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| Image courtesy of Wikipedia |
On 1989 I came to Pittsburgh to attend a pre-college summer music program at Carnegie Mellon University. I was earnest about the voice lessons but, foreshadowing my adulthood, I spent any free time combing the city for new things to eat. In groups we’d head off-campus to Primanti Bros. for roast beef or kielbasa sandwiches famously piled with fries and slaw, or to the "O" for super dogs and onion rings. A summer romance stirred over slices of coconut cream pie at Gullifty’s, a gussied-up diner in nearby Squirrel Hill. (It closed in 2013 after 31 years in business.) With money I’d saved from my video-store job back home, we splurged on duck a l’orange and other Continental thrillers at fancy Le Mont, with its city views atop Mount Washington. I had never returned to Pittsburgh. Over the years I’d wondered, as dining became my work, how the city’s restaurant scene had changed since my time there.
These days every small- to mid-size American city can take pride in at least two or three local chefs who keep apace with coast-to-coast trends. But in the last few years, the national arbiters have labeled Pittsburgh "the next big food town." They’ve cited cocktail upstarts like Bar Marco, where the skilled bartenders converse with customers rather than handing out menus, and innovative restaurants like Root 174, where Keith Fuller playfully surrounds pork belly with strawberry-apple slaw, barbecue-flavored pop rocks, and a savory Rice Krispies treat.
Was there a defining shift that had made this Rust Belt survivor the next must-fly-to-eat destination? Were key restaurants evoking a singular sense of place, like in Charleston or Nashville? Had the eating public developed remarkably adventurous palates à la Portland, Oregon? Or was it simply that a critical mass of stellar restaurants had opened? And did it really deserve the accolades?
I thought about all this last month as I began my first meal in Pittsburgh in 26 years, with a starter I couldn’t even have imagined or understood in my teens: trout cured in Cynar amaro. The dish had swum off the page at Cure, the restaurant currently drawing the most national attention to Pittsburgh’s dining scene. Chef and co-owner Justin Severino previously ran a butcher shop in California, and his diverse charcuterie program (coppas, pâtés, rillettes, duck speck, delicate ham made from leg of lamb) at four-year-old Cure has earned him the reputation as the town’s meat virtuoso. Wary of pigeonholing, and cognizant of the challenges around having pristine seafood flown in daily to Pittsburgh, Severino began experimenting with curing fish. He’d had luck infusing salami with the bittersweet notes of a Negroni, one of his go-to cocktails, and thought a similar treatment might fly with local trout.
