TastyBurgher

Udipi Café
4141 Old William Penn Hwy
Monroeville, 15146
412-373-5581
Sun-M, W-Th: 11:30-9:30; F-Sat: 11:30-10 (closed Tu)

I know I have said this a zillion times, and you are probably getting sick of it, but we are blessed, blessed I tell you! to have so many darned Indian restaurants here.  In fact, Pittsburgh is more than blessed because we’ve got two kinds of Indian cuisine: North and South!  Most of the restaurants around here, and generally in America, specialize in Northern Indian food.  This is your meat/veggies-in-sauce-on-rice variety of Indian, including your vindaloos and curries, your dahl and also your grilled tandoori.  Southern Indian food is a whole different beast, with fabulous dosai, uthappam, and sometimes so many little side dishes that it almost rivals Korean.  And it’s absolutely delicious.  Udipi is one of the only Indian restaurants in the Pittsburgh area that focuses mainly on this cuisine, and boy do they do it well.  Strap on your seat belts everyone – we’re going for a mouth-watering ride to coast of India! (more…)

Crazy Mocha
For locations and hours, check:
http://crazymocha.com/

Ahhh….to be a dancing goat!  Spending idyllic hours frolicking in the meadows, high on caffeine while their shepherd drifts away in an unaware sleep.  Nibbling on little buzzing berries all the livelong day, with their freaky horizontal pupils.  Doing continuous backflips over fences, with their backward facing knees.  Wearing little bowler hats and velour vests with pocket watches doing jigs in my living room when all of the sudden this pancake walks in arm-in-arm with a tin can and they’re ….oh wait, that was my dream last night…….ahem…anyway…Dancing Goats is the original name of the first location of Crazy Mocha on Ellsworth Ave in Shadyside.  On the menus they used to have a little legend about the origin of coffee being these goats eating these berries and they’d dance around so the goat herder tried the berries and then – TA DA! – coffee!  I guess it must have sunk deep into the folds of my brain because here I am dreaming of goats getting jiggy.  But irrespective of goats, dancing or otherwise, Crazy Mocha has become a heavyweight competitor in the local café battle, with its recent opening of several new storefronts.  And though usually I would be worried by such rapid expansion, I’m not this time.  They’ve got it mostly in the bag.  Pretty decent coffee, excellent non-coffee drinks, giant cheesecake slices (good ones) and free wireless internet – how could they lose!   (more…)

Screw tapas. I hate everything they have come to stand for.

Affordable tapas would be one thing. Delicious tapas would, too. But if they’re neither delicious nor cheap, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to exclaim “Wow, look how small these plates are! No wonder they call ‘em Small Plates!”?

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