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Friday, November 26, 1999 By Woodene Merriman, Post-Gazette Dining Critic
It didn't take the people of Fox Chapel long to figure out that The Ripe Tomato is more than a little pizza shop.
One of those cooks behind the counter -- maybe even the one tossing the pizza dough into the air -- is the former chef at Mount Washington's Georgetowne Inn, Jeffery Clyde.
Besides pizza, he has a small menu of pastas and dinners called "Chef Jeff's specialties." Most people around the small dining room tonight seem to have ordered the dinners. The folks eating pizza in the booth behind us are an exception.
"Why do they have glasses of wine?" asked one of the pouting pizza-eaters as she pointed to our table.
"Because they ordered one of Chef Jeff's specialties," the waitress replied. "We give a complimentary glass of wine with those dinners."
It's a nice gesture. The red wine is nothing special, as His Honor points out, but even he isn't going to complain when the wine is free. Besides, it's a generous serving.
When Clyde took over the wings and pizza shop in February, he started adding dinners such as penne vodka and chicken marsala to the menu. They caught on quickly. One night, he says, it seemed like everybody in the restaurant ordered the pretty pink penne vodka. (Smart people. Clyde's half-cream, half-tomato sauce is excellent. Pieces of prosciutto are sautéed with fresh garlic and basil, then flamed with vodka and stirred into the sauce before it goes onto the penne.)
What surprises and pleases us is the attention to detail and quality at The Ripe Tomato, despite the relatively low prices. (The highest-priced dinner on the menu, New York strip steak, is $14.95.)
The usual shaker of that sawdust-like Parmesan cheese is on the table. But the waitress hand-grinds fresh Parmesan onto my penne vodka. Order a buffalo mozzarella and tomato salad, and she brings out a bottle of excellent balsamic vinegar to sprinkle on top.
Dinners at this so-called pizza shop start with a house salad of mesclun greens and a bit of radicchio with dressing on the side, served that way without asking. (I must point out that one night those mesclun greens were limp, showing signs of having been put on the plate and held in the refrigerator. Tonight, though, they're great.)
Warm rolls arrive on a dinner plate, circling a pool of seasoned olive oil. A side of grilled vegetables has strips of onions, zucchini, eggplant, red and green pepper in the mix. If you prefer a side of pasta, it comes with a fresh marinara sauce.
Clyde makes the marinara every day. He makes the soups, too. The clam Florentine soup tonight is good, but a tad salty.
Clyde went into partnership with the former owner at first, but now is on his own. He started with six employees and no fanfare. "Just opened the door," he likes to say. Now he has 20 employees (some of them bumping into each other as they hustle around in the open kitchen) and is on his second menu, growing as he goes.
It's a bright, light and clean-looking restaurant, with a few booths and wooden tables and chairs close together. When it's crowded, children are laughing as they draw with crayons on the white paper table covers, and tables and chairs are being pushed around the white tile floor, it can get noisy.
Clyde's about to take out the brick, wood-burning oven because it bakes only three pizzas at a time, and he can't keep up with orders. A more conventional pizza oven beside it does most of the pizza baking.
The variety of toppings for the pizza is almost endless. The pizza I like is the veggie, a four-cut brushed with olive oil and garlic, topped with fire-roasted marinated vegetables and some Parmesan cheese. H.H. wasn't so enthusiastic. "Where's the pepperoni?" he kept asking the night we had it.
The North Atlantic salmon dinner is more to his taste. It's a deeper pink than much of the salmon served at Pittsburgh restaurants, and is grilled with a raspberry and caper vinaigrette butter. "Light and delicious!" it says on the menu. "A little dry," says H.H.
He found no fault, though, with the veal piccata special we had one night. The tender pieces of veal were sautéed in a lemon wine sauce and served with capers and mushrooms. Actually, it looked like someone had spilled the bottle of capers onto our serving.
The veal piccata is part of a "specials" menu Chef Clyde has been trying. On it, too, are veal Parmesan, chicken piccata and shrimp jardiniere, which has lots of shrimp and finely cut vegetables in the lemon-garlic sauce tossed with fettuccine. Once he's decided the specials are a success, and the staff is trained to prepare them, he'll add them to the menu and start trying and teaching some new specials.
Rolls and desserts are from Periwinkle's in the same shopping strip. Even though I'm tired of tiramisu, Periwinkle's version is terrific.
Now, seven months after opening, about 30 percent of The Ripe Tomato's business is take-out. And it's not all pizza. "Fox Chapel people order dinners," Clyde says. "I delivered a New York strip steak dinner at noon today."
Fox Chapel people know a good deal, too. By the time we're ready to leave, there's a waiting line. And a lot of them are carrying those tell-tale brown bags with wine bottles.
The Ripe Tomato
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Hours: Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sunday, 4-10 p.m.