Sewickley Speakeasy as dinner theater

I really enjoyed the Sewickley Speakeasy. The food wasn't great, but food isn't the real focus of this place. The Sewickley Speakeasy is about ambience and culture. The ambience and culture of the 1950's dinner clubs. It's unself-consciously weird, very friendly, and very, very local.

We drove up the driveway from Route 65. There is no place to park other than the restaurant lot. At the top of the driveway, we came to the valet parking road block. One cannot park one's car oneself. One must allow the valet to park the car in a spot about 25 steps from the front door. No ticket, one simply points to the car after dinner. And one immediately gets an idea of the kind of ambience the Speakeasy wants to project.

We ate on the outdoor patio. I had a lovely view of trees, a large motorboat parked on a trailer, and someone's small well-used grill. Every 5-7 minutes a train went past. A really, really loud train, whistling and clacking and everything. Every 5-7 minutes. So dinner goes like this: look at the menu, train, order drinks, talk about what we'll order, train, get drinks, order, train, talk, train, talk, food comes, train. You get the picture.

I've written three paragraphs without mentioning food. This will give you an idea of the experience. Food is only one part that blends into the quirky whole. I can categorize the food into three groups: 1. deep fried, 2. with butter, and 3. deep fried with butter. Yum. There are salads and vegetables, but they're really like garnish- an obligatory green touch to the overwhelming brown or beige palette of the menu.

What do I mean by that? Well, you can have filet medallions with butters and sauces. Filet medallions are unspecified cuts of beef cut into round shapes. Or chicken breasts fried in butters and sauces. Or salmon fried in butters and sauces. Fried shrimp, lamb chops in butters and sauces, mashed potatoes, french fries. I ordered broccoli with my meal even though I don't really like broccoli. I just couldn't face a plate of beige food.

I started with a not very tasty martini with soggy olives. That's the one spot where the Speakeasy broke character. A place like this should have fab martinis. The salads were predictably uninteresting. The bread was a nice suprise- warm and crusty, though the inside was wonderbread-soft and white. Actually, I'm saying it's white out of pure memory association. It was getting darker outside, and the Speakeasy is experienced enough to know that we didn't really want to see the pools of butter we were about to eat. (Our server did bring out a candle after we asked.)

My entree was crab cakes, and Jim had a beef medallion with a cognac sauce. The crab cakes were good, though not as good as the Montery Bay Grotto. The steak was okay, the cognac sauce tasted more like a teriaki sauce. Nothing was great and nothing was awful.

Jim then noticed movement in the woods. It was eery, and the atmosphere became subtly threatening. Racoons were circling the patio. They stared at us with their glowing red eyes, and telepathically commanded me to rip the remaining bread into bits and toss the bread and my car keys towards them. Our server encouraged this, saying with a slight tremor "Go on, lots of human medallions, er, people feed the racoons". Then she slowly backed away and fled into the building...

What am I doing?

I believe in hope, forgiveness, redemption and miracles. And because I believe this, I believe that the local food critics are filled with forgiveness and hope when they gush about mediocre restaurants. I believe that the young, budding cafes and old, established restaurants, the grungy and the pristine food shops each have the potential for greatness. That greatness, culinary gold is out there, quietly serving those blessed customers graced with the discovery.

I'm on a quest to discovery the gold in Pittsburgh.