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Friday, June 13, 2003

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

On a recent Wednesday evening, a group of hungry people -- including two out-of-towners -- headed up Arlington Avenue on the South Side toward Allentown, a hilltop neighborhood that isn't exactly known as a dining mecca.

Paul Johnson prepares shrimp at Alla Famiglia in Allentown. (Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette) Alla Famiglia 804 E. Warrington Ave. Allentown 412-488-1440 HOURS: Dinner, 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 4 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. BASICS: Spicy Sicilian cooking, with an emphasis on seafood, in a charmingly renovated storefront building with only eight tables. BYOB. Reservations recommended. No smoking. Visa, American Express and MasterCard accepted. Not wheelchair accessible. Free parking on side of building. Entrees range from $17 pasta dishes to $45 double veal chop. The price of each entree includes complimentary bottled water, bread, salad, and three dips: goat cheese spread, chick pea condiment and olive oil.

The visitors were looking for a taste of the "real" Pittsburgh -- which could mean anything, but on this night meant charming and unpretentious -- so we were going to Alla Famiglia, an old 19th-century storefront that was formerly the Hilltop Diner. The place wasn't hard to spot: There's large, flowing Italian script painted on the building's one exposed brick wall by the parking lot, which, translated, says: "My father taught me the things I know that I will teach my sons: honor, respect and tradition."

If that's not the "real" Pittsburgh, what is?

The out-of-towners loved it, and they loved Errol, the apron'd waiter who jumped up from a table in the back to welcome us, like long lost friends, escorting us to one of the restaurant's eight tables (six in front, two in back). There's exposed brick and Verdi on the stereo. The 17-foot, pressed-tin ceilings are original, while elaborate bamboo fans whir slowly overhead. The diners sit on one side of the room; the kitchen's on the other, complete with 25-foot-long custom-made copper stove hood -- a sign, perhaps, that the proprietor is serious about food?

He is.

Alla Famiglia is the brainchild of Pittsburgh restaurant veteran David Ayn (of Davio and Mi Scusi -- both in Beechview -- and formerly of Palio, Murphy's Back Room, Fallen Angel and on and on). He originally planned Alla Famiglia, he says, "as a retirement gift to myself, a place where I could go and cook Sicilian food for my friends." But Ayn's schedule made it impossible to be the chef there full time, so he hired Paul Johnson, a Greenfield native who spent many years working at upscale resorts and hotels in Florida and Atlanta before returning home.

Johnson cooks for up to 32 people at a time, but when he does, it's like having your own personal chef a few feet away. You can hear the sizzle when he throws the salmon on the charcoal grill, hear him chopping and thwacking and steaming. That same grilled salmon ($29), by the way, was served piping hot with crabmeat and peapods in a mustard cream sauce, the salmon smoky and crunchy and sweet, mingling with large chunks of the best crab doused in an expertly concocted sauce of cream, butter and whole grain mustard.

Wait a minute. That last dish is French food, not Sicilian.

Ayn shrugs a bit. "We're flexible," he says, and in the next breath reminds me that Napoleon, a well-known Frenchman, once occupied Sicily, a majestic island whose status as a trading crossroads from ancient Greek and Roman times is reflected today in the Italian, French, North African and Middle Eastern influences of its sweet-yet-tart, sunny, spicy cuisine.

There is lots of grilled seafood in Sicilian cooking, and that's the mainstay of Alla Famiglia's menu, along with currants, olives, lemons, oranges, capers, raisins, nuts, peppers -- and tomatoes, but you'll rarely find them saucing an Eggplant Parmesan or spaghetti with meatballs. Instead, you'll find them roasted with pan-fried shrimp, scallops, lobster and artichoke hearts in lemon butter ($29). Or you can forego tomatoes altogether and order swordfish grilled with rosemary ($24) and still be authentically Sicilian. A pan-fried veal dish is dressed with seedless grapes, roasted walnuts and, in a touch of non-Sicilian luxury, colossal lump crabmeat ($34). There's also a simple linguine with anchovies and oil-cured black olives ($19). Even the 12-ounce filet mignon had a spicy Sicilian twist -- a pizzaiola version, topped with melted buffalo mozzarella and doused with sweet peppers, hot peppers, onions and plum tomatoes, and served in the juices from the steak that were reduced with some of Johnson's homemade marinara. The result was hot, hot, hot.

Did you bring your own spicy shiraz to go with those powerfully flavored dishes? Well, Errol will bring out glasses for the wine -- but oenophiles, look out: These are tall narrow drinking glasses, the kind served in Italian cafes, not goblets (some regulars have been known, though, to keep their own wine glasses there to have on hand).

Alla Famiglia isn't cheap. Many of the entrees are upwards of $30, and the double veal chop is $45. (Don't despair, though: cavatappi -- corkscrew pasta -- in fiery hot arrabiata tomato sauce is only $19.) To avoid sticker shock, be sure to ask how much the featured dishes of the evening cost.

You will get what you pay for, and more: Besides homemade bread and complimentary bottled Panna water, each entree comes with a robust salad of bitter greens, radicchio, olives, walnuts and ripe Gorgonzola cheese; crusty Italian bread that is baked on the premises every day; and three tempting starters. There's caprolini, a soft goat cheese spread mashed with Moroccan and Sicilian olives, roasted red peppers and toasted walnuts; ceccinini, cubed provolone, feta and ricotta salata cheeses, Moroccan olives, sliced chilies and garlic; and a third dish -- "Holy Oil" -- reprising those same ingredients in a deep fruity olive oil.

Despite these goodies, don't hesitate to order antipasti, which goes way beyond the rolled salami-and-pickled-green-peppers platter. There's sweet, perfectly fresh calamari -- not just the rings but the tentacles too -- quick fried with field greens and punched up with a little red hot chili and fresh oregano ($8). But the real showstopper is a trifolata of mushrooms ($8) featuring three different kinds of mushrooms sauteed with raisins and currants and finished with moscato -- a sweet Italian wine -- and cream. The result is so simple, and so sumptuous, almost like dessert before dinner.

Did I mention dessert? On the two nights we were there, there was only one on the menu, but oh, what a dessert it was: the richest, heaviest, dampest, drunkest tiramisu -- strawberry flavored one evening, almond the next (I was only drinking water, but this particular concoction gave me a hangover the next day, I swear). On other nights, you might get homemade cheesecake, pie or cannoli, whatever strikes the mood of chef Johnson, who admits he doesn't have an Italian bone in his body ("I'm half Irish, half American Indian").

While Alla Famiglia's style can best be described as Italian-hole-in-the-wall, it's most definitely four-star Italian-hole-in-wall, with cooking so incandescent in its simplicity and execution that Alla Famiglia has fast become, since it opened four years ago, one of Pittsburgh's best-known dining "secrets."

Four stars, you say? For a BYOB whose linen tablecloths are covered in plastic? With no mile-long wine list? No maitre d'?

So sue me. It's not four-star dazzle in the same way as Baum Vivant, Laforet or Isabela on Grandview. But Alla Famiglia happens to do simple Sicilian food, not to mention simple Italian food, better than anyone in Pittsburgh, so why not acknowledge it as the best of its kind?

Ayn's "retirement gift" to himself is a gift to all of us. Let's just hope he doesn't move to Florida.