Category Archives: Pittsburgh

The Great India Buffet Tour: Coriander India Grill

Posted on by

After a long cold winter (well, January and February at least) of struggling to summon the ambition to venture out for any reason, let alone for India Buffet, we finally made a date to check out our next stop on the tour, Coriander India Grill in Squirrel Hill. It was a day only a Pittsburgher could love, 50’s and drizzling, it even inspired two guest critics to come along for the ride: Nik, an India Buffet aficionado and Millvillian, and Jay, an Asian food enthusiast and Squirrel Hill denizen.

Coriander India GrillCoriander Grill is exactly what you would expect, in terms of decor, and then some. The outside and inside plaster wall surfaces are smothered in a lime green color (perhaps “cilantro green” would be more appropriate), which is, perhaps, overkill, but the booths were clean and comfortable, and water served in heavy faux-cut crystal goblets. The lunch buffet at Coriander is offered every day, and a dinner buffet is served on Tuesday and Sunday evenings. The cost is reasonable, being $7.99 during the week, and jumping only to $8.55 on the weekends.

Taking in the scope of the buffet, it became apparent that Coriander’s offerings were more extensive than most, but not quite so gargantuan as the buffet at Taj Mahal. The salad/dessert bar section had a wide variety of chutneys and pickles, including the expected tamarind and mint, as well as the not terribly common coconut. Rice and naan provided the standard starches. Onion pakoras proved to be a crispy appetizer. The meat selections were just as standard as the starch: chicken curry, tandoori chicken, chicken tikka masala. The vegetarian selection, though, came as a pleasant surprise in its extensiveness. There was mattar paneer, chana saag, an inviting dal, vegetable korma, spiced mixed vegetables and cauliflower. The highlight of of the curry selection was a dish off to the side of red chili paste, very useful for raising the heat level on mild buffet offerings.

Coriander GrillAs we dove into our teeming plates of buffet gleanings, we quickly reached a consensus that the taste quality of coriander’s food was a cut above. There was something intriguing about the taste of each dish. Flavors bespoke fresh ingredients and well-tuned spice mixes. So often buffets rely on over-salting to lend taste to food that does not arrive immediately at the table, but in every dish at Coriander, the salt flavor was low and the spices rang at a good pitch. The pakoras were crispy, but the coconut chutney, while tasty, was uninspired. The saag was one of my favorites, as I am a particular fan of saag, and Nik agreed that it exceeded ordinary Indian restaurant saag. The spinach was still quite green, not too dark and overcooked. The chicken tikka masala was definitely a few flavor levels above typical, a danger that faces any buffet vat of tikka masala since it is practically a requirement. I was even impressed by the mattar paneer, which I didn’t get until my second trip, since mattar paneer is among of my least favorite curries. Sabrina detected a pleasantly sour whisper of vinegar in many dishes, and happily attributed it to the Goan influence that she has noticed on the regular menu, as she frequents Coriander for non-buffet dinner. The dal was a favorite among all the guests at our table, and everyone agreed its appeal lay in its likeness to an Indian-style chili.

Coriander SpecialtiesThe biggest controversy of the day came from the vegetable korma. I enjoyed the flavor of this dish and I was happy to taste a highlight spice—my guess was cardamom—which set it apart in good contrast to the other dishes. However, the korma did suffer one pitfall; it’s a common danger that plagues the preparation of korma, that because of the nut pastes used in its preparation the curry sauce dries out easily, and so water or milk must be added frequently as long as it stews over the fire. Sabrina and Jay agreed that the flavor of the korma sauce was not enough to outweigh their distaste at the pudding-like consistency.

After eating, the table discussed our selections; Sabrina and I compared the experience to our previous buffet stops and we solicited the input of our fellow lunchers that day. Coriander got points for variety, being larger than any other buffet we visited, save the Taj Mahal (what is the appeal of the buffet, after all, if not to sample a plethora of dishes), but it also got points for taste quality. We easily agreed that the flavor of Coriander’s food was second only to the buffet at Tamarind. In the end, we decided that taste trumps size, and so we placed Coriander second to Tamarind in the scheme of buffets we’ve visited so far.

Late Night Bites: Harris Grill

Posted on by

If you are a grad student or older undergrad in Pittsburgh, chances are you have been to the Harris Grill. This Ellsworth Avenue house, converted to a bar and restaurant, is headquarters for many a casual Pitt and CMU social gathering with its hip beer selection and creative pub food line-up.

Harris GrillAs it turns out, the Harris Grill kitchen is also open late, until 1am, perfect for hungry second shift professionals like me. That means I have more than enough time to get there and more than enough time to peruse the menu and place my order… just like a real restaurant.

This was not my first visit to the Harris Grill, and despite my trepidation to the contrary, I found parking pretty easily on a residential side street nearby. The inside of the Harris Grill has an eclectic dark and lounge-y decor. Some tables are appointed with couches and leather chairs, playing on the converted house theme. The menu is filled with jokey and colloquial item names and descriptions, many steeped in pop culture references. Even the prices are pitched toward the menu’s funky feel, with items costing $5.81 or $9.03, rather than the usual $-.99.

I ordered a vodka tonic and made a selection from the appetizer menu, as Harris Grill makes the effort to pitch many of its menu items to the meat-eater hungry man (and, on balance, some to the white meat eater, and even to the vegetarian hungry man), and so I guessed that an entree or sandwich would be perhaps too filling and assuredly too caloric.

The two items I got to sample that night were the spinach artichoke dip and the black bean cakes; both were tasty and the black bean cakes struck me as something I ought to try making at home. While I had no complaints about the quality of the dip, I found the service of this dip a bit strange. Usually spinach artichoke dip comes—logically, one supposes—with stuff to dip into it. Perhaps pita wedges, crackers or tortilla chips. This spinach dip came in a bread bowl, like soup does at Panera. The only dip-ables were the top crust and bread pieces that had been removed when the bread bowl was hollowed out. After using up those scant few pieces of bread, one then had to tear the bread bowl apart in effort to consume the remainder of the dip. I probably would have done so at the end of the dip anyway, but I wish I had had more bread or some crackers to extend the actual dipping portion of the appetizer, rather than having to hasten to the tearing portion when there was still a lot of dip in the bowl.

This peculiar method of dip service, plus a nearly eight dollar price tag for the spinach artichoke dip left me lukewarm. The bean cakes, which were more in the neighborhood of six dollars, seemed fairly priced. My vodka tonic ended up being close to five dollars, and while that’s not uproariously expensive, it makes me feel like I would have been better off going to a different restaurant. I also could have easily gotten the same experience, much more cheaply, by making it all at home.

Overall, Harris has a pleasant atmosphere, good food and gets extra points for being open until 1am. The peculiar bread bowl dip service and the slight over-pricing makes me unenthusiastic about a return trip, and so my quest for the best late night bites in Pittsburgh continues.

Sushi Delivery from Hong Kong Taste

Posted on by

Hong Kong TasteThere are pros and cons to living on the margins of the Pittsburgh city limits. I pay about a third the rent that I would for a comparable apartment in Shadyside, while living in just as convenient proximity to all East End and North bank attractions. City of Pittsburgh proper is so close it occupies most of the view outside my front window, and yet there remains that one little river in between us, a simple geographical phenomenon that strikes so much consternation into the hearts of city dwellers. Why is it so daunting to cross a river in this city?

The river provides the biggest obstacle, it seems, to food delivery services. Sure, there are pizza delivery places everywhere, but that would entail wanting to order a pizza. My tastes have matured beyond delivery pizza in all but the rarest circumstances (i.e. those where the pizza is free and alternate food options are limited). The City of Pittsburgh is special case in the diversity of food delivery options, as it boasts the (as far as I know) unique service of Wheel Deliver and its more recent competitor/clone Meals Delivered which coordinate the delivery of food from multiple restaurants through a centralized dispatch/driver service. A fabulous service… for people who live within the delivery range. You have to draw the line somewhere, and the Allegheny river is the most convenient place to draw that line. Highland Park? Sure! Across the bridge? Sorry.

The other common delivery option available most places outside the city is hole-in-wall Chinese restaurant food, which has a somewhat dubious appeal. I’m rarely if ever desperate enough for delivery that I would resort to Chinese food (give me almost any other cuisine in Eurasia before Americanized Chinese restaurant food), and so I almost didn’t take a second look when a postcard flier for Hong Kong Taste showed up amidst my junk mail a few months back… but then I caught sight of its glossy photos of sushi.

Sushi… free delivery… in Etna?! Could it be true? While Chinese restaurants that serve sushi are just as dubiously Americanized as anything else, the fact remained, with the advent of Hong Kong Taste, I was now officially a resident within a sushi delivery zone!

Sushi Rolls from Hong Kong TasteIt just so happened over the weekend that a sushi craving coincided with a lazy Sunday. I debated whether I would be better served taking a quick trip to Whole Foods, my usual go to place for eat-at-home sushi, but the temptation of making an easy delivery call on a chilly winter day coupled with the appeal of supporting a local business tipped the scales and I decided to place an order with Hong Kong Taste.

I checked out their menu online and decided on three rolls, the Spicy Tuna roll, the Alaska roll and the Spicy Yellowtail roll. I probably should have opted for some nigri pieces in lieu of one roll, as the different types of rolls ended up being barely distinguishable, but I wanted to make sure I got a fairly filling meal for what I estimated would be about twenty bucks all told. The sushi prices at Hong Kong Taste are comparatively cheap (average of $4.99 for an eight piece roll), but it’s still sushi—you’re not going to get a burgeoning belly for pocket change.

So, I called up Hong Kong Taste at six o’clock to order my rolls and was promised a wait of thirty minutes to an hour. My rolls came on time at quarter to seven along with plenty of wasabi and ginger and several fortune cookies. Soy sauce, too, but I used my own low sodium soy sauce instead.

Finally, the moment of truth… the sushi was good. It’s not the world’s most phenomenal or revolutionary sushi. Nothing especially unique or creative, just good, basic, fresh sushi. As I said above, the rolls proved to be very similar, save for the dusting of roe on the Alaska roll, but that was partly my fault for ordering three such similar dishes. If I had ordered some nigri pieces, I would have had more to comment on, but as it was, I had a tasty and filling sushi dinner that came to $20, inclusive of tip.

Would I order from Hong Kong Taste again? Sure. Will it be my new go to place for take home sushi? Probably not, simply from a price standpoint. If I’m out and about in the city or ambitious enough to drive out to Whole Foods, I would probably opt to get sushi there, simply because I can get just as many pieces of sushi inclusive of nigri and rolls for about the same price and maybe a little less. The clear advantage of Hong Kong Taste is the delivery option, since when you consider tip and tax, you end up paying $20 for $15 worth of sushi, but that’s the nature of delivery, after all. You pay extra for the convenience of delivery, and if sushi’s what your craving, then Hong Kong Taste is a great place to do it.

Late Night Bites: The Pleasure Bar

Posted on by

The Pleasure BarI’ve always done my best to avoid the nine-to-five, and after a brief stint as a legal secretary in 2003, I’ve been largely successful. For the most part, I enjoy doing things at off hours; being at work or asleep during both sessions of rush hour traffic has undeniable appeal; grocery shopping is a breeze at 11pm. However, the one persistent difficulty I’ve found since the advent of a 10pm quittin’ time is restaurant patronage.

Sure, most bars are open and welcoming when I get out of work, but even those with restaurants attached stop offering food past a certain time. Too often kitchens close at 10pm, sometimes at 11pm (which is doable but can be a tight squeeze), and more rarely at midnight or 1am. I understand that it ceases to be advantageous for most restaurants to offer food after popular dinner times, and that a small number of restaurants will cater to the late night crowd, but finding those restaurants has proven more difficult than I expected.

A couple weeks ago I went to the Pleasure Bar after work on a Friday night. The Pleasure Bar is a venerable Pittsburgh institution located in the heart of the Liberty Avenue business district in Bloomfield. I’ve often dined there and drank there in the past, and it’s one of the few places in the city where I’ll go for Italian food (most Italian restaurants violate my primary law of eating out: Don’t eat food at a restaurant if I can made it better, easier and/or cheaper at home). It had been a couple years, however, since I’d eaten at the Pleasure Bar, and I had never attempted to grab a late night bite there, so I did some research ahead of time.

Inside the Pleasure BarDespite being a venerable Pittsburgh institution in business for over three decades, the Pleasure Bar does not have a website, so I had to pester their hard-working staff with a call to ask how late the kitchen would be open. I was told “Probably until 11:00″… which might help explain the lack of website, probablys being difficult to express in print.

And so, I made a point to leave work at ten on the dot, and put the pedal a little closer to the metal than usual in effort to arrive in Bloomfield by 10:30. On street parking was a breeze, and I was sitting at the bar asking if the kitchen was still open by 10:31. I was told: “For about two minutes.” Luckily, I had found amidst my research earlier that day a menu of their pub food on allmenus.com and so I was able to squeak my order in under the wire.

While I did not receive my order in the aforetold two minutes, service was swift and I quickly found myself with two piping hot appetizer plates and a chilly beverage. First up was an order of fried provolone that exemplified everything a gal could ask for in a plate of fried cheese: crisp breading, gooey center, hearty marinara on the side, a dusting of parmesan. The provolone wedges more than met my criteria for restaurant food, as I would never attempt to make fried cheese at home when such an ideal specimen is readily available at the Pleasure Bar for under five bucks.

My second appetizer was tasty, but mildly disappointing. The crab stuffed mushrooms came full of promise; sizable mushroom caps filled with quality lump crabmeat, baked in alfredo sauce and bubbling with baked cheese. How can you go wrong, right? While I was duly impressed with the quality of the crabmeat, I found that it lacked any sort of zip. A squeeze of lemon, a whisper of garlic, a dash of spice would have gone a long way to making these stuffed mushrooms delectable, but as it was, I found the dish a bit lackluster. Would I be able to make it better myself at home? Maybe. But would I have been able to make it cheaper? Definitely not. At $7.50 for a dish teeming with sweet lump crabmeat, these mushrooms are a great deal.

In fact, the Pleasure Bar proved to be an excellent bargain. Two quality appetizers and a couple of well drinks came to a total of $18, showing the Pleasure Bar to be a great option for starving creative types like me to find after work refreshment. Now, if only I had a better idea of how long the kitchen would “probably” be open, I would name the Pleasure Bar a prime spot for late night eating. As it is, this restaurant is a great spot for inexpensive Italian food, provided that you don’t incur any speeding tickets on your way to place the last order of the night.

The Great India Buffet Tour: Taste, Tamarind & Taj

Posted on by

There is just something about an Indian restaurant buffet that I find hard to beat. Being mildly obsessed with Indian cuisine, my drive to frequent Indian restaurants is far from surprising, but my particular affinity for the buffet bears special explanation as it is the seed of Sabrina’s and my idea for a progressive tour.

The buffet, of whatever ethnicity of food, is a controversial institution. Health nuts hate them, red-blooded American appetites love them… Perhaps the most compelling cuisine-conscious argument against the restaurant buffet is that the quality of food over the buffet represents a noticeable downgrade in quality from off-menu items.

Be that as it may, from my perspective, a cost-benefit assessment of the India Buffet makes it the most alluring choice for South Asian dining. My own growing skills in curry cookery will satisfy my cravings on the average day and make off-menu dining at your average Indian restaurant a questionable upgrade. Do most Indian restaurants cook with superior skill and authenticity to me? Probably. But will ordering two curries and a basket of naan make me happier than cooking two curries and warming up some store-bought naan? Probably not.

The beauty inherent in the India Buffet is that I cannot attempt to recreate it at home (without ludicrous and laborious effort), and I cannot order the full splendor of an Indian meal off the menu without spending a fortune for more food than I could eat in two weeks. The essential appeal of the India Buffet is bountiful variety. Not only do you get a choice of a few (or more) curries, but you get the condiments, the chutneys, the raitas, the breads, the dry vegetables, the desserts, the unexpected delights…

And so, when I told Sabrina two months ago that I had a craving for India Buffet, and we found ourselves stymied by the choices of restaurant, the idea for our India Buffet Tour was born. We have already made three stops on our tour of Indian restaurant buffets in the Greater Pittsburgh area. Let me catch you up on the results so far.

Taste of India, Bloomfield, 4320 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224

Sabrina, being a Lawrenceville dweller and Indian food aficionado, is such a fixture at Taste of India in Bloomfield that she is, more often than not, the reigning mayor on foursquare, but I had only ever tried food from the CMU cafeteria installation. Still, it was close to both of us, it had a buffet, and so it won out as our first stop on the tour.

The restaurant itself was rather empty with only two other tables occupied when we arrived. The buffet itself was much as expected with all the trimmings, the standard chutneys, rice, naan, kheer, a variety of curries, dry vegetable, green salad and tandoori chicken (the last two of which I always skip over). I was disappointed that day in the lack of color among the curries, specifically the lack of a spinach curry. I expect and enjoy having a variety of color in curries. Some red (makhani, tikka masala, madras, etc), some yellow, white or orange (kormas, dals, chana masala, etc), some green (saag/palak). I understand that buffet offerings change, but that day they were all basically red curries. There was a chicken tikka masala, a basic chicken curry, and a malai kofta. As it turned out the malai kofta was quite good, and something I would not have ventured to try off menu, but I was disappointed in the lack of color variety and specifically in the lack of spinach dishes.

On the upside, there was an unexpected delight in the form of lentil balls. Neither Sabrina nor I had tried this dish before and we were both pleasantly surprised. As it turns out, this is a chilled dish made from white lentils served in a yogurt sauce with garnishes of cilantro and tamarind. They were especially tasty and became an instant favorite.

All in all, the Taste of India offered good quality food and a good variety.

Tamarind, Flavor of India, Oakland, 257 N. Craig Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

The buffet at Tamarind came highly recommended by Sabrina, and so for our second stop about a month later I was eager to try out her recommendation. That recommendation came with a warning, however, that the buffet would be smaller. Indeed it was smaller than the Taste of India buffet, but not by as much as I had imagined when she first described it.

Smaller, perhaps, but I knew on first glance that the dishes were certainly more unique. Their coconut chutney was a first for me and a welcome change from the usual coriander, tamarind and random pickle. There was naan, of course, but also a savory pastry that resembled small donuts. The curry selection was much more up to my colorful expectations, and I was especially impressed by the presence of a lamb saag. Since I am generally unenthusiastic about chicken, a lamb dish on a buffet was quite exciting… and spinach, nonetheless!

The difference in quality was apparent from the first bite. Whether it was the spice blends or the freshness of the ingredients, I could not say for certain, but the food at the Tamarind lunch buffet was definitely a cut above. The flavors were more intriguing and complex than at Taste. The lamb saag was particularly good, as was an eggplant and cauliflower dish (Sabrina was less impressed than I was with the latter), but nothing on this buffet was a disappointment.

Tamarind took a clear and early lead.

Taj Mahal, Ross Township, 7795 McKnight Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15237

Having a little more time to spare over the holidays, we decided to make our more-or-less monthly buffet trip a bit early. After crunching schedules and evaluating our remaining options, we decided on the Taj Mahal restaurant on McKnight Road, which has a lunch buffet and a dinner buffet, such that it seems whenever they are open there is undoubtedly a buffet.

We attended the dinner buffet on a weekday evening. The building is tarp-draped and under renovation, and no wonder, because even though the seating was only about half capacity, it still felt cramped inside.

Perhaps it was the ambiance, but perhaps it was the enormity of the buffet. The advantage of the Taj Mahal buffet was undeniable even on first sight. It was at least twice as large as the Taste of India buffet with offerings I had not seen anywhere else. There were all the requisite vegetable curries, chana masala, vegetable korma, as well as a few chicken curries and even a goat curry. More impressive there was an entire vegetarian wing with paneer tikka masala and vegetable biryani, along with a peculiar Chinese-style tofu dish. Chutneys were numerous, as were appetizers including fritters and papaddams, the peppery crackers served as a standard warm-up at many sit-down, off-menu restaurants. The dessert selection was also large, with a mango mousse, kheer, a peculiar puffy pancake and a too-sweet blood-orange candy.

The bounty of the Taj buffet was exciting, though ultimately the quality was standard. All the curries were enjoyable, but the quality was not up to par with Tamarind. The highlights for me were the paneer tikka masala, the piquant sauce of the goat curry (still undecided about the goat meat itself), and the papaddams which made a surprisingly tasty, spicy and not-too-filling starchy complement to use in alternation with the naan. Lentil balls were a welcome chance to revisit the flavors we had come to enjoy at Taste of India, but weren’t quite as good as those at Taste, lacking some of the extra fresh flavor of the garnishes we had enjoyed the first time.

In the end, we decided that Tamarind still won out on the basis of far superior taste quality to our other buffet stops, but Taj Mahal gets definite points for the vast and various offerings of its dinner buffet.