Call for Catering a great gastropub in New Ken
Phillip Call cooks his pork chops over Pennsylvania cherry wood to an evenly crusted mahogany on the outside and juicy medium in the center.
The orange and red wafers of housemade pickled peppers that accompany the chop are tangy sweet, with a slightly spicy pop at the finish. Call finishes the plate with tendercrisp, peak- summer green beans dressed with concentrated garlic butter and a snowfall of finely cut scallions.
It’s the type of alluring entree you might expect to see at one of Pittsburgh’s mainstage restaurants. Instead, the plate is part of a small menu of equally captivating dishes at Call for Catering, located in a former pizza and wing bar in the back streets of New Kensington.
“We definitely don’t get the foot traffic or the volume of the people we’d have in the city,” says Call, chef and co-owner of the 10-month-old restaurant.
What they do have is a loyal nucleus of regulars who eat dinner there at least once a week. That number should grow given the quality of food and the warmth of service.
Call for Catering is a gastropub in the classic sense, before the term was co-opted to mean “anything elevated yet approachable, preferably with Edison lights.” It’s a welcoming establishment where, on any given night, you might find locals watching a Steelers preseason game or playing cards while hanging out on the couches in the lounge, having a conversation and a bite at the bar or eating a quiet meal at one of the tables in the small dining room.
Call typically offers a handful of appetizers, salads and entrees, and he changes the menu frequently. So, aside from the pork chop (which is always offered, although the side sets vary), don’t get too attached to any individual dish you might love.
He cooks a lot of his ingredients on his wood-fired grill.
“We cooked food over a wood
fire for millenia. It’s just the last bit that we’ve started cooking inside with gas. So maybe we crave that flavor that comes with wood. I’m not talking about long smoking, though, because I think that overwhelms the flavor. Wood fire layers the flavor. You can still taste the pork and the brine in that chop,” Call says.
Elevation by wood fire was most evident last weekend in Call’s chicken piccata. The slightly smoky flavor added a hunky bass note to the Italian American staple, which comes with a tender bone-in half chicken with excellent crackle in the skin and creamy potatoes, both bolstered by the piquant, lemony sauce with butter and capers.
Most of Call for Catering’s dishes lean toward the comfort and classic end of the spectrum. Take the wedge salad. It’s a quintessential preparation of the old-school salad with iceberg lettuce, cherry tomato, hard-boiled egg, red onion and blue cheese dressing. There are no clever plays here; it’s simply made with great care and quality ingredients. Smoked hunks of unctuous and crispy pork belly (which appear throughout the menu, but this is the dish where they shine the brightest) made this salad much better than the version with prefab bacon bits that are the stuff of lousy rubber chicken meals.
Speaking of catered meals: If you’re wondering why the restaurant is named Call for Catering, it’s because Call and co-owner/ general manager Jillian Ludwiczak started the operation as a catering business (which they still run) in late 2019, prior to launching the bar and restaurant last October.
Nevertheless, Call says, sometimes even the classics are a hard sell because they’re perceived as a bit “cheffy.”
“For 20 years this place was a pizza and chicken wing restaurant. On more than one occasion, I’ve had people sit down and when I tell them the menu, they say they don’t like this kind of food. And then they leave. This can be disheartening, of course. But once people try the food they’ve all become loyal customers,” he says.
That, in part, is why (as often as possible) he visits every table to narrate the evening’s menu. It helps build trust with his guests. And that rapport might even get them to try the rare dish on the menu that is actually a little bit soigné.
Last weekend, that menu item was cacio e pepe rice cakes, inspired by something first served at Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York. The rice cakes are chewy and fun and drink all the flavor of the simple yet hardto-do-right cheese and pepper sauce. A shower of summer truffles added an earthy depth of flavor.
At $35, those rice cakes are one of the priciest dishes on the menu but worth it as a special treat. Prices, in general, tend to run a few dollars lower than equivalent restaurants closer to the city but are still high for the area.
There are some good deals, however. Thursdays are oyster night, where bright, perfectly shucked oysters go for $1 per raw bivalve, and Call’s elegant baked oysters are $3 each. He expects to add a prime rib night and other specials soon.
Call and Ludwiczak met when the place was called Stella’s Dine-Inn Restaurant, best known for its 2015 appearance on the restaurant fix-it television show “Restaurant Impossible.” Ludwiczak was part of the front-of-house staff at the time. Call was practicing jiu-jitsu with Dominic Mazzotta, son of owner Stacey Mazzotta, who asked him to come in to help manage the kitchen as they launched a new menu in the wake of the show.
Call was a good fit, having worked in restaurants such as Eleven, Willow and Meat & Potatoes. Although he served for several years in the Navy prior to attending Pennsylvania Culinary Academy, he says he always felt like restaurant kitchens were his calling.
“I started in the industry as a busser at Sewickley Heights Golf Club when I was 14. I remember seeing the head chef chopping onions in the proper way, and it looked like magic to me. That’s when I was first excited about the idea of working in a kitchen,” he says.
Ludwiczak is a registered nurse who also felt the draw of the hospitality industry. When she and Call both independently left Stella’s a little less than a year after the “Restaurant Impossible” episode aired, Ludwiczak worked at Pub 333 in Oakmont and helped open The Lot at Edgewater in 2018. Following that, while working full time in a hospital, she picked up a once-aweek shift at DiAnoia’s Eatery in the Strip.
“I’m always looking to learn more, which is why I kept my hand in the restaurant industry. I learned a lot about wine, Amaro and so much from people I met at DiAnoia’s,” she says.
It shows. Ludwiczak’s bar program is lovely, with a list of well-balanced scratchmade cocktails that are spins on well-known mainstays plus a few originals, and many of the drinks are prepared with housemade syrups. There’s also a list of cordials and amari (including a few small-batch gems from North Carolina) that are hard to find on most bar lists in Pittsburgh, plus beer and wine.
Mazzotta still owns the building and the liquor license, but the two are in the process of taking over the space. At the moment, dinner is served on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and a brunch menu is offered on Sunday.