Last Saturday, my cousin Jennifer and one of her bridesmaids, Leah, came to Pittsburgh for an evening of single gal celebration—Jennifer's bachelorette party to be exact. Yes, folks, my dearest little cousin Jennifer is forsaking the single life and getting married to her long-time boyfriend, Trevor, this September (marriage, boo! Nothing personal, Trevor, I'm just down on marriage in general).

The Pleasure Bar

And so, since I can't talk Jennifer out of tying the knot, I figured I might as well send her off in big city style! Well, big-ish city style. I do live in Pittsburgh, after all.

This tale of single gal fun will be peculiarly bisected so that I can complete a review that I've been meaning to write for a few weeks. Thus, a few weeks back, I went out on a gallery crawl with Sabrina, where we hung out with assorted folks and did assorted things, all of which Sabrina details in her blog entry on the evening, and thus I will not repeat it here. However, as we did end up the evening at The Pleasure Bar, and as it is one of my favorite Bloomfield establishments, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a review. But since it's also one of my favorite places to eat, writing a review on just the bar seemed somehow incomplete. Thus I waited until I was equipped to include a dinner review, and after last weekend I am.

My Vodka Rocks, with two pieces of fruit!

The Pleasure Bar is a venerable Bloomfield establishment—it sounds like a strip club, but isn't—that has offered patrons drink and Italian food for over a quarter century. The testimony to its tenure can be found in the personal anecdote I always tell about The Pleasure Bar, which has a great first line, but a lame back story—that is, I was almost born at The Pleasure Bar. It isn't really true, but my mother did eat dinner there in a very early stage of labor. And so, we can attest that The Pleasure Bar has been around at least 27 years. Not too shabby as restaurant ventures go. The bar area is large but pretty basic. The four-sided bar is surrounded variously by white walls and huge mirrors. It's the sort of bar where they don't offer daily specials because, pretty much, they don't need to. Booze is cheap to begin with. When we ended up there after the gallery crawl, I ordered my default low-carb bar drink, the vodka rocks with well liquor. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my drink was only $2.50. Not only was it cheap, but the serving was generous, coming in the same-sized glasses as Sabrina's vodka cranberry and Ted's rum and coke. The most delightful icing on this vodka cake was the fact that I got two, count'em two slices of fruit for garnish, a lemon and a lime. No wondered I wanted out of the womb after my first visit back in 1979.

The Pleasure Bar Dining Room

This brief foray to the Pleasure Bar from post-gallery-crawl drinks put me in the mood to go back for dinner, but I had not managed it until last weekend. Faced with the decision of where to go to dinner before hitting the clubs for bachelorette fun, Sabrina and I mused over the restaurant possibilities considering the criteria of reasonably priced and Pittsburgh-y. When she suggested Bloomfield, the Pleasure Bar jumped to mind. And so, after having cocktails at my apartment with "just the girls," Sabrina, Jennifer, Leah and I met up with Ted and Roger (I couldn't afford strippers, so Jennifer got two fully-clothed men instead) for dinner at the Pleasure Bar. The low-carb options aren't exactly plentiful at the Pleasure Bar, since it's ostensibly an Italian restaurant. Pasta proliferates on the menu. But I came in with a hankering for a Pleasure Bar favorite, the Chicken Cordon Bleu, and so that's what I got. I also decided to brave the salad, since the soup of the day was vegetable and one never knows precisely which vegetables will be included (potatoes, carrots and corn are higher carb veggies that frequently appear in soup). I'll give them this, salad-wise—the Pleasure Bar is trying. About half of the greens were dark field greens, but the other half were in fact iceberg. Oh well. I was hungry so I even ate the iceberg. It is also important to note that while the blue cheese dressing was fresh and tasty, it had too many chunks of blue cheese. This may sound like an oxymoron—fresh crumbled blue cheese is a coveted salad topping. But because it was mixed in with the dressing, there was too little of the creamy part to cover my salad to satisfaction. Still, got to love blue cheese. My chicken also came with a choice of sides, and upon my selecting the vegetable du jour over the assortment of starch, I was pleasantly surprised to get a choice of vegetable: broccoli or green beans. While I've developed more of an affinity for broccoli since going low-carb, it tends to be the vegetable everywhere so it was nice to get a choice and have green beans for a change. The chicken breast itself came in a shallow dish covered in large slices of prosciutto ham, alfredo sauce and melted swiss cheese. There was also, I discovered, some breading on top of the chicken and underneath the proscuitto. Not a terrible offense to my diet, but still, it was easily scraped off and so I decided to spare myself the carbs. Otherwise the Cordon Bleu was delicious. You can't beat meat, covered in more meat, slathered in both cheese sauce and melted cheese.

Stay tuned for more Bachelorette Shenanigans in a blog to come.