Thanksgiving Festivities, Continued: In which we gain a greater appreciation of Pittsburgh, and a new appreciation of Cleveland

One nice side benefit of having visitors is that we have extra incentives to go explore things nearby that we'd ordinarily be too lazy to go check out.

Take the ice skating rink at the PPG Plaza, for instance, which was christened with the holiday tree at the annual Light Up Night a week ago.


Gorgeous, crisp, cold, and clear night...holiday songs over the loudspeaker...trees decked out in lights...


...and Heinz-regalia Triceratops around the corner.


And of course, a trip to Primanti's was in line. Meat, fries, and coleslaw on soft Italian bread...


...what more could you ask for in a sandwich?? Yum yum yum.

And then the next day, we piled into the car and headed out to Cleveland, a city very similar to Pittsburgh in many ways, including industrial history, approximate metropolitan population size, and hatred for each other's sports teams.

My general feel for Cleveland from this trip was that 1) it was very flat, 2) downtown was very clean, spacious, and pretty, 3) the houses looked more neat and well-kept than the old houses in Pgh.


Interestingly enough, they have much better Asian grocery/restaurant infrastructure, for not being much bigger than Pittsburgh.

We had lunch with friends of mine at Siam Cafe, which was refreshingly old school. You know you're in a decent Chinese restaurant when you see old and wrinkly Chinese elders drinking tea and waiting for their food when you enter.

Then we went to a large Asian supermarket called Park to Shop to check out their awesome live seafood selection and prepared foods.

Including roast duck. Mmm mmm mmm...and so cheap!


And a surprising meat selection: live frogs. I haven't seen fresh frog sold in this manner in the US before. I wonder how much turnover they actually get.



Then we headed over to West Side Market, an awesome fusion of farmer's market meets specialty shops.

One building held a continuous hallway of produce vendors, or hawkers, since they kept calling out to potential customers to catch their attention. When we were leaving, a couple of salespeople called out "ni hao!!" to us as we passed by. We smiled, walked away, rolled our eyes, and sighed.


There was a Mediterranean import shop that had the BIGGEST jar of Nutella I have ever seen. We saw a few more of these jars at the crepe stand (which was next to a coffee stand--awesome idea), and we were able to discover that the gigundous jars held FIVE KILOGRAMS of Nutella.


In the main hall, there were stands upon stands of what looked like family-owned, local purveyors of all kinds of foods. Fudge, roasted nuts, caramel popcorn, perogies (we brought home 1 & 1/2 dozen of them), pastries, breads, pasta (see below), ethnic prepared foods (Asian, Middle Eastern, Italian, Mexican...), sausages, meat, fish, dry foods (beans, grains, etc), dairy (cheese, milk, butter), crepes, coffee....and much more.


Look at all these pastas!! And raviolis! And there was more around the corner at the same stand...there must have been over two dozen types of fresh pasta...


And this stand sold British-style pastries and meat pies! We brought home a Scottish meat pie, and it was quite yummy. They also had pasties.


And our last shopping destination was KoKo bakery, a Taiwanese-style bakery with the obligatory bubble tea menu.


They had a great selection of breads, packages of prepared steamed buns in the fridge, boxes and boxes of traditional flaky moon cakes, buttery Japanese-style bread, and pretty cakes and pastries.


Our last attempted destination was a bar/restaurant called Melt, which I heard about through fellow Pgh food blogger Burghilicious. They have a crazy long selection of cheesy sandwich deliciousness. Apparently they're going to be featured in Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on Food Network in January, so we were hoping to get in while their popularity hadn't shot through the roof through national TV exposure, but alas, the wait for our little cohort of 3 people was 1 & 1/2 hours, and take out would have been 1 hour. We could have waited around, but it was dark, we didn't have anywhere else to hang out for just an hour, and we were getting tired. So we snapped a few pics, took a menu, and headed back home. Alas.