| rev:text
| - I went to Bona Terra last night for the first time after hearing about it for years. It was like a great first date with me thinking about the experience much of today. Chef Douglas Dick is nationally recognized with recognition in some of the national food magazines and has been recognized with an award for one of the best "farm to table" restaurants in the country. He's all about the best ingredients and the menu changes daily because of that. When you make a reservation they call you back to confirm and give advice with respect to parking and other details. Great start! It's located in sharpsburg which is a working class part of pittsburgh. The restaurant is right across from the "family dollar" retail store and located on the same street with many "shot and a beer" establishments. The space itself is, well.... not nice. What can I say? He must really want the focus on the food. The lighting is bad. The ceilings are low. The furniture is Ikea or walmart and the bathroom is tiny. The silverware is target and the plates are uninteresting. The service is slightly above average, but still mostly 20somethings working till they figure out what they really want to do. The Maitre'd, Adam was actually very good and helpful and honored our request for a printout of the impromptu tasting menu we requested. But, the FOOD! OMG is the food incredible. The food is on par with some of the better restaurants I've been to coast to coast, not the best, but this can stack up in any city. A friend that I had lunch with suggested that we ask for a tasting menu. We didn't even look at the menu and just asked the server to ask the chef to make us as many dishes of whatever he wanted with no restrictions. I suggest you do the same, but Kathy said they usually won't do this on the weekends, so better to try for a weekday. Ok, the meal started with an amouse bouche (sp?) which was a piping hot cauliflower soup. It was pretty good, but not memorable. The first course was amazing. It was a perfectly caramalized dayboat scallop with a strawberry chutney and a 20 yr. aged balsamic. This combination was the best scallop I've ever tried. It was like the first time you had ice cream. The next dish was a pan seared grouper with vegetables. This dish was cooked perfectly and presented beautifully, but for me it wasn't memorable. The seared tuna with microgreens and candied kumquats (what! as if kumquats werent' sweet enough) and toasted almonds was delicious. The "prime" lamb chop came next and was the best lamb chop I ever had paired perfectly with collard greens. The waiter then asked us if we could still keep going, we said bring it on, so finally was a kobe beef sirloin, which was rich and unlike any steak I've ever had. The desserts were okay, but nothing special. I actually didn't care for the lemond tart, but really liked the coconut lime sorbet. The bread served with dinner was just out of the oven and served with this interesting cherry butter. The pacing could have been a little faster we took about 3 hours with dinner which certainly could have been 2 1/2 hours. Overall a great chef that we are lucky to have. The portions were reasonable and no one felt uncomfortable after all these courses and the price was about $70 each, which is very reasonable considering the quality and the fact that is BYOB. I can't wait to visit Bona Terra again.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)