’90s throwback dinner starts with slap bracelets

If you’re a child of the ’90s, the menu for an upcoming ’90s Cocktail Dinner might sound like heaven, with throwbacks like fish sticks, ham-and-cheese Hot Pockets, mini-bagel pizzas and Zima, served straight from the bottle with a Jolly Rancher if you want it.

Home, one of the four restaurants occupying Smallman Galley in the Strip District, is putting on the dinner at 5:30 p.m. Monday as well as planning ’80s and ’70s dinners for the future.

Smallman Galley is an incubator for fledgling restaurateurs. Up-and-coming chefs apply to run their own restaurant concepts in the food hall for a limited time while receiving training in entrepreneurship, food safety, finance and more. The experience is meant to provide a launching pad from which the chefs can one day open their own restaurants.

Home is the brainchild of Phillip Milton, a Michigander who has worked in Manhattan, Tampa, Fla., and Atlantic City, N.J., restaurants. His wife, Melanie, encouraged him to move to her hometown of Pittsburgh in 2015 and join the rising food scene.

Home’s tagline is “A Modern Take on Comfort Classics.” The fish sticks for the ’90s dinner also show up on the regular menu, but they’re not the fish sticks of your childhood. They’re pecan-crusted walleye with spicy tartar. Other items on the regular menu include pulled pork, chicken and biscuits and a “TV Dinner” that changes daily.

The other food items on the menu for the ’ 90s “strolling” dinner are Caesar salad, sun-dried-tomatostuffed mushrooms, pigs in a blanket, chicken pot pies, molten lava cakes and a Dunkaroo dipping station. Food will be available at selfserve stations.

Other creative offerings on the cocktail menu include:

• “Why Did We Ever Stop Drinking These?” is a cosmo made with vodka, cranberry/orange cordial and lime.

• “Peach Snapple Tea-Ni” includes whiskey, Meletti, Peach Snapple syrup and bitters.

• “You Don’t Just Drink, You Drink-a-Roo” is rum, Maggie’s Farm Coffee Liqueur, chocolate syrup and Dunkaroo whip.

Bar manager Matt Zelinsky called the ’90s a decade when “drinks were all called martinis even if there wasn’t any vodka or gin, or god forbid actual vermouth, contained in them at all.

“Bonus points … if your glass contained Hershey’s syrup in some capacity,” he added.

In creating his ’90s cocktail menu, he thought immediately of “Zimas and a cosmo named after a ‘Sex in the City’ quote because I literally cannot think of anything more apropos of ’ 90s drinking than those two specific things.”

The fun runs from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. on an evening when Smallman Galley is normally closed, so ’90s diners will have the place to themselves. Organizers are planning to give out slap bracelets at entry, and ’ 90s attire is encouraged.

Tickets, which include two of the specialty cocktails, are $59 and are available at eventbrite.com/e/ 90s-cocktail-dinner-withhome

The ’80s and ’70s dinners will be held on Nov. 5 and March 11, 2019, and tickets for the three dinners can be bought in a package deal at eventbrite.com/e/diningthrough