Kitsch Cafe has opened its fourth location, tucking a new food stall inside Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Student Center on the Homewood campus. It is the Baltimore-born bakery's second spot on Homewood grounds alongside Kitschenette, the micro-cafe already operating in Gilman Hall, and it arrives with a far bigger menu than its campus sibling.
A Bigger Menu Built for Lingering
Where Kitschenette in Gilman Hall is designed as a fast-paced grab-and-go stop, the Bloomberg Student Center location is meant for students who want to slow down, according to The Hub, Johns Hopkins University's news outlet. Owner Jackie Mearman described the new stall as doing “a much larger menu geared toward stopping and taking a break,” a contrast to the quicker rhythm of her first Homewood outpost. The Bloomberg Student Center's own dining page lists breakfast favorites, sandwiches, salads and sweet treats among the offerings, with “plenty of options to customize your meal.”
The expanded menu includes a Blue Jay breakfast smash burger, Kitsch sandwiches and three salads, the station's report notes. Beverage options run to four distinct smoothie varieties — mango, berries and cream, PB&J, and green machine — each one formulated differently from the others. The new stall is limited to Johns Hopkins students, professionals, affiliates and alumni, per the cafe's own FAQ page on kitsch.cafe.
From a 400-Square-Foot Cafe to Four Storefronts
Kitsch now operates four locations total, a run that began in October 2020 when Mearman opened the original cafe serving breakfast and lunch sandwiches alongside Caffe Umbria coffee, according to kitsch.cafe's own account of its history. That first West University storefront was just 400 square feet with minimal seating and parking, and had no seating at all when it opened. Mearman has said she wanted to build an affordable, accessible food business around carefully considered food, and that during the pandemic she saw value in connecting with customers in what she considered a safe ten-minute window — a philosophy that shaped the compact original shop.
Mearman brings 23 years in the food industry to the expansion, having started in a professional kitchen at 16 before graduating from the Culinary Institute of America at 20. She went on to become one of the country's youngest distillers at 23, winning awards for her rum, and later worked as a corporate pastry chef across 18 restaurants before opening Kitsch. She was quarantined at the Carlyle Apartments, a ten-minute walk from Homewood, when she launched the original cafe later that pandemic year.
Part of a Wider Local-Vendor Push
The Bloomberg Student Center's food stalls are all run by local businesses with local owners, The Hub reports, and Johns Hopkins has partnered with four local vendors overall to supply the center's dining options, according to the university's student affairs office. Kitsch already serves professors and researchers across the Hopkins community, and Mearman has said locally owned, campus-based food businesses can bring the surrounding community onto campus while helping those businesses grow revenue through catering. She pointed to the student center's openness, layout and sustainability practices as strengths of the new space.
Beyond Homewood, Kitsch opened a location inside R. House Food Hall in July 2024, where it also serves as the primary caterer for the venue's garage space, a room that fits 450 people, according to reporting from The Johns Hopkins News-Letter. Mearman has told The Baltimore Banner that her goal is to establish Kitsch as a mid-Atlantic brand, with an eye toward expanding into hospitals and universities, and the business aims to cater to tens of thousands of people connected to Johns Hopkins and the surrounding neighborhoods.
A Student Center Built for More Than Studying
The new food stall also lands in a building that, until recently, students used mostly for quiet work rather than hanging out. A survey covered by the News-Letter found that before dining options opened, 60% of students said they used the Student Center for one to three hours a week, and studying was the most common reason, cited by 56.7% of respondents. Students rated the center just 5.57 out of 10 on socialization and connection in that same survey, before the current mix of quick-service options and specialty kiosks began arriving in fall 2025.
Mearman also used her conversation with The Hub to play tour guide, pointing students toward Baltimore neighborhoods within reach of campus. She recommended Hampden and Fells Point as worth exploring, suggesting Frazier's in Hampden for a crab pretzel and the Duchess, also in Hampden, for a snack. She noted that students can walk to plenty of the city's attractions directly from Hopkins.
