Taste the world, just up the block: Pittsburgh’s growing global food scene

Click on the “listen” button above for an interview about diverse local cuisines with Beth Kracklauer, a Pittsburgh native, and the food and drinks editor of the Wall Street Journal’s weekend “Off Duty” lifestyle section.

On a Wednesday evening in May, a group of about 40 runners warms up for a trail race at Frick Park, as Vladimir Martinez Rodriguez and Meghan Raffensperger set up their Oaxacan street food pop-up, 1,900 miles from where they met in Oaxaca, Mexico five years earlier.

An airhorn sends the runners racing off into the park. Rodriguez chars whole jalapenos on the grill, as Raffensperger lines up a display of jewel-colored Jarritos sodas. It’s a context that could not be more different from a Oaxacan street, but the menu is traditional: tlayudas, memelas and — the day’s special — molotes.

“I call them little football shapes,” Raffensperger says of the molotes, offering a bridge to what may be an unfamiliar dish with metaphor. “Last year, I called them Mexican dumplings.”

Raffensperger and Rodriguez opened their business Lulá’ La Chula in 2024 with a dream of eventually being able to support themselves, all while showcasing the variety in traditional Oaxacan cuisine. Rodriguez grew up in Oaxaca, where both his parents were street vendors. His mother sold Oaxacan food. His dad had a hot dog and hamburger stand.

“It’s crazy,” Rodriguez says. “[A client] was joking with me, ‘Your dad sells American food in Oaxaca, hot dogs and hamburgers, and you’re bringing Oaxacan food to the United States.”

Pittsburgh has long been a city whose cuisine was influenced by immigrants. Few dishes, for example, are more emblematic of the city than the Polish pierogi. And for decades, some of its most beloved restaurants were neighborhood Italian spots such as Tambellini’s and Lombardozzi’s, serving plates piled with red-sauce pastas and chicken parmigiana.

But as these institutions close, the people creating Pittsburgh’s food scene now are drawing on the cuisines of places thousands of miles away from our Rust Belt town: Uzbekistan, China, Mexico, Tanzania, Puerto Rico, Sweden, India and more. They’re mashing up tradition with autobiography, and making Pittsburgh a city where you can get, yes, still, pierogies and pasta, but also: Uzbek plov served on the same menu as pizza. Gelatinous xiaolongbao quivering in a bamboo steamer. Chunks of fresh lobster nestled inside Puerto Rican pan sobao.

And, of course, Lulá’ La Chula’s Oaxacan molotes.

Which are delicious: two neat dumplings of chewy-crisp corn masa wrapped around a mash of ground-beef picadillo, pleasingly mussed by toppings of guacamole, frijoles and crumbles of queso fresco.

Bringing specificity to “global” cuisines

In the 1970s and 1980s, before the collapse of the steel industry rolled through the region, Pittsburgh had a “vibrant, high-end restaurant scene,” according to Beth Kracklauer, a Pittsburgh native, and the food and drinks editor of the Wall Street Journal’s weekend “Off Duty” lifestyle section.

There were white-tablecloth Italian restaurants. The French restaurant La Normande offered a hand-calligraphed specials menu (duck-stuffed morels, steak smeared with bone marrow) alongside its regular offerings of chef-made pâtés and lobster consommé. But though there were some east and southeast Asian restaurants in the 1980s, such as Richard Lee’s South Side institution Chinese on Carson, Kracklauer says that for the most part, “high-end dining meant continental European. Those were the restaurants that got the buzz.”

Jamilka Borges, Puerto Rican executive chef and co-owner of Shadyside’s Lilith, moved in 2007 to the city, where she attended culinary school. Sitting at a table in Lilith’s emerald-walled dining room, she remembers Pittsburgh of that time as a “meat-and-potatoes, pierogies, red sauce” town.

“They were fantastic places, but I struggled finding any restaurant that was not only Puerto Rican, but like, anything,” Borges says. “ I remember people being extremely excited to take me to Kaya — which was very good.”

But Borges remembers wishing there were also more regional options in Pittsburgh, in addition to Kaya’s Caribbean fusion offerings. “Each island [in the Caribbean] is very different. … We have been colonized by different countries and then recolonized, and that has affected each island’s cuisine.”

And perhaps, more than anything, it is specificity — of country, of region, of dish — that chefs like Borges have been striving to bring to Pittsburgh’s increasingly global food scene. While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the trend began, many local restaurateurs were innovating beneath the blare of the national hype proclaiming Pittsburgh the Next Big Thing in dining in the mid-2010s.

In 2010, Kate Lasky and Tomasz Skowronski launched the “Pierogi Night” pop-ups that would grow into their brick-and-mortar restaurant Apteka, whose vegan menu is rooted in both chefs’ Central and Eastern European identities. In 2013, Taiwanese restaurateur Mike Chen opened Everyday Noodles, bringing hand-pulled noodles and soup dumplings to Squirrel Hill.

And in 2014, Borges connected with pastry chef Dianne DeStefano, the Pittsburgh native who would go on to become the co-owner of Lilith. Their relationship got off to a rocky start: The pair met for the first time when one of the owners of Bar Marco, the Strip District restaurant where Borges was the executive chef, hired DeStefano without consulting Borges.

“It was a very awkward moment,” DeStefano says, sitting across the table from Borges at Lilith.

“Yeah, it was pretty awkward,” Borges agrees.

But their decade-long friendship and collaboration was born when Borges asked DeStefano to make mallorca, a Puerto Rican sweet bread Borges wanted to add to the menu at Bar Marco.

“I never had a recipe. I didn’t know how to make it,” Borges says. “I basically described it to her … and I would be like, ‘Hm, more sweet. More elastic.’”

After a number of attempts, DeStefano nailed the bread.

“She got my respect,” Borges says.

And Borges got her Puerto Rican mallorca bread: traditional, specific — and perfected by a Pittsburgh native pastry chef.

The A-word

When reporting on immigrant-owned and internationally inspired restaurants, it’s hard to avoid, even now, stumbling into and over the word “authentic,” which is sometimes wielded by white foodies as an imprecise measure of “other” cuisines.

The Wall Street Journal’s Kracklauer calls it “the A-word.”

“I think that word can be used as a kind of bludgeon,” Kracklauer says. “Any restaurateur, an immigrant restaurateur or not, is operating on razor-thin margins. They have to work very hard to appeal to whatever country they’re cooking in, whatever city they’re cooking in. … [Restaurateurs] are constantly trying things out to see what works.”

Some of these efforts to appeal may look like offering a familiar dish alongside an unfamiliar one, to help customers baby step into new cuisines, as Everyday Noodles owner Chen did many years ago, when he owned China Palace in Monroeville.

As Chen tells it, his white Italian-American friend, a man named Joe, told Chen that despite their friendship, he was a steak guy, and he’d never set foot inside China Palace.

But Chen promised Joe that if he came to China Palace with his family, Chen would cook him just a steak. Joe agreed, and when he came, as promised, Chen served him a steak, medium rare — but with a black pepper dipping sauce on the side. Chen asked Joe to dip a bite of the steak in the unfamiliar sauce, and when Joe did, he was pleasantly surprised.

“He said, ‘Every time you cook this dish, I’m coming,’” Chen recounts, in an interview in WESA’s studios. Gradually, Chen introduced Joe to new dishes. “After that, he became my loyal customer.”

Beyond the business need to adapt dishes to appeal to customers, chefs also offer menus that defy expectations of “authenticity” as they showcase their artistry and blend tradition with autobiography.

At Amazing Dumplings in Squirrel Hill, Fengping Geng and husband Feng Gao offer a menu rooted in Geng’s memories of growing up in northwestern China making dumplings for the Lunar New Year.

“When I grew up in that time,” Geng says, “we didn’t have fresh vegetables. … Mostly, we had pork with sour cabbage. It’s our New Year’s dumpling.”

Though Geng’s favorite fillings are the ones she made with her family as a child, she created more than 20 flavors for the restaurant, drawing on her decades of culinary experience: minced Kung Pao chicken, mala-spiced crayfish and pork, and the General Gao, a spiced beef dumpling that’s an homage to her husband. Geng also dyes her dumpling skins in a rainbow of colors, using natural dyes made from carrots, spinach, red cabbage and other vegetables.

“They look like flowers. They’re beautiful. And so, what’s authentic? That’s authentic to her,” Kracklauer says. “I think we can get into a bind where we characterize something as authentic or not.”

At a very different restaurant, Nik Forsberg of Bloomfield’s Fet-Fisk, a 2025 James Beard Award finalist for best new restaurant in the country, is also playing outside the bounds of strict tradition. Forsberg’s father is Swedish, and while Forsberg grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, his memories of visiting Sweden and eating shrimp, langoustine, mussels and oysters provided inspiration for the concept of Fet-Fisk.

“I believe the best seafood in the world is what you get off the west coast of Sweden,” Forsberg says, in an interview at WESA’s studios.

But the restaurant’s dishes — pickled mackerel encircled with smoked beet purée, rye cavatelli bursting with malted barley umami — are not from the traditional Swedish table. While Forsberg has extensively studied Scandinavian and Eastern European cookbooks, he says, “I’m kind of creating Swedish dishes in my head rather than like, ‘Oh, this is an authentic or traditional Swedish dish.’ … It’s like alternate-reality Swedish food. Or parallel dimension.”

City of secrets and unGoogleable delights

Lilith’s Borges would love to see restaurateurs continue to push the limits of local palates.

“Higher-end restaurants are still playing it very safe,” Borges says. “People want to have a steak on their menu. Many people want to have pasta on the menu. So I think there is a juggling of what food you want to put on the menu and push a little, but you also have to play it safe. And that’s just business.”

That said, the city has exciting prospects on the horizon: Later this year, chef Csilla Thackray will open her new Hungarian-Austrian restaurant Titusz in the former Merchant Oyster Co. space in Lawrenceville. Filipino chef Rafael Vencio’s highly anticipated brick-and-mortar Amboy is under construction on the North Side.

And while there is so much to look forward to, there is so much that already is: good food from all over the world, hidden in plain sight. In Kracklauer’s own neighborhood, Greenfield, there’s a small business district across from the Giant Eagle with two Ukrainian grocery stores, Kiev and Nataliya, where she likes to shop for half-sour pickles and Siberian beef pelmeni. She relies on the Afghan restaurant Rice ‘n Stew for takeout during busy weeks. And she enjoys classic Sichuan dishes at the recently opened Golden Ladle.

“It’s fantastic,” Kracklauer says. “These places are all in, like, two blocks. There’s a dense offering of really great foods from really different parts of the world.”

As for me? Reporting this series has revealed some of the unGoogleable delights in my own neighborhood, Squirrel Hill. The abundance of Asian dessert and bubble tea shops in the neighborhood has influenced the local Belgian waffle shop, Waffalonia, resulting in a happy fusion: a scoop of house-made matcha ice cream atop a Liège sugar waffle.

At Amazing Dumplings one evening, owner Geng serves a shareable soup bowl filled with ribbons of cucumber in a clear, cold sweet-sour broth, swimming with dainty, fish-shaped carrot slices. The dish’s fitting name? Geng tells me: Cucumber pond.

And at Everyday Noodles, I order a dish I haven’t tried yet: golden pickle cabbage, a tangle of sliced, pickled cabbage in a yolk-colored sauce, with a bite reminiscent of horseradish. Delicious, but mysterious; I’ve never tasted anything like it.

When Everyday Noodles owner Chen comes to our studios for an interview, I make sure to ask him about it. What is in that gorgeous yellow sauce?

“I went back to Taiwan last year, and I went to a restaurant and ate it,” Chen tells me. “I said, “Oh my God, this is completely different. Not like a traditional pickled cabbage. And also not like Korean kimchi. The flavor is amazing.’”

Chen asked the owner of the restaurant, which had maybe four tables, if he would tell Chen what the ingredients were. The owner said no at first, but finally agreed to share a list of ingredients — but the ingredients only. The quantities, Chen would have to figure out himself.

Back in Pittsburgh, at Everyday Noodles, he began to experiment with one of his chefs.

“You know how many times I came back to try to do this sauce?” Chen asks me. “I think more than 50 times. But finally, we got it right.”

The main ingredient in the golden pickle cabbage, a dish Chen tasted in a four-table restaurant 7,500 miles from Pittsburgh, is cantaloupe.

90.5 WESA’s month-long series “Local Cuisine, Global Roots” features interviews and deeper dives on the restaurants and business in this article. Find all the stories in this series at wesa.fm/food.