Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part I

The second day of driving would take me across the Ohio River Valley and across the endless farmlands of Ohio. First, however, there was the question of breakfast. I initially wanted to go to the Steel City Diner, a downtown greasy spoon J. and I enjoyed on our visit three years ago, but I walked the six or so blocks only to find that it had closed. Plan B was Pamela's in the Strip, recommended the previous night by the Church's bartender and corroborated by the woman at my hotel's front desk.

The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.

Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.

The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?

While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.

It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.