Pittsburgh

OK, LTHers, I need your reliable expertise on food recs for Pittsburgh.

I will be there with several colleagues for an English Teacher's convention and need some good places to eat and drink. We will be staying in the downtown, and will only have access to public trans and cabs.

Thanks!

Have you tried searching the site? There's plenty of good stuff already here. Of course, new experiences are welcome too.

PS, try Beyond Chicagoland for your query.

I've got a guide to "Eating Pgh" (a couple of years old by now, but still useful) that I wrote for a convention. I'd be glad to send it to you if you'd like.

Da 'Burgh is my second academic home, after KC, so I spend a LOT of time there. Eating, mostly.

If you're going to be there on the weekend, you absolutely must go to The Strip, which is the produce section of town that has, over the years, morphed into an indigenous entertainment district.

What kind of food do you like?

As Calvin Trillin would say, "a person can get something to eat in Pittsburgh."

Geo

48 Hours in Pittsburgh

I spent two days in Pittsburgh this week for work, eating the majority of my meals at the Omni William Penn downtown. While the hotel is not a food destination, I was pleasantly surprised by almost everything I had (set menus served by the hotel for the conference I attended there). Particularly noteworthy was a chocolate mousse tart with a hazlenut-rice crispy crust served at dinner on Thursday.


Chocolate mousse tart

Before joining the conference group on the first day, I explored the area around the hotel and ended up at Zorba’s for lunch. In the window, there was a bright sign that said something to the effect that Zorba’s chicken salad was the best in Pittsburgh. The claim made me curious. I also stopped in because the place was busy with what looked like a pretty mixed crowd and because I was too hungry to walk any farther. Standing in line reading the menu, I realized that the chicken salad, which I assumed was something made with mayo, was actually just a grilled chicken leaf salad made with iceberg and maybe some feta to make it quasi Greek. A lot of people seemed to be ordering it, but I’m not a big salad eater and was really hungry, so I opted for a chicken sandwich.


Chicken sandwich at Zorba's

The sandwich was a bargain at just over $3. It was fine. It was juicy breast meat on a non-descript bun with lettuce, tomato and onion. I probably wouldn’t have changed anything about the sandwich except maybe to remove some of the chicken. It was very hearty.

That said, I was still hungry after Zorba’s. I went back to the William Penn and discovered that they served high tea, so I grabbed some work from my room and got myself a table at the hotel’s Palm Court. I was disappointed to discover they served Peet’s teas, which I generally don’t like very much, but I felt committed to the idea of tea service so I stayed. I ordered the Xiao’s Blend tea and got a variety of traditional tea sandwiches, petit fours secs (supposedly from Switzerland) and straight-from-the-oven scones.


My afternoon snack

Because I was doing some work, I forgot about my tea and oversteeped it. I don’t think I would have liked the blend anyway—the peppermint was overpowering. The tea sandwiches were very disappointing. The white bread was slightly stale, and there was far too much mayonnaise on everything. I do think tea sandwiches are hard to make well. The ones I had at the Palm Court lacked delicacy, which is the primary quality I look for in tea sandwiches. The petit fours were fine, but I was curious about the term “Sacher” embellished on the chocolate tart (a dark chocolate disk on a butter crust). I’ve stayed at the Sacher Hotel in Vienna and have eaten my share of Sacher torte, but are there Sacher chocolates? The scones were warm and tasty, but they were more like muffins in consistency and sweetness. I felt over-sugared by the time I was done with everything.

Again, I didn’t have a lot of free meals to take outside of the hotel during my 48 hours, but the conference schedule left us on our own for dinner last night. There were a few meal groups we could join, but I was not interested in the American and Italian places proposed, so I proposed my own outing to Abay, supposedly Pittsburgh’s only Ethiopian restaurant.



Six people signed up for my dinner, which was a fantastic turnout. So my boss and I were joined by new friends, hailing from downstate Illinois, Oklahoma, Idaho, New York and South Africa. The LTH spirit was definitely alive in Pittsburgh last night with this group of relative strangers gathering warmly and enthusiastically to learn about a city through its food.


New friends

Abay, located in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, immediately stuck me and my boss as much hipper than Chicago Ethiopian establishments. Granted it was a Friday night, but the place was packed with well-dressed 20-somethings—a very different environment from, say, Chicago’s Ethiopian Diamond. (A patron even received a singing telegram from a person dressed as a gorilla in a Steelers jersey during our meal—very funny.) The food was terrific. We enjoyed everything. The flavors were rich and the portions generous. My only complaint was that the restaurant was kind of stingy with the injera—we had to ask twice for more. We ordered eight entrees, of course, to share:


Ayib be gomen, misir wat, butecha & tikil gomen


Doro wat, kay wat, inguday wat & ye’abesha gomen

The company and conversation were delightful so we weren’t quite ready to leave even though we had finished our food. We sat for a while and then ordered two desserts to share: pumpkin sambussas drizzled with chocolate and honey and topped with cinnamon ice cream and a slice of chocolate cake. The chocolate cake was forgettable, but the sambussas were the perfect way to end such a pleasant meal. The cinnamon ice cream was outstanding.


Pumpkin sambussas

I enjoyed the little I saw of Pittsburgh. I loved the colors of the trees I saw on my way from the airport to downtown. There are beautiful buildings in downtown proper, and I love any city with a lot of bridges. Friday afternoon, I stole an hour from the conference to run across all of the passable bridges, which afforded me some impressive views of the city. I also snuck in a quick visit to the Andy Warhol Museum, which I recommend in general, but on this visit I noted a few very interesting food-related works. The Pittsburgh collection reminded me that there is a lot more food (and eating) in Warhol’s oeuvre than Campbell’s soup.







Of particular note were works of two artists featured in a temporary exhibit called “Andy and Oz: Parallel Visions” about Warhol’s influence on contemporary Australian artists. In one room, there were two vitrines showcasing old Kellogg’s cereal boxes (I’m guessing from the 1960s) from the collection of abstract-Pop painter Robert Rooney. The boxes were pretty compelling as sources of Pop imagery.


From a box of Kellogg’s Rice Chex


From a box of Kellogg’s Rice Bubbles (the name for Australian Rice Krispies)

Another Australian artist with food-related work on display at the Warhol Museum was Fiona Hall. In particular, I was taken by her series Paradisus terrestris (1999)--precious, poetic sculptures carved by the artist, supposedly at her kitchen table, from sardine cans. Unfortunately, I think the sculptures are technically too explicit for me to link to here, but one should look for them as beautiful examples of art fashioned from recycled food packaging.

Anyway, I’ve diverged from "eating out." Pittsburgh is a pleasant place, and I hope I have the chance to eat there again.

Zorba’s
400 Smithfield St
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
412-471-9930

Omni William Penn Hotel
530 William Penn Place
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
412-281-7100

Abay Ethiopian Cuisine
130 S Highland Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
412-661-9736

The Andy Warhol Museum
117 Sandusky St
Pittsburgh, PA 15212
412-237-8300

happy_stomach wrote:Pittsburgh is a pleasant place, and I hope I have the chance to eat there again.

happy, Pittsburgh is a good eating town (and also a good beer town, I'm discovering). Drop me a pm next time you head this way and I can suggest a few places if not posted by then. I haven't, for various reasons, really eaten out at many places that are good enough or enough times at a good place (to write home to LTH about).
Still, thanks to Geo and some of my own updates, I could point out a few places for your next trip.

sazerac wrote:

happy_stomach wrote:Pittsburgh is a pleasant place, and I hope I have the chance to eat there again.

happy, Pittsburgh is a good eating town (and also a good beer town, I'm discovering). Drop me a pm next time you head this way and I can suggest a few places if not posted by then.

Thanks--will do. Maybe you can also share with me the secret to getting a cab in Pittsburgh--that was the toughest part of my entire trip.

happy_stomach wrote:Thanks--will do. Maybe you can also share with me the secret to getting a cab in Pittsburgh--that was the toughest part of my entire trip.

Sorry, can't help you there. I do see the occasional cab, which makes me realize that they do in fact exist here. As for getting one - well, maybe once you find out, you can clue me in...

You can't get a cab in Pgh... unless you've got a Real Address and a telephone. And even then it's tricky. Back before they got the Flyer, I used to take the cab to the airport from Oakland—an easy large-ticket item for a cab. Yet a sizeable proportion of the time, the cab wouldn't show.

Like many other things in Pgh (and PA in general) there are hidden forces at work, interfering with what, in other places of the world, would be the Normal Course of Human Events. [For example, buying beer...]

Geo

Geo wrote:You can't get a cab in Pgh... unless you've got a Real Address and a telephone. And even then it's tricky.

This, I experienced. Because it took us almost 30 minutes to get a cab at the Omni William Penn to go to dinner in Oakland, I called Yellow Cab to arrange for our return rides as soon we arrived at the restaurant. After finally convincing the operator that I was giving her a real address (she didn't believe me) and making sure that they would send two cabs for the size of our group--this conversation was an ordeal in itself--the operator, understandably, asked for my phone number. I gave her my cell number, and then she explained that she wouldn't accept a long distance number. We were all visitors to Pittsburgh so no one had a local number. The whole thing was so absurd! The operator finally just told us to wait outside the restaurant, which we did. The cabs never came. Half of our group got lucky and got a cab that had just discharged a passenger down the block. The other half of the group took the bus (after trying, unsuccessfully, to hail a cab), which is probably what we should have done in the first place. (Granted, I called the restaurant from the hotel earlier in the day to ask if public transportation was an option to get there. The woman I spoke to said, "No way." At the end of the night, the other half of my group discovered that the bus ride was very easy--direct with very few stops.) I'm glad I enjoyed every other aspect of my visit to Pittsburgh because, if I hadn't, the whole cab situation would have ruined the city for me for a long time. I kept saying to myself, "Just let it go... Just let it go... Don't be such a city brat." But the whole thing made me so grumpy!