Pittsburgh: Sienna Mercato

A tradition we have when we go on the road is to have a pasta dinner on our first night.  I found Sienna Mercato on yelp, and said the place was about 0.4 miles from our hotel, and the hotel had a shuttle that could take up to 11 of us. This restaurant is divided into three floors, the first floor is a meatball restaurant, second floor is a charcuterie and pizzeria, and a top floor is a beer garden. The third floor is on the roof, but the room is enclosed in glass.

Reservations can only be made for the second floor restaurant, and since there were 20 of us, it took a while for a table as it was first come first serve. The staff was very nice and tried to accommodate us with two tables of 10. While we waited for the table, we went to the rooftop to get some drinks.  It took about 45-minutes to get my text message our tables were ready.

We were seated adjacent to each other, but with different servers.   The downstairs level wasn’t very large, so we were quite fortunate to have our group in just 2 tables.

The menu had a variety of things, but I wanted to try all their meatballs, so Stephen and I shared a combination of them:

Pork with pork Bolognese, and the BOM (ball of the month ) with marinara

Vegetable ball with govt cheese, the Turkey meatball with mushroom gravy, and my favorite of all, the classic beef meatball with the spinach-almond pesto.

What I didn’t realize until we paid was our meatballs were the same price as sliders.  Basically, we were not given our bread. I don’t know if it was a miscommunication or an error on the server’s part, but we left on a rather sour note.  Overall, everyone enjoyed their meal.  The service was decent, despite the size of our group.  Most of the group had the 4 meatballs with pasta, which was too much for one person.  Perhaps Stephen and I should have split that, or, gone in with others to share a variety of meatballs and pasta. Oh well, there’s next time.