Chengdu Gourmet, Everyday Noodles, Pusadee's Garden, Sakura Teppanyaki and Sushi, and Taiwanese Bistro Cafe 33 made a list of the 31 Best Restaurants in Pittsburgh by Pittsburgh Magazine dining critic Hal B. Klein. The list is notable this year not only for its composition but for its ethics and motivations.
This list is dedicated to everyone who works in the hospitality industry. To that end, I’ve decided not to name executive chefs in each restaurant’s information bubble, as is typical for our list. This isn’t meant to diminish the importance of an executive chef to a restaurant; instead, see it as a reflection of the reality that restaurants are a holistic operation.
To all the dishwashers, servers, bartenders, chefs, line and prep cooks, managers, bussers and hosts, you deserve unyielding esteem. This pandemic exposed much of the dark side of the restaurant world — the parts we’re not supposed to think about when we’re out to dinner. Wage disparities, often stemming from tipped-wage power dynamics, were exacerbated as servers were thrust into the role of teaching a new dining etiquette to a sometimes politicized public. Punishing hours in cramped, poorly ventilated kitchens were always part of the typically unseen working conditions for many back-of-house staff; now those conditions put those workers at a high risk for contracting COVID-19. Lack of healthcare for too many people who work in restaurants, along with an at-will labor policy that left thousands of people without jobs at a moment’s notice, resulted in many feeling anchorless and, frankly, scared. An even brighter spotlight was fixed on the urgency for a long-overdue reckoning with systemic, overt and unconscious forms of racial, gender and sexual discrimination that have for generations plagued the industry.