Steel Cactus

Location: Shadyside, Walnut Street Shopping Area
Cuisine: Mexican
Price: $$

Walnut streets newest addition occupying the site of the old Cozamel restaurant that sat vacant for over a decade.  This place is fun and offers a huge rooftop dining area with a glass retractable roof and heat lamps for winter dining. Its big, its urban meets large lit steel cactus sculptures and aged barn wood tables! The food is your standard Tex Mex but its good and reasonable.  The drink list is large and there are several bar areas.  Great view of Shadyside from the top deck.  Fun Friday night hangout. Gay friendly! Definite place to check out while shopping on Walnut.  Grab a margarita shooter...its a giant margarita with an entire bottle of beer upended in it!

Food: 4/5
Atmosphere: 5/5 (fun and friendly)
Service: 4/5 (can get busy so wait can be long)

Taza 21

Location:  Squirrel Hill
Cuisine: Lebanese
Price: $

Great little hole in the wall sized place on Murray ave.  Offers homemade middle eastern fare along with desserts and fresh hummus. Very friendly owner who runs the place.  Small menu, fresh food, very small dine in space.  Great for carryout .  Inexpensive and good.  Clean and well kept.

Food: 5/5
Service: 4/5 (can be a bit slow because just one guy cooking but worth the wait)
Atmosphere: 3/5 (very very small with four tables)

Industry Public House

Location: Lawrenceville
Cuisine: Pub food
Price: $$

This was a nice discovery!  Located on the increasingly trendy section of Butler Street, this new pub offers a small but delicious menu of gourmet burgers and other assorted pub foods.  It also boasts the largest selection of mircobrews within the city of Pittsburgh.  The "management burger" was delicious.  The decor is industrial chic with exposed brick, filament light bulbs, and steel.  Large bar, good food, friendly and fast service, large open space and VERY busy on weekends with the drinking crowd.  Not a large menu and certainly not the place if you are looking for over the top creations and crazy modern cuisine.  Just a very good pub offering up some above average pub style food!  Fun! Check it out!

Food: 5/5
Service:5/5
Atmosphere: 5/5

Heyeholde Restaurant

Location: Moon Township/Airport area
Cuisine: Euro/Game Meats and Fish
Price:$$$$$

If you want luxury and a very sophisticated setting go to this restaurant.  It is picturesque and you will feel like you are in the French countryside.  The menu is wonderful and consists of delicious offerings like prime rib, elk, trout, ect.  The sherry bisque is to die for.  The service is flawless.  The property also offers hand prepared picnic baskets for romantic dining outside on the lawn.  Its perfect for valentines or for impressing that special someone.  It is not cheap, in fact quite expensive.  The last time I went I dropped 80 bucks for lunch and that was several years ago!

Lavite Restaurante and Narcissi Winery

Location: Gibsonia
Cuisine: Italian/Winery
Price: $$$


I was very impressed with this place after hosting a party for 25 people there!  Narcissi offers a very large selection of homemade wines that are not your typical sweet Pennsylvania wines.  They rival what you would find in a California winery!  Quite a surprise.  The food is very good quality Italian.  My only complaint was the cheese plate which had a wide array of cheeses but was dumbed down by the fact that they threw cheap domestic cheese cubes on it!  Not cool!
The setting is in the rolling hills of the North Hills area of the city.  It is a very large property surrounded by vineyards and there is a large area of outside seating for dinning alfresco.  Wine tastings are offered as well as live entertainment on certain days.  There is a small gift shop catering to wine enthusiasts.
The service was flawless which was not simple task because it involved catering to 25 hungry guests.

In my opinion, a simply must do for the holidays!

Food: 4/5
Service: 5plus/5
Atmosphere: 5/5 (very unique setting!)

The Green Pepper

 

Location: Squirrel Hill

Cuisine: Korean

Price: $$

The jury is still out on this one.  I went for dinner, it was fabulous.  I went for lunch, it was awful.  The atmosphere is a sparsely decorated room that is painted lemon grass green with a few tables and a huge center space.  It almost seems too empty!  The wait staff was ok but not memorable. The Green Pepper offers traditional Korean cuisine that is served in bento boxes (think asian tv dinner plates like those metal divided ones from the 60's only black and red). 

Food: 3/5 (inconsistant)

Service: 2/5

Atmosphere: 2/5

Stagioni

Location: formerly Bloomfield, since relocated to South Side
Cuisine: Italian
Price: $$$

Once one of my favorite Northern Italian restaurants in Pittsburgh, Stagioni is now not what it used to be.  Since its relocation, the food and the service have gone down hill.  In its former state it was a great little bistro that offered freshly prepared northern Italian cuisine.  Its staff was friendly and the owner and her husband were the cooks.  It has moved into the former site of Le Pommier and has outgrown itself.  I had one of the rudest waiters that I have ever encountered here.  The service was rushed and the wait staff had no clue about what they were serving.  My entree was cold and the salad, appetizers, and entree were all thrown at me within ten minutes.  It was one of the few times that I asked to speak to the management.  The atmosphere is fine but they have not changed the place since it was a French place other than take down the French artwork and put up a few Italian accents here and there.  I would not go here again.  Overpriced poorly prepared food, bad attitude from the staff.

Atmosphere: 3/5
Food: 1/5
Service: 0/5