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| - Can a restaurant stay open for over a decade mainly on the strength of one outstanding dish? If that dish is good enough, Luma has proven that the answer is "yes."
The dish that I'm referring to are the absolutely delicious crab cakes which have been Luma's staple since they first opened. You can get one in an appetizer or 2 in an entree. I just had one again on a recent dinner and it was just as good as I remembered. Big fat pieces of crab, lightly baked with a red onion caper sauce. Seems simple but they're just magical.
I still think it's somewhat of an aberrancy of nature that Luma serves the best crab cakes that I've ever had: better than anything that I've had in Baltimore or Boston. How is this possible in Pittsburgh you may ask? Don't know, but I am hardly alone in my assessment. Every person I know who's tried Luma's crab cakes has told me that they're the best they've ever had.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything else on the menu falls short in comparison. It's all OK, but everything fails to reach the heights of the crab cake. On a recent dinner, after devouring my crab cake app, my entree was duck with butterscotch gnocci. The duck was delicious, but the butterscotch was a fail. Duck naturally pairs with sweeter flavors, but this was entirely too sweet. I should have seen it coming, but I thought it sounded cool. The gnocci was so sweet it was inedible for an entree (but might have been an OK dessert).
Luma still has a "twenty wines for twenty bucks" list. Actually, I think it's now 22 wines for 22 bucks. Sounds like a deal, but each wine tastes like a 6 or 7 dollar bottle of wine so it's really not worth it. They do have nicer wines which are marked up 3-4 times.
If you've been around as long as Luma has, clearly you're doing something right. The place was packed when we dined recently on a Saturday night. As long as they keep serving those amazing crab cakes, Luma will easily be around another 10 years.
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