Meet Thrillist Pittsburgh's Best Chefs of 2016

pittsburgh chefs cure
JUSTIN SEVERINO | Adam Milliron
Editor’s Note: This article is part two of Thrillist Pittsburgh's year-end look at the best of our city’s local food and drink scene in 2016. In addition to our annual Best New Restaurants award, this year, we’re spotlighting the men and women behind the dishes we love to tell you to eat. Whether they bucked the national trends, revived classic local flavors, or otherwise drove the city's culinary scene, these are the chefs that stood out this year. Check out our picks for the rest of America’s 2016 Best Chefs, and then catch up on Best New Restaurants

Chefs work hard. They pour their hearts and souls into their kitchens, churning out dish after dish, finding new ways to reimagine old favorites, and honing their craft to create new flavor combinations that an ever-sophisticated public demands. Just running a restaurant and staying open in a crowded market is a minor miracle, but striving day after day to perfect skills and push boundaries -- well, that’s what makes you the best.

In a city that has a dining scene that’s been growing by leaps and bounds, choosing just a handful of chefs to name as our best of the year was a challenge. But these four chefs earn the title of Thrillist Pittsburgh Chefs of the Year because they have delighted us all year long with their culinary pursuits, putting their own stamp on their respective cuisines.

Justin Severino

Cure

In the last five years, Justin Severino has made an indelible mark on Pittsburgh’s culinary community. Since opening Cure in 2011, the accolades, including a James Beard Award nomination, have steadily rolled in -- and Severino has kept his head down and worked through it all.  

That no-nonsense ethic drove Severino to launch his second Lawrenceville restaurant late last year. Morcilla opened to rave reviews, cementing his reputation as one of the city’s brightest stars. Not only has the Spanish restaurant been on just about every Best New Restaurant list in town (including ours), but it’s packed every night, with locals and visitors alike.  

Though the menus and cuisines at Severino’s restaurants differ, they’re both uniquely and unmistakably his. Both restaurants have insanely good charcuterie selections, with primarily house-cured meats from black strap ham to Negroni-spiked salami. Severino excels in creating refined, interesting dishes that still feel incredibly accessible to a more traditional meat-and-potatoes crowd.

Severino has gone full circle on his journey to become one of Pittsburgh’s most beloved stars. After graduating from the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute, Severino spent a few years bouncing around California, working in kitchens and running a butcher shop. When he moved back to Pittsburgh, he did stints in various restaurants before venturing out on his own. Back when he first opened Cure, Severino was far from a recognizable name. Five years later, he’s leading the charge to make Pittsburgh a world-class culinary destination

Matthew Conboy

Trevett Hooper

Legume

In a world that centers around what’s new and what’s next, Trevett Hooper is happy to stay his course.   

“The thing that we excel at is something that has kind of come out of fashion,” Hooper said. “Farm to table food is not as fashionable now as it was ten years ago, and while it’s not the most trendy thing, we’re really trying to be a genuine farm to table restaurant.”

That restaurant, Legume, is on the cusp of celebrating its 10th year in business, and the adjoining bar, Butterjoint, has been around for four. And Hooper is ready to expand his Oakland footprint with the soon-to-open Pie for Breakfast, an all-day, everything-from-scratch café, right next door.

“We just want to be working on interesting and fun things,” he said. “And we want to work with really interesting people.”

Over the last decade, Hooper has earned a reputation for being fanatical about local sourcing. He’s developed close relationships with a number of local farms and farmers, sitting down with his favorites each year to request certain plantings of unusual vegetables, plotting menu ideas a year in the future. His storage room is legendary, loaded with dozens of jars of house-made pickles, jams, and preserved vegetables, which give bright bursts of summer tastes even in the dead of winter.

Though Hooper is known for the traditional cooking methods and techniques that have become central to his approach to food, everything in his New American restaurant still feels fresh, even after all this time.

“In some ways, I feel like we’re mastering the lute,” he said. “We’re mastering this thing that is kind of archaic, but incredibly important.”

christopher ruth

Kate Lasky & Tomasz Skowronski

Apteka

Since opening earlier this year, Kate Lasky and Tomasz Skowronski’s Apteka has become one of Pittsburgh’s most exciting new restaurants, and Lasky and Skowronski have become two of Pittsburgh’s most exciting new chefs.

The duo first made their name in Pittsburgh with their monthly Pierogi Night pop-ups, where hordes of people would line up to get a taste of their homemade pierogies at various spots around town. That led to a successful Kickstarter campaign that helped them launch their Bloomfield restaurant -- an open, modern space that doubles as a community hub.

With a small menu that focuses on the complex flavors of Eastern European, Lasky and Skowronski are bridging the gap between old-world tastes and modern techniques. Think: Lots of fermenting, preserves, and house-made pickles, all inspired by their European travels and Skowronski’s childhood visits to family in Warsaw. But don’t expect many dishes that your Polish babcia would recognize. Apteka’s menu is refined, with dishes that have smoked onion remoulade sharing a plate with traditional pickled beets and house-made seed bread.

The restaurant is completely vegan, though carnivores won’t miss meat or dairy. Roasted vegetables bulk up many dishes, and the seasonal menu (and pierogi selection) changes with such frequency that no two visits will ever be exactly the same.  

Skowronski and Lasky have paid special attention to Apteka’s bar program, infusing cordials and liqueurs, and crafting hearty, savory cocktails, like a gin and Chartreuse drink spiked with celery seed. This is a place purveying traditional flavors brought decidedly up to date. It’s enough to make even the most hard-to-please babcia happy.

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Emily Catalano is the creator of Good Food Pittsburgh, a site devoted to all of the good food that her hometown has to offer. She loves fries on her salad, Jalapeno Hannah, and any event with a cookie table. Follow her at @emcatalano.
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