The Rise And Fall Of Good Food

For our first few days in Pittsburgh, meals consisted primarily of:

• breakfast: take-out pastries while waiting for deliveries
• lunch: fast food between trips to Target/Lowes
• dinner: American chain restaurants near Target/Lowes

Having arrived on June 12th, we first ventured out into the larger world on the 14th by walking to the Carnegie Mellon campus--about 35-40 minutes from home. There, we grabbed lunch, wandered around aimlessly, realized we had no idea what we were looking at, felt stupid, and walked back. We live just a block away from Squirrel Hill's downtown area on Murray and Forbes. So, on Monday the 16th we were finally ready to brave the local restaurants. Virg took me to Pamela's Diner for breakfast (pretty good), and we tried a random Italian place for dinner (pretty good).

Every place in the area looks like a dump on the outside, so you never know what you'll find inside. We scored with two dumpy looking places the next day--a Thai place called Sweet Basil (cute place, excellent food) and a deli called Kazansky's (dumpy inside, but with surprisingly excellent menu roughly resembling Max's Diner in California). When we later found that both places were recommended by our Moon Pittsburgh guidebook, we began relying on the guide for most future food needs--right after we let Virg wolf down some biscuits and gravy at Bob Evan's (her favorite Ohio delicacy).

So, in the next week we found some great eats:

• dinner at Mineo's Pizza (supposed to be Pittsburgh's best, but it was really all cheese)
• lunch at Gullifty's (excellent food, excellent menu, excellent desserts!)
• hot chocolate at the Tango Cafe (v.g.)
• dinner at Abay Ethiopian. Yes, Pittsburgh even offers Ethornopian, albeit with a drive to a not-so-great part of town, and with food that was good but not spectacular.
• lunch at the Pittsburgh Deli Company (a long wait for mediocre sandwiches/salads, but in a really cute section of Pittsburgh called Shadyside)
• dinner at Point Brugges Cafe (a great, lively place sitting randomly in a section of otherwise residential blocks)
• brunch at Harris Grill (dumpy area, questionable chain-smoking clientele, pricey food, but well worth it if you imagine you're paying in part for the entertaining food descriptions on the menu)
• lunch at the Rose Tea Cafe (good super-cheapo Chinese in Squirrel Hill)

Yes, we've been eating like kings! But inevitably, we've begun to run out of guide-recommended places to go. So, lately we've started eating at all the non-recommended places in our area. And, not surprisingly, they haven't been as good. And as we run out of nearby non-recommended places, we'll have to try random places even further away, on our ever-expanding quest for more and more mediocre food.