After the July 2016 tragedy, women of Main Street share their stories
In spite of devastating losses – notably to the restaurant’s wine cellar – Angie Tersiguel sees the silver lining
Text by Halima Aziza and Amanda Loudin Photography by Mary C. Gardella
December 2016/January 2017
When Angie Tersiguel looks around, she sees a community that is rebuilding. Each week since early September, 
more businesses have returned to Main Street. Tersiguel, mother of two, part-time blogger and wife of Chef Michel Tersiguel, owner of the eponymous French restaurant, has been happy to see so many neighbors reopen shops. “Each business is dependent on another business’s success,” she explains. “Maybe you shop at Sweet Elizabeth Jane and then have lunch. None of us can have the rewards that we have without each other.”
To that end, Tersiguel is serving on the Community Advisory Group (CAG), which County Executive Allen Kittleman created to help shape Main Street’s future. “We’re trying to determine what our community will look like,” she says. “What will be put in place to protect it?”
For Tersiguel, it seemed as if the hits just kept coming the first two weeks of August, and she found it tough to focus on anything but loss after the flood. But circumstances required she stay focused and attend to a growing list of family troubles.
In the days following the flood, Tersiguel’s youngest son suffered a severe asthma attack that required a five-day hospital stay. Michel contracted a virus just days after the flood leaving him incredibly ill. Tersiguel was spent. “I couldn’t sustain that pace,” she says. “I wasn’t sleeping.”
Slowly but surely, she and her family began to dig out of the unexpected turns in their lives and move on. With
support from extended family, including Michel’s parents and founders of the restaurant, Odette and Fernand, as well as her own family, Angie could begin to look forward.
“Guilt. Grief. Anger. Every day I wonder where this ride is going to take me,” Tersiguel used to think to herself last summer. She funneled her energy into supporting her husband and boys the best way she could, while trying to navigate what the renaissance of Tersiguel’s would look like.
After more time passed, Tersiguel began to see the silver lining. “This tragedy has given us this 
gift,” she says. With the restaurant closed, her boys spent more time with their father than ever before. Likewise, her husband saw his sons off on the first day of school for the first time.
Tersiguel – formerly Angie Noppenberger – grew up in nearby Catonsville and began bartending and bussing tables in 2001 at the restaurant while studying at the University of Baltimore. One thing led to another and in 2008, she and Michel married, sealing her fate and ties to the restaurant. “We were in different worlds,” she says of her early days at the restaurant and her future husband.
Today she is focused on bringing the restaurant back to the community better than ever. The losses were big, including rare wines with a total replacement value of $40,000 and total inventory estimated at $300,000 in sales. “You’ll never find those wines again,” she says of bottles of Opus 1, Rothschild, and Camus. “We also lost our walk-in freezer.”
Tersiguel says the restaurant is showcasing a different menu than before the flood, one that includes changes every two weeks. “It’s fresher, more immediate,” she says of the offerings. While it’s nice to be out of response mode and into rebuild mode, at press time, Tersiguel looked forward to a return to normalcy. “I figure by Christmas, I’ll be able to breathe again.” *
– H.A. and A.L.
