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Cleveland
A Food Tour
Posted: Nov. 11, 2011
By Victoria Bradley

As a Pittsburgher, I’ve been conditioned to regard Cleveland as enemy territory. But when Positively Cleveland, the travel bureau, invited TABLE to judge their Cleveland Culinary Challenge — we were flattered. And, admittedly, curious.

Positively Cleveland’s Lexi Hotchkiss picked us up at the Marriott Key Center, shortly after our arrival, for lunch. “We’re going to the nicest restaurant in Cleveland,” she said, winking behind her hipster glasses. She led us to a charming cobblestoned street, with lights zigzagging across like a canopy. We were at Lola, the restaurant of celebrity Chef Michael Symon.

The place is famous for its beef cheek pierogi, which didn’t disappoint. It was striped with horseradish and steeped with mushrooms, giving the sweet beef a lip burn and a bloom of earthiness. I ordered the afternoon’s special: a venison sandwich, which had a clean mineral flavor with a little tang. I appreciated the crunch of pickled red onion, stacked on top, and the side of salty fries.

We were whisked off to Sweet Moses for dessert, a charming treat shop, with old-fashioned wrought-iron ice cream chairs and an authentic Bastion-Blessings soda fountain. Owner Jeff Moreau started us off with scoops of his seasonal pumpkin ice cream. Nice spice. We got instruction on how to properly eat a root beer float (“Scoop the ice cream UP; when you scoop down, you plunge into the root beer and spill over the sides). We were surprised by a third treat of a banana split. (“Well, it’s the prettiest one,” Moreau said. “You have to try it.”) And our finale was a chocolate raspberry phosphate (a vintage soda). Sweet Moses claims one of only four true phosphate machines still in existence in the country.

Can you guess what happened next? We crashed. Lexi dropped us off for a nap before the competition.

Fully refreshed, we scooted off to Cuyahoga Community College for the third annual Cleveland Culinary Challenge. Cleveland’s top chefs, Karen Small (Flying Fig), Doug Katz (Fire Food and Drink), Dante Boccuzzi (Dante, Ginko) and Eric Williams (Momocho) were paired up with teams of students with an one-ingredient theme. (Lucky for me, that ingredient was lamb.) I was honored to be on the judge’s panel with Next Iron Chef judge Michael Ruhlman, television producer, recipe developer and author Susie Heller, and Food & Wine Deputy Food Editor Kate Heddings.

I taste-tested at a table with a microphone. When asked, “How does the culinary scene in Pittsburgh differ from the one in Cleveland?” I licked lamb from my lips and said, “What you lack in football, you make up for in food.” Cheers all around.

The Greenhouse Tavern was the scene of the after-party, with Chef Jonathon Sawyer, a red-bearded culinary genius with as much personality as flavor in his garlic rosemary French fries. The highlight of the evening was a tie: Sawyer carried a roasted pig’s head in front of the window where we were eating and pushed his nose into a snout (hilarious), and we drank glass after glass of spicy red wine on the roof with Heddings, gazing over the electric bustle of East Fourth Street.

We breakfasted at Lucky’s Café and barely spoke through our biscuits and gravy and “Shipwreck”: a breakfast hash, with potatoes, eggs, cheese, veggies, and bacon, the perfect cure for the previous night’s imbibing.

A walk through the West Side Market was a romantic end to our 24-hour love affair. The majestic hall has housed the market for the 99 years and is packed with a menagerie of vendors, from fresh produce to charcuterie, and is only open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, “because that’s when the ice was delivered back in the day.” We sampled slivers of smoked bacon and took home rounds of peppered jerky and Cognac fig goat cheese (a delicious snack for these writings).