A decade after the hype, Pittsburgh’s food scene has become more introspective than anticipated (2025)

In early 2025, Pittsburgh landed three James Beard semifinalist nods: Fet-Fisk for Best New Restaurant, along with Kate Lasky and Tomasz Skowronski of Apteka and Wei Zhu of Chengdu Gourmet for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. Fet-Fisk, already named one of the country’s best new restaurants by The New York Times and Eater, has since advanced to the finalist round. Winners will be announced in June, but whatever the outcome, the message is clear: for a city long called “up-and-coming,” some may have missed the significance of what actually arrived.

The restaurants could hardly be more different from each other. A Nordic dreamscape. A vegan dinner party wrapped in post-industrial cool. A Sichuan spice temple that challenges every bland notion of authenticity.

But together, these three restaurants reflect a food renaissance that has quietly been building here for the last decade. The hype around dining in 2015 looked outward, mirroring national trends and basking in outsider approval. But in 2025, restaurants look inward. They embrace hyper-local agriculture, heritage-driven menus, and nontraditional paths to excellence.

The Long Road to Now

For years, Pittsburgh's food scene has flirted with the idea of greatness. There were whispers, designations, and glowing national nods. In 2015, Zagat named it the top food city in America. Soon, Anthony Bourdain rolled into town, drank Iron City beer, and made gnocchi with Kevin Sousa on Parts Unknown. The New York Times came calling. Trendy “best of” restaurant lists buzzed with Pittsburgh names. Suddenly, Pittsburgh was “next.”

Forsberg remembers the “feeling of 2015,” he tells Pittsburgh City Paper. He had just moved to Pittsburgh from Asheville, N. C. Morcilla had opened, The Vandal was plating minimalist brunches in Lawrenceville, and Apteka was quietly testing vegan Polish dishes in borrowed kitchens. There was energy in the air, what he calls a “vitalization.”

Chef Csilla Thackray was living it. She had started at Bar Marco and later cooked at The Vandal, Legume, and Fet-Fisk. “That period between Bar Marco and The Vandal felt like the heady days,” she tells City Paper. “It was wild — Bourdain was here, Joey [of Vandal] and I were in The New York Times. Everyone was talking about Eater lists. But if you really knew Pittsburgh, you also knew the bubble couldn’t last forever.”

At the time, she was still green, caught up in the rush. “I threw myself into this world I barely knew, and, in a way, that mirrored what was happening across the scene. A generation with more disposable income, internet culture, glossy food shows — it all created this sudden appetite for what was happening in kitchens. But I realized I still lacked real skill and depth.”

That realization took her to Legume, where trendiness gave way to technique. “It was the kind of place where you couldn’t coast on the hype. No ephemera. Just classical cooking. That’s where I really became a chef.”

Pittsburgh had the bones: a low cost of living, stunning produce from surrounding farms, a tight-knit community of chefs willing to share gear, space, and purveyors. “There were younger, more progressive-thinking farmers starting projects. We had all these building blocks in place,” he recalls. “And then COVID hit,” says Forsberg.

Restaurants shuttered. Projects collapsed. Careers paused. Thackray found space to heal and reassess at Churchview Farm. Pop-ups became survival tools. From the wreckage, something quieter and more intentional began to grow.

That shift was felt across the industry.

The Rise of The Middle

Bill Fuller, the co-founder of big Burrito Restaurant Group, which opened genre-defining spots like Kaya, Mad Mex, and Soba, sees the arc clearly. “Back in the ’90s, there wasn’t a consumer middle class dining out. It was either country clubs or diners,” he tells CP.

But things started to change in the early 2000s as institutions like UPMC, University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University grew and brought in a steady flow of professionals: engineers, doctors, researchers, and administrators. Many were transplants, used to eating out and open to trying something new.

“You had more people with money to spend who wanted more than the old-school options,” Fuller says. “And when the demand changed with the emerging middle class, the restaurant scene responded.”

That middle — diverse, curious, and hungry — has supported everything from vegan pierogi to foraged fish roe.

“Pittsburgh is still healing,” Thackray says. “But there’s a drive coming back to restaurants, to diners, to the whole scene. The people who’ve stayed are thinking harder about what’s sustainable, what the city will support, and what kind of stories they want to tell through food.”

Thackray offers a warning to anyone chasing the next wave: “This isn’t New York. This isn’t Chicago. You’ve got to dream big — but the city will chew you up and spit you out if you don’t honor its spirit.”

Now, she’s channeling that spirit into her own project — Titusz, a Hungarian-Austrian restaurant and one of Pittsburgh’s most anticipated openings of 2025. It is a tribute to her grandmother. “Her spirit was remarkable,” Thackray says. “This is an homage to her life as a Hungarian refugee during World War II. A local Hungarian church sponsored her and her family to come to Pittsburgh. That’s how they got here.”

Fet-Fisk Finds Its Way

Fet-Fisk, the Scandinavian-leaning pop-up-turned-restaurant, launched last year. Chef Nik Forsberg has built something that feels both stripped-back and cinematic: teal-rimmed glassware, soft golden lights, a menu that reads like a love letter to smoked fish and root vegetables.

There’s no hard line between kitchen and dining room, just Forsberg and his team plating a whole grilled branzino or laying down scallop crudo with pickled apple. And then, of course, the roasted half chicken: crisp-skinned and impossibly tender, a dish that channels both the Swedish farm table and a Sunday dinner.

“We weren’t chasing anything,” Forsberg says. “We were going home.”

Forsberg grew the idea out of stagnation. In the early days of the pandemic, he found himself without a restaurant, rent, or payroll. So Forsberg turned to a city lot and began farming. “We didn’t have a brick-and-mortar yet,” he says. “No rent, no loans. We could just pause.”

He began hosting pop-ups, and, later, launched a prepared food venture out of a commercial kitchen in Shaler called Fet-Fisk: Royal Market. The dishes were Nordic, seasonal, and nostalgic. “They became a memory project,” he says, “built on the way my dad cooked, the way my grandma hosted in Sweden.”

Apteka Breaks the Mold

While Forsberg was planting seeds, both literal and figurative, Lasky and Skowronski were already growing Apteka. It, too, was a venture shaped by heritage that became the city’s most improbable success story: a vegan, Central European-inspred restaurant with no signage, no tips, no reservations, and a menu that changes when the cooks feel like it.

In the heart of Bloomfield, Apteka has a space that feels spare but full of character; and the food is surprisingly maximalist: vegan fried pierogi stuffed with all kinds of vegetables and horseradish. Golabki (stuffed cabbage rolls) bathed in a tomato broth. Celeriac Schnitzel that challenges every assumption about what vegetables can do.

“It’s not about romanticizing heritage,” Lasky tells CP. “It’s about rethinking it with care.”

The couple draws from Tomasz’s summers in Poland and Lasky’s multigenerational Pittsburgh-Slovak roots. “You don’t have to be Slovak or Polish to love pierogies here,” she adds. “They’re part of the city’s identity.”

“We didn’t need a million-dollar buildout,” Lasky says. “We had a community. It’s still possible to build something small and meaningful in Pittsburgh. You just need a true story to tell.”

Chengdu Gourmet Turns Up the Heat

Drive north to a McKnight Road shopping plaza and you’ll find Chengdu Gourmet, a sister restaurant to the Squirrel Hill staple that explodes with color and spice. Its original location has long drawn accolades for bold, regionally faithful Sichuan cuisine. But here, Chef Wei Zhu doubles down, offering deep-cuts from the Sichuan canon that rarely make it onto American menus.

The setting is festive — red lanterns, massive round tables with lazy Susans — but the food is serious: dan dan noodles slicked with sesame and chili oil, green peppercorn fish fillet, shredded beef with hot pepper. The spice builds, complex and tingling, until your whole palate is alive.

Behind it all is Zhu, a seven-time James Beard nominee.

Zhu, who doesn’t speak English and prefers to let his food do the talking, remembers his grandmother’s boiled beef as his emotional origin point.

“The rich, spicy, and tender taste has influenced my cooking style to this day,” he tells CP through a translator.

He launched the first Chengdu Gourmet in 2014 in Squirrel Hill. “In 2014, authentic Sichuan cuisine was niche,” Zhu says. “But people came in, trusted us. I may adjust the spice to suit different palates, but the soul of the food never changed.”

A City That Cooks Together

That ethos is echoed in the rise of diaspora chefs like Rafael Vencio, whose upcoming Filipino restaurant, Amboy, will add another layer to Pittsburgh’s slow-burning culinary renaissance. Like Zhu, Vencio sees authenticity not as a fixed set of ingredients, but as a relationship between culture, chef, and community.

“Cuisines should be celebrated for their power to shape a city’s food identity,” Vencio tells CP. “The person offering that experience should honor it with truthfulness. Innovation is just as essential, it’s skill and integrity that resonate. And that audience is growing.”

“Pittsburgh now, compared to 10 years ago, has become a more tight-knit industry,” he adds. “Chefs are working together through collaborative experiences to bring something new.”

That spirit of collaboration is held together by mutual respect. “We’re all vying for similar resources within a relatively small population,” Thackray says. “But the collaboration doesn’t have to feel intentional; it’s a web of connectivity.”

For Vencio, that web has allowed him to go from cooking other chefs’ food to owning his Filipino heritage. “Cooking from your culture isn’t a gimmick here,” he says. “It’s the reason people care. It’s how you tell them who you are.”

Pittsburgh’s current culinary moment, Fuller concurs, is much more about its denizens expressing themselves and less about outside accolades. “Maybe this is the year for the James Beard win,” Fuller says. “But what matters more is how these restaurants reflect who we are now.”