During its eight-season run on TV, “Portlandia” often lightly skewered the hipster food scene for its obnoxious mixologists, locally sourced chicken, brunch, ramen, and in the opening sketch of season 2, pickling.
Everything and anything, in the most irritatingly twee way imaginable with the sing-songy catchphrase: “We can pickle that!”
The fellas running the Bridge City Brinery food truck have based their business around the practice of pickling, but not to any such cutesy effect. Rather, they make big, honkin’, messy sandwiches with bold flavors, and in each one there is an element that’s pickled, brined or both. After all, this is Pittsburgh, not Portland.
To wit: The Graceland, a $13 absolute behemoth of a pickle-brined fried chicken thigh sandwich, slathered with a rich and piquant peanut chili glaze and a slightly sweet and tangy Filipino-style banana ketchup. It’s topped with crunchy napa cabbage and crispy quickles (which are exactly what they sound like — quick-pickled fresh cucumbers).
All the components are house (or rather truck) made, and that includes the excellent bread which holds up to this Fat Elvis-sized sammie.
The textures and flavor profiles are interesting, if not borderline bonkers, but so too is the story behind how Beaver County native Mark Mammone and Shaler product Joe Bardakos launched this business.
“Meeting Mark was life-changing,” Mr. Bardakos said. “Everything has led perfectly to Mark and I crossing paths.”
The 40-year-old Mr. Mammone followed showbiz aspirations as a standup comedian, working the club circuit regionally and nationally before ultimately moving for seven years to Los Angeles, where he racked up two dozen film and television credits, mostly as an extra or a stand-in. He enrolled in culinary school there and moved back to Pittsburgh in 2019 on his own terms, he said, and in early 2020 found a job at Il Piccolo Forno in Lawrenceville.
Mr. Bardakos, 30, grew up “in a shootout of kitchens run by little Greek and Italian women” (his mother and grandmothers) and even got a waffle iron for his seventh birthday. Culinary school was all he ever wanted to do, even if his mother asked him why he needed to go to school when she’d taught him how to cook.
“I said, ‘Mom, I need the piece of paper’ that proved it.”
He did that and more, graduating on the dean’s list from the bygone Le Cordon Bleu Institute in Downtown. He worked at the William Penn Hotel but got in legal trouble over drug use. He cleaned up his act in 2018 and is nearly three years sober. In 2019, he started working at Piccolo Forno and credits chef/owner Dom Branduzzi for taking a chance on him.
Neither he nor Mr. Mammone had been there very long when the pandemic hit and suddenly found themselves running a kitchen “staring at each other cooking [takeout] food all day.”
They started spitballing ideas for a pickling business and launched Bridge City Brinery, making and selling jarred pickled goods on their days off. Getting their product on the shelves at Pennsylvania Macaroni Co. buoyed their confidence and they started dreaming of a restaurant when the opportunity to buy a food truck fell in their laps.
So they did, launching the truck in May with the help of their significant others. They’ve put together a creative menu of Brobdingnagian sandwiches like “Graceland” and the “Seoul of Pittsburgh” — a $14 Korean-inspired take on Primanti Bros. with bulgogi ribeye, kimchi mayonnaise, Korean-seasoned fries and napa slaw kraut that borrows from Mr. Mammone’s Croatian grandmother’s sauerkraut recipe.
Others are more straightforward, like the “The Crosstown,” a shaved ribeye and provolone cheesesteak with red pepper giardiniera and roasted garlic mayo ($14).
“We make our mayos from scratch, our bread from scratch, our pickles from scratch, everything from scratch,” Mr. Bardakos said. “We want to feed you like you’re coming to our house to eat. That's what it means to cook from love.”
Follow Bridge City Brinery at bridgecitybrinery.com.
Dan Gigler: dgigler@post-gazette.com.
First Published: August 19, 2021, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: August 20, 2021, 4:33 p.m.
