It's been a hectic week with the end of the school year and my upcoming teacher exchange trip to Upper St. Clair's sister school in Leverkusen, Germany, but Jeremy and I found a sliver of time last night to visit the Greek Food Festival at Holy Cross Church, and we're so glad that we did. The festival runs through Saturday, June 18 and offers eat-in and take-out options, as well as an outdoor a-la-carte food area and a buffet-style dining area indoors.  The buffet features traditional favorites like stuffed grape leaves, souvlaki, pastitsio, Greek salad, and rice pudding, while the outdoor …

We passed Luma on the random drive last week that landed us at Carbonara’s and made a mental note to go back when they were open. (They’re closed Sundays, but open for lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday.)  So glad we kept this place on the radar! Luma is modern — the lighting is dim and tables are candlelit; black panels on the walls are backlit with different colored light, and the sliding doors to the bathrooms are both chic and space-saving. There’s outdoor seating behind the restaurant, hidden from street view and shaded by big, leafy trees — I can’t wait to test out their lunch …

Fun fact:  Cinco de Mayo marks an outnumbered Mexican army’s victory over an invading French army on May 5, 1862, in Puebla, east of Mexico City. In preparation for Thursday's Mexican celebration (ok, honesty here – we’ll make any excuse to eat Mexican) we headed over to Bridgeville to visit El Paso’s Mexican Grill.  Despite the fact that it was a weeknight, there was a line, but we were seated within minutes. Fun Fact:  Americans alone are expected to consume more than 70 million pounds of avocados on Cinco de Mayo.  We didn’t consume quite that much guac, but the side of it that came with …

My car is currently a rolling advertisement for Venture Outdoors — a moving storage space for climbing gear, camping equipment, and miscellaneous accessories for the horse and dog. However, as everyone in western Pennsylvania is well aware, the recent weather hasn’t been good for anything much more than surfing the net for hiking trails in Hawaii while daydreaming about campfires and fireflies and spending the night under the stars. Surprised by nice weather one recent evening, Jeremy and I were anxious to spend some time outside, so we headed over to Calabria’s at the Frosty Valley Golf …

I hadn’t been to DeLallo’s since high school when a group of my friends and I went before one of the school dances, so Jeremy and I decided to pay it a visit, sans flowered wrist corsage and boutonniere. DeLallo’s, for the unfamiliar, is the green (teal?  turquoise?), barn-shaped building on Fort Couch Road just down from Village Drive. Inside, it’s a cozy, quiet sit-down with soft lighting and tasteful décor. We were guided to a cozy corner booth behind one of the half-walls separating the reception area from the dining room and felt like we had the place to ourselves. Our waitress was …

As promised, Jeremy and I revisited Sauce in Bridgeville, and we had such a great experience that we wanted to let you know as soon as we could. We went on a Thursday at about 4:30 p.m.; from 3 p.m. to 5  p.m. every day in March the entire menu — except for drinks and desserts — was half price. Go to their website to join the mailing list; they’ll update you on new offers and specials. As hoped, we ended up in one of the plush leather booths in the main dining room, and what a difference in atmosphere. The booth was comfortable and roomy and we looked through the large window beside us onto …

Our new thing is weekend breakfast dates. Ski season is over and with our Saturdays and Sundays suddenly free, Jeremy and I have been struggling to figure out what to do with ourselves…ah, the challenges of being workaholics.  The breakfast kick started a few weekends ago when got a rare blue-sky day and Jeremy decided to fly us to DuBois for the pie at the Flight Deck Restaurant. (Dating a pilot is fun!) Anyhow, when we got to Beaver where we were to pick up the plane, we were starving and — long story short — it came out that Jeremy had never been to an Eat N’ Park. So we stopped in, had …

At the recommendation of a reader, Jeremy and I wandered into Piccolina’s one recent evening for dinner.  When we saw the candled tables and chandelier-like light fixtures we feared being under-dressed — we were both in nice jeans; he had on a dress shirt and I a sweater — but were immediately relieved when the gentleman at the table next to us was also sporting denim.  It’s definitely a dressier atmosphere than what we had expected and a return visit would have us leaving the jeans at home.  For a weeknight, the dining room was busy, and we were by far the youngest in the crowd.   Jeremy was…

At the recommendation of reader — and student — Liz MacLean, Jeremy and I ventured into Bridgeville on a Saturday night to check out Sauce and their top-rated gourmet burgers. Ok, Jeremy was there to check out the burgers. Liz recommended that I try the mac and cheese.  We arrived around 7 p.m. and met with a 30-45 minute wait, so we tucked ourselves into the one tiny bench in the entrance area behind the door. The place was packed. The main dining area and bar are side-by-side in a long, narrow room, but managed to feel cozy and inviting with soft lighting and oversized, padded booths. The …

Located in the heart of downtown Mt. Lebanon at 660 Washington Road, Molly Brannigans is part of a Pennslvania chain of restaurants that doesn’t feel at all “chainy.” The storefront itself looks and feels like it has been uprooted from a Dublin street and every detail from the pictures and decorations to the tables and chairs to the bar, mantle, and hearth was handmade in Ireland, shipped across the sea, and put back together on American soil by Irish craftsmen. If you call yourself an “Irish Pub” then you’ve got to have the hops to prove it. In addition to a number of domestic and imported …

It seems like so many restaurants in Upper St. Clair are some variation on an Italian theme, and last week Jeremy and I were craving Mexican.  So we Googled our options around USC and were directed to El Campesino at Water Dam Center, 4175 Washington Rd.  It was busy for a weeknight – several tables featured families, and a few booths brimmed over with giggling teens.  We were seated immediately at a cozy booth near the parlor doors to the kitchen and presented with complimentary tortilla chips and salsa while we decided on drinks. El Campesino has a wide selection of Mexican beverages for …

Stepping into Café Georgio, a converted house on tiny Donati Road, you’re not sure whether you’re entering a restaurant or an art gallery, but the food and décor are both inventive and full of flavor. Jeremy and I were seated in one of the two downstairs dining rooms – farthest from the entryway, bar, and kitchen, where a handful of tables are tucked in beside a fireplace and a collection of artwork by the owner, Grace Hopwood. There’s an upstairs dining room as well, also uniquely decorated with artwork for sale.  Our reservations were for 6:30, and when we arrived, we were the only two in …

A friendly face awaited us in the tiny kitchen at the back of the Moroccan restaurant at 665 Washington Rd. in Mt. Lebanon:  Abdel Khila, former French and Arabic teacher at the high school who took a leave of absence from teaching to follow his dream and open his own restaurant -- Kous Kous Café. At 6’8’’ tall, Abdel towered over the glass partitions that separate the kitchen from the intimate 28-seat dining room. He gave Jeremy and I a wave and a smile and then went back to his cooking -- he’s the only chef in the restaurant, aided only by two servers (one being his mother, Mrs. Habiba), …

I ruined Valentine’s Day. But let me start at the beginning. My almost three-year-old Blackberry has been on the downward spiral ever since my dad knocked it into the sink a few months ago, but I’ve been putting up with the freezing screen and sticking keys, holding out for the Verizon iPhone 4. I emailed my dad last Wednesday asking for the password to our family plan account so I could preorder my phone for pick-up two days later at the Verizon store; his response to my email was “NO.” Dad’s not a good secret keeper. Mom would have made up some excuse – that she didn’t have the password …

Jeremy drives by StonePepper’s Grill on Washington Road when he drives from his place to mine, and so he actually suggested that we check it out for this week’s column. I had heard that it was a pretty chill sports bar, but when we came into the contemporary entryway and had the option of sitting at the pasta and wine bar, main dining room, or the tall-stooled bar surrounded by the Pens on huge TV screens, we knew immediately that we had underestimated our evening out. We were seated by Jimmy, a now-highschooler at Bethel who was my first babysitting charge when I was a teenager. He, his …

Jeremy and I took advantage of an afternoon off recently to make the trip out to Raccoon Creek State Park. The park has miles and miles of great hiking trails, a beautiful wildflower reserve and lakes for summertime fun. However, our goal for the trip was a) to find the waterfall and b) see if it was frozen and c) climb it. Jeremy’s favorite activity in Alaska is ice climbing, and it’s one thing he misses a lot here in PA. (Example:  Ice axes and ice climbing boots are always in the back of his car, apparently “just in case” he stumbles across 50 feet of glacial ice next to South Hills …

Has anyone else come down with a case of the wintery blues? It’s the end of the semester at school - the piles of grading on my kitchen table eyeball me every time I walk by, and it’s as though some tornadic force had a pre-Super Bowl party in my apartment. Jeremy beat me home from work yesterday and was on the couch doing homework when I struggled through the door with a bag of final exams. When I sat down next to him and pulled the throw from the back of the couch over my legs, Emma (my dog whose need for daily hour-long walks I neglect terribly during the winter months) began pawing …

Thursday night, Jeremy and I braved the blizzard and the roads and ventured to Pepperoni’s on Donati Road. Normally, our plan of attack for an evening like last would have been take out Chinese and a movie from Redbox, but we had tickets to the 7:30 showing of “Mary Poppins” at the Bennedum and figured we’d find something to eat on the way into town. I’d been to Pepperoni’s a while back for lunch, and remembered it as a place with good, quick service and great pizza. I was anxious about getting into town in time for the show with the roads already covered and the snow continuing to fall, and …

Jeremy and I had set aside a Friday night after the holidays for our first official “Date Night” but he left the choice of restaurant up to me.  Uncertain as to where to begin our culinary adventure, I asked around the staffroom at lunch for suggestions.  A colleague mentioned Wild Rosemary – that she drives past it’s full parking lot often and has been wanting to pay the tiny eatery a visit.  She said we absolutely needed reservations; friends of hers had waited weeks to get a table in the 28-seat dining room.  I picked up the phone to call about reservations for that evening, already making…

I was sitting across from my boyfriend Jeremy at the Market Square Primanti’s, watching him try to make sense of his sandwich that was exploding fries and coleslaw across our wax paper-covered booth.  We met in the fall, only a few months after he relocated to Pittsburgh from Anchorage, Alaska, and though I’d been telling him for months about this Pittsburgh sandwich phenomenon, this was our first visit. He looked at me from across the table and said, “I like this.” “What, the sandwich?” I asked, as a glob of ketchup threatened to fall from his sandwich crust onto his pants. “Nah, not the …