By the age of 10, Sandlin was a latchkey kid. Her single social worker mom spent long hours on the job, but money was tight.
“My mom was very thrifty,” she says, “and that came from growing up poor. On Saturdays, we would cut coupons and go to four different grocery stores.”
Typical family meals were roast chicken, Steak-umms, and Hamburger Helper. “My mom was a survivor,” Sandlin says. “There were times when she worked nights and weekends. And my dad was supposed to pay child support but he didn’t.”
Out of necessity, Sandlin learned to cook. “I’d make snickerdoodle cookies,” she says, laughing, “but it was nothing like on Master Chef Junior, where these kids are making foie gras.”
Eventually, her mom married, but family life was still strained and her stepfather was “mean and militant,” says Sandlin, who moved from Highlandtown to Dundalk to Essex and finally to Glen Burnie, where she attended high school.
In 1994, while still in high school, she landed her first job in hospitality. “I worked at a Discovery Zone, which is basically like a Chuck E. Cheese with ball pits and tunnels and they had a little area with pizza,” she says. “I was 16 and on acid. Eventually, I became the party captain in charge of the other party hostesses at kids’ birthday parties.”
From there, she took a job at Ann’s Dari-Creme, a long-running hot dog joint and something of an institution in Glen Burnie. She started as a dishwasher, before moving on to making hot dogs and taking orders.
“I learned to take orders without writing anything down,” she says. “It helped me in the long run,” she says. “You have to learn the system to remember things, which I’m really good at. That’s something that set me up to be a great line cook in the future.”
In the late ’90s, she headed to her mother’s home state of California, where she graduated from Sacramento State, then taught fifth and sixth graders in a private school. After a student ratted on her for having tattoos, she was fired from the job.
“I was like, ‘Why am I doing this? I hate mornings, I don’t like children, and I’m fucking miserable,’” she recounts. So, she went back to restaurant work. To make ends meet, she says, “For a long time, I worked two jobs—I’d work one from 8 to 3 then another from 3:30 to midnight.”
Her first high-end restaurant job was at Esquire Grill, a steakhouse in Sacramento. There, she learned to make gourmet ice cream and invented flavors like roasted banana walnut. “I’d ask the chef if he wanted to taste what I was making and he was like, ‘No, I totally trust you,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this is what I do now.’”
She was also indoctrinated into hard-driving kitchen culture.
“I was coming home when the streetlights were going off,” she says. “I was wild. We moved from daytime to nighttime and we’d all walk off the line together and sit down and have a beer, then we go to another bar together. On Thursday nights, we’d watch Dave Chapelle and go to work at 7 a.m., hungover and miserable, before Excedrin Migraine was even a thing.”
On a lark, in 2004, she traveled to Perth, Australia, and worked in a Mexican restaurant. “The food was terrible,” she says. “We served kangaroo tacos. We were so far away from Mexico, there was no authenticity whatsoever. I was like, where are the chile rellenos? Where’s the lengua?”
She lasted in the job only two weeks but stayed in Perth and worked in other local restaurants for six months or so. “It was an awesome experience but it was super isolated,” she says.
Missing her family back home, Baltimore beckoned and she was stateside again by 2005. As she headed home, she’d read about chef Cindy Wolf, co-owner/chef of Harbor East’s Charleston, in an issue of Gourmet magazine.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to move back to Baltimore and I’m going to work there,’” she says.
There were no openings at the time, but after interviewing with Wolf, she was offered a position as a line cook at Petit Louis Bistro in Roland Park, another property in the Foreman Wolf restaurant group. After a year, she made a quick jump to Spike Gjerde’s Vespa in Federal Hill, then got the call that there was an opening as a line cook at Charleston.
“I had never done food as high-end as Charleston,” she says. “And at Petit Louis, I learned those super classic French dishes. It was the first time I ever had duck confit. I learned a lot of discipline, even in how I carried myself in the kitchen, and also learned how to interact with servers just by watching that staff and the very formal brigade system.”
All the while she added to her culinary education, learning what it meant to have high standards. “As a line cook, I always knew that consistency is important but I really understood it when I went to work for Cindy Wolf, who believes that there’s no such thing as no time to do it right. It was going to be right or we were not going to serve it.”
From Charleston, she worked at Pazo, Foreman Wolf’s now-closed tapas restaurant in Harbor East. “We’d serve 1,200 people some nights. With the recommended three or four plates per person, that was almost 5,000 plates a night,” she says. “I’d come in at noon and leave at three in the morning. And on Sundays, I’d go to the farmers market with Tony Foreman at 6 a.m., still hungover after being up all night.”
From there, she was seemingly everywhere. Mt. Vernon’s Sotto Sopra, making pasta and pastry; briefly baking bread for B Bistro, Tapas Teatro, and The Helmand; and working as a line cook at Cinghiale in Harbor East. After that, she was executive chef at the Italian-leaning Vino Rosina in Harbor East, which begat an executive chef job at downhome barbecue joint Oliver Specks Eats & Drinks in the same space. Other stints followed at the corner bar Jack’s Bistro and Southern-style Jokers N’ Thieves in Canton.
Her food was innovative and elevated but the customers didn’t always care. “I was doing shrimp and grits and I made this blackened catfish with hominy and bacon and salsa verde that was fucking delicious,” says Sandlin of her time at Jack’s, “but nobody gave a shit—everyone wanted a burger.”
It was at The Outpost American Tavern in Riverside where she first found her voice in the kitchen.
“Until then, I was trying to do what I thought other people wanted,” she explains of her life as a peripatetic chef. “I started to cook food that I wanted to eat, so if there was a burger, it was a great burger, and it was on an onion roll because I love an onion roll when I eat a burger.”
Beyond burgers, there were other more chef-driven dishes, like shaved Brussels sprouts and blue cheese with candied pecans, house-made gourmet “trash can” nachos, and blackened tuna salad with pickled onions and carrots tossed in a sweet chile dressing.
In the summer of 2020, she opened her first restaurant on the site of The Laughing Pint in Highlandtown. After signing the lease for what became Sally O’s, she promptly had a meltdown.
“I sat in the pigs’ room and had a panic attack,” she recalls. She called her friend Brian Acquavella, who later became her business partner (along with Matt Akman) in the venture. “He talked me off the ledge,” she says. “He told me I’d be fine.”
And much like the style she started at The Outpost, the menu she devised was a high-low blend with something for every palate—and pocketbook.
“I wanted a true neighborhood place where you could stop in and drink a Natty Boh and eat a smashburger and wear your sweatpants,” says Sandlin, “or you could come in a nice suit and tie and get a great steak and a good bottle of wine or a cocktail. The idea was that everyone is welcome. We want you to feel comfortable and not judged—and that style of service is very Baltimore.”
Acquavella, who first met Sandlin when he owned Jokers & Thieves, has enjoyed watching her trajectory.
“Jesse started her career in the humblest place possible—cooking hot dogs—and she managed to make it into the kitchen of Foreman Wolf, the two greatest restaurateurs in Baltimore,” he points out. “She has such a broad range and is not afraid to use that. Most chefs find their lane and stay in it—Jesse has an eight-lane highway and moves side to side.”
On an unseasonably warm Wednesday afternoon, Sandlin sits in the upstairs dining room at Bunny’s, near the open kitchen. Years ago, a coworker dubbed Sandlin “Bunny,” after the sexy rabbit logo on the bag of Bunny-Luv brand carrots. She ran with it. There’s bunny artwork throughout the restaurant, which serves up serious eats with a wink. On a marquee over the U-shaped bar, there are cheeky slogans: “Some bunny luvs u” and “Nuggs & kisses.”
“You guys did a great job of selling the halibut dish last night,” says Sandlin during her menu meeting with staff. “We have five left. Now, who knows what the gnocchi prep is?”
As her cook thaws scores of biscuits and drops chicken in the Bunny’s pressure cooker behind her (they do 350 orders of fried chicken on a busy night), Sandlin sits front and center.
“We have 17 [parties] on the books tonight,” she says, “but it’s nice outside; don’t be surprised if you get a late-night rush.”
While she talks, her niece and Bunny’s staffer, Kaylee, affectionately puts her arm around her aunt—but everyone on staff is family. Once the meeting is over, Sandlin jokes with her staff about doing karaoke after work one night soon.
“Of course, I’ll do ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’” she says, “because it’s fucking awesome.”
After the meeting, Sandlin will organize her walk-in refrigerator, then head home to her menagerie, while Kaylee takes her place expediting during dinner service.