Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [65]
Sunday is a great day to dine at People’s if you don’t mind crowds and a wait, for locals and visitors fill the place with the joy of family weekend dining. We also love coming when only a few regulars occupy the counter seats, very early in the morning, when we feast on either old-fashioned oatmeal or “baked oatmeal,” which is like a coarse-textured bread pudding made with cooked oats and brown sugar. Another excellent breakfast, and a true Mid-Atlantic specialty, is creamed chipped beef. This is the real stuff—spicy shreds of brined beef in a rich cream sauce, ladled over a plate of crusty fried potato discs. Of course, you can also get a dish of expertly crisped scrapple, and eggs are guaranteed to be from local hens.
Primanti Bros.
46 W. 18th St.
412–263–2142
Pittsburgh, PA
Always open | $
If you like big sandwiches, you need to eat around Pittsburgh. In this brawny city, where the Big Mac was invented in 1968 by a local McDonald’s franchise, “the more the merrier” is the basic rule of sandwich-making. The city’s champion of huge sandwiches is Primanti Bros., a raucous open-all-night beer-and-sandwich joint that throbs with the play-by-play broadcast of whatever local team is in action. Opened in 1933, the original Primanti’s down in the Strip District is a city shrine where walls are painted with caricatures of native sons who range from Andy Warhol to Mr. Rogers and Tom Mix to Roberto Clemente. (There are three other Primanti Bros. around town; none of those is open round the clock.)
The astonishing sandwiches were originally designed for truckers who hauled produce to the nearby wholesale market. While their trucks were being unloaded, they dashed over to Primanti Bros. with a big appetite but little time to eat a dagwood, slaw, and potatoes separately. The solution was to load hot French fries directly into the sandwich atop the customer’s meat of choice, then top the fries with Pittsburgh-style (no mayo) coleslaw and a few slices of tomato. The sandwiches are assembled at the grill behind the bar at the speed of light, so when the sandwich is delivered, the fries and grilled meats are still steaming hot, the slaw and tomato cool.
Weird as this combination sounds, the regulars at Primanti’s tables assert that such combinations as double-egg and pastrami (both sizzled on the grill) or steak and cheese simply do not taste right without a layer of crisp-fried potatoes and another of slaw. The barely hoistable meal is presented wrapped in butcher paper so that when appetite flags, the paper’s edges can be gathered to pick up the spillage.
Robert Wholey & Co.
1501 Penn Ave.
412–261–3377
Pittsburgh, PA
LD | $
Located in Pittsburgh’s appetite-inducing Strip District, Robert Wholey & Co. seems more like a culinary amusement park than a mere store. It has a toy train and singing mechanical pigs to amuse children and an extensive kitchenware department to amuse recipe-obsessed adults.
Once strictly a wholesale fish market, Wholey now carries a vast inventory of foodstuffs that range from baked ham by the haunch (or sliced superthin, aka chipped, the way Pittsburghers like it) to sides of tuna that are cut into steaks to order. For those of us who demand immediate gratification, there are a few makeshift tables for sit-down meals at the end of a cooked food line, and more tables upstairs in the Pittsburgh Room. The meal most people come to eat is a fish sandwich on a tender, butter-rich bun. It is made of cod sizzled in the bubbling fry