What to Eat in Pittsburgh

We never blog about chains. Except when we do. Because rules are made to be broken. And also, because Asian desserts are our weakness.

We recently wrote about our love for Thai rolled ice cream in our post about EBQ in Wexford. We first encountered rolled ice cream (and bubble waffles, as we described in the EBQ post) in Queens in 2016, just after it had been introduced in the US.

A few months later, we found ourselves on a 2 week trip to Japan. While we expected to eat a lot of sushi. But what we didn’t expect was all of this: (next few photos are from Japan, not Pittsburgh,,, sorry for the tease….)

Ice cream stuffed into so many delicious cake and waffle-like things.

Matcha green tea…. everything.

And above all, what were called “parfaits,” of all shapes and sizes. Often with green tea. Oh my.

And of course, no meal of any sort in Japan was complete without plastic replicas. This was true of even the nicest restaurants. And our favorite parfait place was absolutely no exception. They practically had a plastic shrine to parfaits:

Apparently, Thai rolled ice cream was just the starting point. Noted.

Fast forward to this winter, shortly after we moved from Birmingham to Pittsbugh. One day, we were walking in Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood of my childhood, looking for the Thai rolled ice cream place we thought had already opened on Murray. It had not. Instead, we found this:

And…wait for it…. those plastic replicas! This place is legit.

Note that this is a crepe parfait place. I don’t believe we actually ate any crepes in Japan, but it’s not that we couldn’t have. The crepe just seems like one of the many dry vessels we encountered to house the goodies.

Here are a few shots of the inside:

Note that they carry both savory and sweet crepes. I can’t tell you anything about the savory ones. When offered the option, I could never choose anything besides sweet.

Of course, we forgot to take a pic of the menu. It can be found online here.

Just like at EBQ, when offered matcha, matcha we must have. Here’s the Matcha Chocolate Truffle which contains both matcha custard cream and chocolate truffles, as advertised. Delicious on its own, but we had to add a scoop of matcha ice cream (not pictured). The crepe is soft, and also a bit crunchy especially by the time you get to the bottom. Fantastic.

That was our first visit. No surprise that we have found ourselves bringing friends of the blog Harry, Christina, Andrew, Priya, Deepak, Ashi, and Amar on by. Here’s what we sample during those visits:

Apologies for not remembering the name of this one. It’s all mango all the time, with mango, mango sauce, and vanilla gelato to top it off.

And finally, Chocolate Nut Party. The same chocolate truffles used above, now combined with pistachios and almonds, topped with chocolate gelato. We had to add matcha gelato, just because, how could we not. And voila:

We loved them all equally just as one would love all of one’s children equally, but I have to say that personally, the chocolate nut party with matcha on top was pretty insane. And look at that beautiful crispy crepe.

What a treat to have this place just a few blocks from where I grew up. That’s one of the things I love about Pittsburgh in 2018 and Squirrel Hill in particular. You have great places that have been there for 40 years (read: Murray Avenue Grill, the Manor, the old Post Office, etc), and then you have places like this popping up. And even on a block where there is already a Cold Stone (meh) and a Waffleonia (have not tried it yet but hear great things), T-swirl Crepe has been crowded every time we’ve been there. There’s plenty of demand for outstanding dessert in this town.