Thursday, December 28, 2006
Food & Drink / Food Chain Eating Elsewhere: Pittsburgh's Strip District
Posted by Mike Sula on Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 1:59 PM
Earlier this year a reader interpreted something I wrote as a slight against the food in our mutual hometown, Pittsburgh, PA. I'm sorry she saw it that way, because I'll readily admit to yinz that the mid-size, depopulating, rust belt 'Burgh ain't a bad place to eat. I mean, there isn't a hot dog in Chicago that can touch the charred, natural casing wieners at The Dirty O. It's the ancestral home of the Clark Bar, Heinz Ketchup, and Klondikes. A jumbo and cheese sandwich from Primanti Brothers, heaped with fries and coleslaw, is a marvelous thing. And who can't admire the sheer audacity of the pierogie [sic] pizza?
The culinary epicenter of my oft-maligned city is the Strip District, a half-square-mile neighborhood on the flood plain of the Allegheny River. A one-time steel producing center (like, where wasn't?), and later a nucleus of the wholesale produce business, it's now a cross between Maxwell Street and the gentrified meatpacking district, a destination for tourists and townies alike.
Saturday mornings in the Strip are a mob scene as people crowd the diners, file into amazing old- world delis, or line up for streetside-fried Korean mung bean pancakes. The day before Christmas Eve I got trapped in Wholey's as practically every Catholic in the tri-state area was making a seafood run for the Feast of Seven Fishes. I'm currently obsessed with Parma Sausage Products, a 52-year-old pork emporium that cures its own prosciutto and a gorgeous line of sausages. The retail potential of the Strip has even attracted outsiders like Penzey's, though the spice shop's bougie atmosphere seems a little out of place in one of the most unpretentious neighborhoods in a thoroughly unpretentious city.
So if some jag off ever tries to tell you the 'Burgh is a hopeless backwater with nothing to eat, you can tell him I says gitdahellaht!
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