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Friday, August 11, 2000
By Woodene Merriman, Post-Gazette Dining Critic
By 6:45 on a Saturday night, the diners are starting to come in waves. By 7:15 p.m., Hartwood Restaurant is jammed. And I suspect some of those people looking through the bookshelves are waiting for a table.
It's called "kill the chef," a game that hungry Pittsburghers play every Friday and Saturday night. Everybody wants to eat at 7 p.m.
We had a 6:30 reservation, beating the crowd. Before they are seated, we're well into our shrimp wontons with spicy Thai ginger glaze, one of the best appetizers I've had in Pittsburgh in months, maybe years. The four crisp wontons, each one cradling a big shrimp, are attractively arranged on a puddle of the sweet and spicy glaze, which is really more of a sauce. The combination of flavors and textures is sublime.
His Honor is ecstatic -- not about the wontons, which he also likes a lot -- but about all the different bottles of wine he sees passing our table. Lots of nice wines, he says. Some tables have two bottles; one table has a magnum and two smaller bottles. These are his kind of people.
Like everybody else, we brought our own -- a Chehalem chardonnay from Oregon. Last time, I forgot to tell H.H. the Hartwood Restaurant is BYOB and we had no wine. Have you ever seen a grown man cry at the dinner table? For a while, I thought I was going to.
Two chefs from Mama's Fish House on the Hawaiian island of Maui are creating all the excitement at this new restaurant in a bookstore, the Bookworks Cafe. Eddie Myers and Alison Crispin had moved to this area, fortunately for us, about the time architect Don Montgomery was ready to open a restaurant at his wife Molly's book store.
Mama's Fish House is a fine restaurant; H.H. and I have eaten there many times. So it's not surprising that the Hartwood is specializing in fresh fish prepared the way you might get it in Hawaii. It's not exactly the same; it's impossible to duplicate the taste of fish that came out of the water that day, but Hartwood comes close. Also, it's less expensive here; Pittsburghers would never pay the dinner tabs of Mama's Fish House, owner Montgomery points out.
The menu is brief and changes weekly. If you like fish, you can always count on finding a crab cake appetizer, two or three specials such as mahi mahi, salmon, Chilean sea bass, soft shell crab and maybe a pasta with shrimp and crab. The Hartwood crab cake, which has no filling and no mayonnaise, is golden brown on top and comes in a sweet, orange-colored papaya basil sauce that gives it a little kick.
But Pittsburghers love steak. So every night a filet or strip steak is available. And beef has become a big seller. Tonight it's filet mignon with caramelized red onions. Kalbi lamb chops, marinated in a sweet shoyu and sesame mango mint sauce, are often on the menu. You've never heard of Kalbi lamb? Neither had I. It doesn't mean a thing, the server assured us. It's just a made-up name.
A vegetarian dish is always on the menu, or the kitchen will create one. The vegetarian pasta I'm having has small cubes of deep-fried, panko-crusted tofu atop the linguine, and a ginger, soy and cilantro sauce. It's excellent. I wish I hadn't told H.H. those tasty cubes were soy; he would never have known.
Some dishes, like the shrimp wontons and the crab cake appetizer, are so well flavored it's surprising to find other dishes utterly bland. The grilled mahi mahi, the wasabi mashed potatoes and the zucchini and yellow squash combo we've had were all bland. I rarely salt anything, but found myself reaching for the salt and pepper shakers.
Hartwood has an outstanding house salad, which has capers, marinated artichoke hearts, thinly sliced red onions, thin pieces of carrot and jicama cut into butterfly shapes, blue cheese and baby greens, with a balsamic vinaigrette. Crispin makes the salads, and she's fussy, Montgomery tattles. "We throw away half the greens we buy." And if you spot an edible flower in your salad, that's the influence of Karen Guthrie, Montgomery's partner, who handles the artistic details, like flowers and candles on the tables.
Scott Bruce, formerly of the Chartiers Country Club, is the soup specialist who comes up with combinations like the cauliflower and cheese combo we had tonight. Good, but a little more cheese would have been nice. Two kinds of bread -- a baguette and a light rye -- are in the bread basket. Each night the chefs send out a little gift from the kitchen. Tonight it was two tiny crackers with an artichoke dip inside. Another night, it was two small skewers of fruit-- a grape, a blueberry, a piece of honeydew cut into a star shape, and a round of watermelon on the bottom.
Desserts, just three of them, are made at the restaurant. You can't miss with the chocolate drop cake, a flourless cake that's dense and not overly sweet, or the vanilla dream, two scoops of ice cream, chef-made caramel sauce and marinated berries. I have yet to try the Hartwood ice.
At this time of year, you can sit outside and listen to the cars go by on Harts Run Road. You can eat in what Montgomery calls "the little red room" that he added to the back of the bookstore. Or you can eat in between the bookshelves inside the store. This type of restaurant is new to Pittsburgh, I think, but popular in cities like Washington, D.C., and Boston, which is Montgomery's hometown.
The Bookworks Cafe and Hartwood Restaurant are in a building that once was the headquarters for the Harmar Mining Co. Just across the driveway is another business in the old scale house. If you go, watch carefully for the restaurant. The sign is small and it's easy to whiz right by.
Hartwood Restaurant
3400 Harts Run Road, Indiana/Hampton line
412-767-3500
Hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 5-9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 5-10 p.m.The basics: Pacific Rim cuisine; entree and salad, $18-$26; soup, $3.50; appetizers, $6-8; desserts $5; parking behind restaurant; seats about 75, plus 25 more on terrace; smoking permitted only on part of terrace, no smoking inside; BYOB, with $1.50 a person stem charge; wheelchair accessible; can get noisy when busy; major credit cards, except Discover.The last word: 3 1/2 strs