Pittsburgh!?!?*

* This should be said in the manner of Joe Flacco in a 1st Mariner Bank commercial.

So I went to Pittsburgh. For a funeral, which seemed entirely fitting. It was a quick trip, much of it spent on the road, but my traveling companion, Kim, and I made the experience as fun as possible. And we squeezed in two restaurant meals.

I had quizzed a friend, whose spouse hails from the city that supports the Baltimore Ravens worst enemy, about restaurant recommendations. She offered up several, a few of which came with the caveat that she had not tried them but had heard good things. Another restaurant, the Pleasure Bar, came with praise from both her and her husband. We decided to check it out.

The name conjures up visions of a cozy and dark space that serves up both good food and fine libations. Instead, the corner restaurant in Pittsburgh's Little Italy seemed rather generic and certainly not cozy. The menu comprised Italian-American favorites like ravioli, eggplant parm, and stuffed shells. We started out with an appetizer order of fried calamari. It was ok, nothing special, and possibly not house-made. Lemon wedges would have been more useful than slices.

I wasn't in the mood for Italian food, but was contemplating the eggplant parm. Then I spotted the crab cakes. Yes, I know that it's a really dumb idea to order crab cakes anywhere outside of Maryland, but I wanted to know how badly they could be fucked up in a place like Pittsburgh.

Turns out, pretty fucked up.

Before I ordered, I asked our waitress about the origin of the crabmeat. When she went off to the kitchen to ask, I predicted she would tell us that it came from such-and-such distributor. And indeed she did. She said something about the meat being combined with their crab cake mix, which should have set off warning bells in my head. Instead, I chose to believe that it referred to breadcrumbs, egg, seasonings, and mayonnaise. After I explained that I wanted to know where the crab lived before being caught, she apologized for her mistake and ran back to the kitchen. When she returned, she said it came from "various parts of the Atlantic." She even added that she didn't really like crab cakes, but the ones at the Pleasure bar were soooo good, she would eat them.

I ordered them anyway.

In all honesty, they didn't taste bad. They did taste of bell peppers, which I don't care for and which do not belong in a Maryland crab cake. But this was Steeltown. It was the filler that was the real problem. I found a number of spongy, red-tinged objects in the cakes, and after careful analysis, I determined that they were...fake crab meat. That surimi crap that comes in cheap California rolls. I can almost forgive this, since it still sorta kinda is at least a seafood product. But the overall texture of the crab cakes was unpleasantly mushy. Had the ramekin on the side been filled with a nice remoulade sauce, there would have been a bright side. Alas, it was grainy "Alfredo" sauce.

Please indulge me in a small side rant here. The Italian chefs I know all rail on serving cheese with seafood; I just roll my eyes at this. So why is this Italian restaurant serving "Alfredo" sauce (that is, a bland white sauce with some cheese thrown in, and nothing like the real thing) with crab cakes?

Sigh. Serves me right, dunnit?

Kim ordered the rib eye steak, which, at the same $19 as my crab cakes, was a steal. You can't really tell from my cellphone pic, but it looked like it had been steamed rather than grilled or pan fried. And a goodly portion of it was gristle.

Oh well, better luck next time. Guess we should have stuck to the Italian-American food.

The next day, after the funeral, we headed back downtown to a gastropub called Meat & Potatoes, one of the recommended restaurants that had the "but we haven't tried it" caveat. We've tried it, and I have to say...we'd try it again. (Not that we ever plan to revisit Pittsburgh, but stranger things have happened.)

Burger - Caramelized onions, havarti, tomato jam, arugula, french fries

We were those terrible people who walk into a restaurant fifteen minutes before the kitchen is scheduled to close. But we ordered quickly! It was lunchtime, so their menu offerings weren't quite as interesting as those at dinner, but we quickly settled on the burger and the bibimbap.

BiBimBap - pork belly, black fried rice, pickled cucumbers, carrots, korean hot sauce, sunny side-up egg

The burger was huge, delicious, juicy (despite being cooked to medium well, as requested by Kim) and the accompanying fries were crispy and nicely browned. The tasty bread and butter pickles on the side were likely house-made. My bibimbap was outstanding. While I'd have liked more rice to absorb all of the hot sauce and pickle juice from the cukes, the flavors were bold and the huge slab of pork belly was moist and nicely fatty. (My mouth is watering as I'm typing this.) The egg yolk could have been runnier, but overall, this dish was terrific.

Cinnamon panna cotta

We splurged on dessert, because, well, we were grief-stricken (not by the previous night's meal, but by the funeral) and needed comforting. There were three choices, including a chocolate pot de creme, but I went for the cinnamon panna cotta and Kim chose the unpleasantly-named peanut butter Oreo dirt.

Peanut Butter Oreo Dirt

The panna cotta had a nice cinnamon flavor and I really enjoyed the fall-ish caramelized fruit topping, Kim's evil concoction was pretty tasty, too, and almost large enough for two servings.

So....

The Pleasure Bar wasn't pleasurable, but I'll cop to making bad choices. Meat & Potatoes was delicious, however, and I wouldn't mind checking it out again. If I didn't have to go to Pittsburgh to do so.






Posted on Minxeats.com.

Aggio Popup at Artifact Coffee

Bryan Voltaggio, owner of Volt and Family Meal in Frederick, Range in DC, and Aggio, an Italian restaurant within Range, is opening a second outpost of Aggio in Power Plant Live! here in Baltimore sometime early this summer. To introduce the restaurant to locals, Spike Gjerde hosted a two-night Aggio pop-up at Artifact Coffee. We managed to snag a table for the first seating on the first night.

First appearances are important, and Aggio hit all the right notes there with a generous bread plate that included ethereal grissini and heartier foccacia. They were served with two dips, one an intensely salty whipped goat ricotta with lemon and olive oil, and an unusual whipped mortadella. At this point, we were pretty happy campers and looking forward to the rest of the meal.

The first of four courses were equally successful. I chose the chioggia beets. Voltaggio likes to play with textures, and in this dish, the naturally sweet beets were presented in both chunks and paper thin slices. I didn't really taste the charred rosemary component of the dish, but really enjoyed the fishiness of the tonnato sauce (made with tuna) and the bottarga (an Italian salted fish roe). It was an inspired combination.

Chioggia beets, tonnato sauce, charred rosemary, pine nuts, bottarga, arugula

Mr Minx's impeccably fresh raw tuna served with orange was also a nice combination of flavors. And because the house lights dimmed dramatically a little while earlier, Mr Minx wasn't sure what he had on his fork at any given time. He enjoyed the little game of "is it orange, or is it tuna?"

Tuna, pistachio, castelvetrano olive, blood orange sugo, citrus pith, radish

For the second course, Mr Minx chose the asparagus and I had the shrimp and polenta.

Asparagus, fava and pea ragu, wild herbs, smoked pecorino, almond

The asparagus was a big disappointment. While the stalks were nicely cooked and juicy/tender, the only flavor in the dish came from the smoked pecorino. It was perhaps a bit too subtle.

Prawns, polenta from buckwheat and yellow corn, sauce fra diavolo

Also too subtle was the prawn dish, a homely festival of brown. I felt it was bland and uninteresting and lacking the promised heat and flavor of the fra diavolo. Clearly the Washington Post's Tom Sietsema, who gave Aggio three stars, was served a different dish. "The seafood choices include a raft of grilled prawns adrift in a dark orange froth of shellfish stock, tomato paste and red chili flakes. 'Too pretty to eat' comes to mind. Ignore the thought and dive in. Beneath the tender seafood is soothing buckwheat polenta."

On to the pasta course, which was much more successful. We passed on the spinach pasta with crab and buttered popcorn to try the whole wheat lumache with lamb ragu and the spaghetti alla chitarra with meatballs.

Lamb ragu, whole wheat lumache, oak smoked pecorino, mustard leaf pesto

The ragu was rich and delicious, with a hearty lamb-gamy flavor. A perfect dish to cozy up with on a cold winter's night.

Meatballs braised in ragu pomodoro, chittara, basil, parmesan

I am not Italian, so I like my pasta drenched in sauce (IMHO, the reason to eat the pasta in the first place). Voltaggio's spaghetti alla chittara was cooked properly al dente and was coated with a rich tomato sauce. The terrific meatballs were fluffy and soft, and according to Sietsema, are made with a portion of mortadella. In other words, they were full of baloney.... 

Dessert was hit or miss. Mr Minx had the cookie plate, featuring lemony "taralli" and chocolate biscotti. Despite the incorrect nomenclature (taralli are crunchy ring shaped crackers, and these were pillowy soft cakelets, more madeleine than cookie), Mr Minx enjoyed both. The "taralli" were especially tasty.

Cookie plate, Meyer lemon taralli, chocolate almond pistachio biscotti

My pistachio and olive plate tasted of neither. The kumquats were the star, as far as I'm concerned, sweetly bitter and bursting with citrus flavor. I wanted the sorbet to be more tangy, and the soft cake to taste like...something. But Voltaggio's textural contrasts are always fun and almost made up for the lack of pistachio.

Pistachio in olives, olive oil cake, pistachio cream, cara cara orange sorbet, crispy pomegranate, kumquats

We're eager to visit Aggio in its eventual destination downtown, realizing that part of the inconsistency of this meal may have been due to the tiny kitchen space at Artifact. It will be interesting to see how well the restaurant does in Power Plant Live!, which is still the Brokerage in my mind (a lame place, even when it was popular).

Posted on Minxeats.com.