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Friday, November 19, 1999 By Woodene Merriman, Post-Gazette Dining Critic
Can a Pittsburgh restaurant sell more duck strudel than fried zucchini?
That was the question five years ago when the Stone Mansion restaurant opened in Franklin Park.
The answer? "No," says owner Don Mervis, "it can't. But it comes darn close."
The problem with the duck strudel is the name, he says. People don't understand what it is -- roasted duck with stir-fried vegetables and plum sauce, wrapped in puff pastry. It's served as an appetizer at dinner, an entree at lunch. Once they try it, most people like it.
It has become a signature dish at the Stone Mansion and will stay on the new menu being devised by Mervis and chef George Wertheimer. Also coming up: bru-schetta and frogs' legs as appetizers, filet medallions bordelaise instead of filet mignon, veal with morels, osso buco and crab cakes made with colossal lump crab meat as entrees.
Mervis, who was general manager and maitre d' at Rico's in Ross before he struck out on his own, knows Pittsburghers' tastes well. The best seller, he's predicting, will be the crab cakes.
Two popular entrees staying on the new menu are duck breast jubilee and pork porterhouse ochos rios, a one-pound, very thick cut of pork, rubbed with Jamaican jerk spice and grilled. Mervis says he knows one customer who has eaten at the Stone Mansion probably 30 times and ordered the pork porterhouse 25 times.
I learned all this by speaking on the phone with Mervis, and it surprises me. Before the conversation, His Honor and I had ordered the duck breast and the pork one recent evening and were disappointed with both entrees. The menu description of the duck breast says it is "boneless maple leaf duck breast seared and complemented with a bing cherry sauce." The little slices of duck breast, artfully arranged on the plate with a rice timbale, baby zucchini, red pepper and other colorful vegetables, were dry and overdone.
Ditto for my pork porterhouse. It was spectacular-looking, surrounded by a caramelized Bermuda onion and apple marmalade, with crisp-tender strips of carrot and green beans filling out the plate. But it was dry. Today's pork does not need to be cooked so long that it loses all juiciness.
The vegetables, incidentally, were so good we had a difficult time understanding why they were so bad when we had dinner at the Stone Mansion a couple of weeks earlier. That night mixed vegetables were served with both entrees, and the broccoli was overcooked and soft. "It's early in the evening," H.H. pointed out. "What's the broccoli going to be like by 8 p.m.?"
Aside to the staff at Stone Mansion: While you're redoing the menu, consider instructing whoever assembles the salads to stop drowning them. The leaf lettuce with cucumber slices and halves of cherry tomatoes is nice enough, and so is the raspberry vinaigrette. But I'm weary of watching H.H. prop one side of his salad plate up on a fork so the dressing drains off.
Enough complaining. There is plenty to like about the Stone Mansion. The building itself is a treasure, with lots of stained glass and dark carved wood dating back to the 1930s. There are eight dining rooms of varying sizes, plus the lounge and a shower room (honest!) on the ground floor just big enough for a table of four good friends.
The big lounge, with its vaulted ceiling and high-backed banquettes along two walls, center bar and a large, usually burning fireplace at one end, is a pleasant spot for dinner, too. On Wednesdays through Saturdays you can listen to Etta Cox or other local entertainers as you dine.
We highly recommend the sea scallops gorgonzola as an appetizer. The fresh sea scallops (I didn't count, but there must have been 10 of them) were lightly sautéed and served tumbling out of a scallop shell, accompanied by a little of the creamy sauce and finely chopped red, green and yellow pepper.
Especially good, too, was the veal Tuscany, which has prosciutto and sun-dried tomatoes, finished with a sage-scented rose wine sauce, and the crab and shrimp portabella. For this entree, the big mushroom cap is flattened in the middle of the plate and topped with jumbo lump crabmeat. The big sautéed shrimp ring the plate.
Dinners average $19 or $20, including the salad.
One of the few desserts made in-house is milk chocolate macadamia nut torte, but the new menu will have a house-made chocolate truffle dessert, too. Usually there are several dessert specials, too, such as an excellent pumpkin cheesecake we had one night.
The lunch menu has six specials every day, all for $10 or less, plus a standing menu. Virginia spots provencale, for example, accompanied by a salad and a side dish, is $8.50.
Like the menu, the wine list is changing. It's already an excellent list, proclaimed so the last three years by none other than Wine Spectator magazine. Mervis had as many as 200 selections, but is trimming it to 175 while trying also to improve the quality of the list.
We got caught in the action, I suspect. H.H. saw a Sonoma County pinot noir, one he didn't know, believe it or not, on the wine list at a reasonable price and ordered it. The staff hunted in the wine cellar and couldn't find it.
At the server's suggestion, he switched the order to a bottle of Gloria Ferrer pinot noir. Another wait while they hunted but didn't find it. At the server's suggestion again, we ordered a more expensive 1995 King Estates pinot noir from Oregon. We would be charged only the price of the less expensive pinot noir, she said. That's standard practice in most better restaurants, of course, but it helps make up for the irritation of waiting and waiting for your wine.
By the time the bottle arrived, in fact, we had eaten half our duck strudel and what was left was getting cold. It was amazing, though, how much better the last of the duck strudel tasted. The wine seemed to bring out the intense flavor of the duck and its sauce.
H.H. gave the pinot noir his highest compliment. "A very nice wine," he said.
Stone Mansion Restaurant
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Hours: Lunch, Monday-Friday, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; dinner, Monday-Thursday, 4:30-10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 4:30-11 p.m. Closed Sunday.