For my sixth meal of Pittsburgh Restaurant Week, we met friends at Bocktown in Robinson. It is located up on the hill in the same plaza as Target. Bocktown may be one of the proudest members of the Pennsylvania Buy Fresh Buy Local program, as they proudly display the program information throughout the restaurant. Plus, this week there was a strong presense of Pittsburgh Restaurant Week promotion going on.
For Pittsburgh Restaurant Week, Bocktown offered a three item tapas and beer pairing for $20.13. Each tapas comes with a 4oz beer pairing. For folks that like wine pairings, this would be a nice change from the norm.
Though their special – called “Where Beer Meets Grill” – was enticing, one of the items was blue cheese covered in chutney. Since I’m not much for blue cheese, I opted to order off the regular menu. I’ll certainly return for the beer-tapas pairings on a future visit.
Ordering off the regular menu, PghTasteBudA opted to share a Jalapeno Popper Dip with the table. A coworker of his recently gave him a great recipe for this dip, so it was a great opportunity to see how the homemade version would stack up to a pub-style Bocktown version. Bocktown did not disappoint. The pretzel bites were perfect size — don’t you just hate when you get a dip and it comes with 4 huge slices of pita and you have to break it all up yourself? Oh, and other than the homemade version has a crumbled topping, the dips were similar in nature.
The dip wasn’t really all that spicy, but it was reminiscent of eating a popper. The pretzel was like the breading and the dip was a sour-creamy popper filling. It went great with the beers too.
For my entree, I decided to go with the BackDraft burger. The burger came cooked to temp on a fresh bun with banana peppers and melted mozzarella cheese. The burger was juicy and you could tell how fresh it was because the burger was not commercially shaped. It gave it character and me the piece of mind of how fresh it was. As the son of a dairy farmer, it was a nice change from the grocery store meat case.
TasteBudA had the Live-A-Little, which is a 10oz steak. Though I don’t remember his exact comments, other than that he liked Bocktown’s version of “medium,” there were no complaints coming from his direction. I wish I would have asked him about the Untouchable Sauce, because with a name like that, it better be irresistable.
We’ll likely return in the summer to sit in the beer garden off the side of the restaurant. The vibe and local beers served in an outside setting would be a great summer evening.
And I will be issuing a challenge to my food-challenge competitor, Matt, where we will faceoff in The Beer Belly Challenge. “Take on our Mr. Potatohead timer, and receive a complimentary short sleeve tee (valued up to $20) when you finish a Beer Belly Fry with three toppings by yourself in under 30 minutes.”
