Butterjoint

Butterjoint is the surviving half of one of the most consequential restaurant projects Pittsburgh has had. Trevett and Sarah Hooper opened Legume on South Braddock Avenue in Regent Square in June 2007, moved it to North Craig Street in 2011, and opened Butterjoint as the more casual bar next door in late 2012. Legume closed permanently at the end of February 2020 and the two rooms became one under the Butterjoint name. The Post-Gazette's assessment when the Hoopers stepped away was that their seventeen-year run as restaurant owners changed the course of dining in Pittsburgh. In November 2023 they sold the business to George Austin, who had been their executive chef since 2021 and who put it plainly: he is carrying on, as much as he can, what Trevett and Sarah started here. The awards belong to that earlier era and are worth stating precisely — Legume was a 2018 James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurant, and Trevett Hooper a 2013 semifinalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. Semifinalist in both cases, not finalist, and not for Butterjoint itself.

The food is Pittsburgh comfort cooking crossed with French bistro: pierogi with caramelised onions and sour cream at $17, a burger at $21, moules frites at $30, steak frites with ramp chimichurri at $52, and milk-bread rolls with local Hatch chile butter at $8. The non-alcoholic drinks have their own heading, and it is a good one — "Hold the Booze" — which reads like the bar talking rather than a marketing department. What sits under it is a single rotating house cocktail plus a properly stocked shelf. The current cocktail is the Concrete Jungle bird at $12, built on house-made non-alcoholic rum and non-alcoholic Campari with pineapple, lime, cinnamon and jalapeño — house-made, which is the detail that matters, because most bars buy those bottles in. Leitz sparkling Riesling is the non-alcoholic wine at $10, and cans run $6: Guinness Zero, Bitburger Premium Pils, and an Aslin blackberry-and-blueberry sour. Be aware the cocktail slot genuinely rotates — it has held at least three different drinks in three years — so ask what is on rather than arriving for a name.