgrimage to Harry's New York Bar in Paris. That bar was created in 1911 when an American bar was dismantled in Manhattan and rebuilt on Rue Daunou, and it later became the first European bar to serve American hot dogs using a steamer acquired at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, according to Sortiraparis.com.
Old Goucher's Growing Bar Scene
Bryan said most of the cool kid bartenders have already come to check out the new spot, and bartender Dante Cox was working at Werewolves Welcome during a recent visit documented by the Banner. The bar joins an Old Goucher lineup that already includes Mama Koko's, Yeiboh Kitchen and W.C. Harlan, and it sits near Dutch Courage, the gin-focused cocktail bar that Brendan Dorr and Eric Fooy opened at 2220 N. Charles St. in late 2019, according to Baltimore Magazine.
Dorr said Old Goucher has some of the best drinking in Baltimore, and he believes Werewolves Welcome should cement the neighborhood's status as one of the city's top bar-hopping destinations. That kind of commercial revival was made possible in part by a 2017 state law: Maryland Senate Bill 384 established special Class B-D-7 liquor licensing rules for the designated Old Goucher Revitalization District, easing license transfers for corridors including 24th Street as long as owners made a minimum $50,000 capital investment, per the Maryland General Assembly. Operators in the district still pay Baltimore City's standard annual fee of $2,060 for a Class B-D-7 license, plus a $600 application and hearing fee for new issuances overseen by the city's Board of Liquor License Commissioners.
A Neighborhood Built Around Reuse
Old Goucher was originally developed in the late 19th century around the original campus of Goucher College, then known as the Woman's College of Baltimore, before the school relocated to Towson in the 1950s — a history that led to the neighborhood's designation as a National Register Historic District, according to ARQ Architects. That historic building stock, including the 19th-century carriage house now home to Werewolves Welcome, helped define the area's character while also complicating the bar's renovation.
The neighborhood remains heavily residential and walkable, with roughly 85% of households renting their homes rather than owning, per data from Live Baltimore. Commercial growth in the area has been steered in part by the Old Goucher Vision Plan, developed with the Neighborhood Design Center to encourage historic building reuse and pedestrian connectivity with the adjacent Station North Arts & Entertainment District, according to the Neighborhood Design Center.
As for Bryan, he's already looking ahead to Halloween: he said he's considering keeping the beard he's grown throughout the renovation until at least then, with plans to dress as a werewolf for the holiday. With the September grand opening still ahead, Werewolves Welcome's upstairs screening room remains a work in progress, one more piece of a project that has already taken far longer than anyone expected.
