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Downtown & The Cultural District, East Liberty, Lawrenceville, Shadyside, Strip District, Friendship & Penn Ave Arts District, Oakland, North Side, South Side, Squirrel Hill 

Nine On Nine, the latest arrival on the high-toned dining scene in downtown Pittsburgh, plans to serve nine-course tasting menus and $100 make-your-own martinis. “We don’t know if Pittsburgh is ready for us,” says chef Richard DeShantz. “But we thought if we were going to do this, we should go high end.”

“We said, ‘Let’s drop something on the city it’s never seen before,’” says Michael Pijanowski, who along with his fiancé, Courtney Lynch, are partners with DeShantz in this ambitious venture at the corner of Ninth Street and Penn Avenue in the Cultural District. All three are native Pittsburgh thirty-somethings.

Going high end at Nine On Nine reflects trends in fine dining here and nationally. Have a tasting of duck that includes breast, leg confit and foie gras. Try a duo of veal – the braised shank and the sautéed sweetbreads. Or the Pittsburgh surf-n-turf: a grilled filet and a lobster pierogie.

In a word, it’s variety: tasting menus with a number of small plates, a selection of several wines by the glass with different courses, innovative cocktails with unusual blends of ingredients.

“Diners are looking for excitement and exciting options,” says Bill Fuller, executive chef of the big Burrito restaurant group that includes Eleven, Casbah, Kaya and Soba, all among the city’s top eateries. “Small plates allow them to get five or more items to share for the price of one dinner”. The result is more variety for the dollar.”

It may have started with “tapas,” the Spanish word for a lid or cover that’s morphed into a term for hot and cold appetizers often eaten in a shared, grazing fashion.

Among Fuller’s restaurants, Kaya, a Strip District bistro, features small plates called “tropas” – a contraction of “tropical” and “tapas” -- tropical cuisine served in small portions. Soba, on Ellsworth Avenue in Shadyside, puts the accent on Asian foods in the small plate format. Fuller likens them to the puu-puu appetizer platters long a staple of Chinese restaurants. In Middle Eastern or Mediterranean restaurants, the small plates are called mezze. “These restaurants are for people who like to graze,” he says.

The selfish way to graze without sharing, and perhaps the epitome of the small plate concept, is the “tasting” menu. Fuller says his group’s flagship restaurant, Eleven, on Smallman Street in the Strip, offers a tasting menu of six courses so diners can sample more kinds of foods at one sitting. They run from $45 per person (vegetarian) to $65; matching wines add $30.

The wine and dine

The other big offering for food and wine lovers is the wine dinner, special courses with wines that compliment them. Kevin Joyce, owner of The Carlton and a veteran of the city’s fine dining scene, says he’s now hosting two to three wine dinners a month. His Spring Mountain Wine Dinner brought in 85 guests. Another dinner featuring the wine selected by the chairman of Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board sold out, with 200 diners paying from $79 to $129 per person for the event.

Joyce says The Carlton has a $750,000 wine inventory and now serves 40 wines by the pour as a way to draw patrons. An additional lure, he says, is the free limousine service he provides to ferry customers to and from the Cultural District for performances. He says that sets him back $75,000 a year and so far it’s been worth it.

Joyce, president of the statewide Pennsylvania Restaurant Association, traces elegant eating from posh hotel dining rooms and exclusive private clubs to outstanding individual restaurants, some of which grew into upscale chains. Over the last two decades, Pittsburgh’s Renaissance high rise office buildings provided space and a reliable base of expense-account clientele for branches of Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in the PPG Center, Morton’s of Chicago Steakhouse in Dominion Tower, and Palomino in Gateway Center. The Carlton is in One Mellon Center; Café Euro is in the U.S. Steel Tower. And now, in the new Marriott on Penn Avenue, the Sonoma Grille offers a variety of small plates and an extensive selection--more than 300 kinds--of wine.

The art of cooking

Another recent entrant in downtown high-end dining is Six Penn Kitchen, in a corner four-story building at Penn Avenue and Sixth Street in the Cultural District. It’s the first upscale creation of the financially successful Eat’nPark restaurant chain based here for more than 50 years. The director of concept development is Mark Broadhurst, the third generation of the family operation. He says his company’s departure from serving basic family food at suburban drive-in restaurants to establish a fancy eatery reflects Eat’nPark’s commitment to the city’s revival.

Six Penn Kitchen’s American bistro cuisine fosters the slow food (as opposed to fast food) movement. “We’re braising, roasting, brining, confiting, and smoking our food,” he says.

“The pork shank served on Friday has to be started on Tuesday. First we brine it; then we confit it at a low temperature in it’s own fat. Then we flash fry it for a crispy exterior. These are old world cooking techniques. We’re taking our time to get the true flavors out.”

Chef Richard DeShantz says his cooking at Nine On Nine is all about art. A graduate of Langley High School in Sheridan and the Pittsburgh Culinary Institute, DeShantz says he actually sketches his meals on paper before he prepares them. “I just see things, and I’ve always been artistic,” he says. “I’m a perfectionist; I see every plate before it goes out of the kitchen. I usually garnish it myself.”

DeShantz admits it’s easier to do this when you have 14 tables seating about 52 people as Nine On Nine does. If he had a 200-seat restaurant, he says, the menu would have to appeal to a broader range of culinary appetites.

As menus vary and ingredients and recipes become more exotic, so the prices keep rising.

Modest chicken and pasta dishes are climbing into the high twenty-dollar range. Traditionally pricey entrees of beef, lamb, and fresh seafood have pushed through the thirty-dollar threshold, and like gasoline prices, show no real signs of sliding back.

Bill Fuller, who’s been described as Pittsburgh’s resident philosopher-chef, has even taken to comparing meal prices to a fill-up at the gas station. “That’s a one-tank dinner,” he says of a meal costing $40 or $50. He worries customers will start making the same comparison, especially when they realize dinner for a couple or a family may be costing three, four, or five tanks. For that kind of money, it has to be memorable, he says.

Somewhat ironically, Fuller says he’d actually like to see Americans cook at home more so they’ll value dining out more. “They’ll understand all the trouble we go to and appreciate what we’re trying to do for them.” But he doesn’t recommend using that as an excuse to stay home the next time the chief cook at your house wants to go out.

Gregg Ramshaw is a writer and a former producer of PBS' Newshour. HIs last story for Pop City was on tissue engineering.

except Six Penn images, courtesy of Six Penn