This Week at the Herdic House
Hmmm… It’s been positively wintry so far this week (see below for a picture of Linden with the year’s first snowball), but we’re hoping to squeeze in one last delicious and slightly summery Blue Plate before we transition to full comfort food vibes: it’ll be a Misty Mountain Farm beef and pork taco salad this evening, folks, with local beans, crispy tortilla, salsa casera and pepper jack, over local baby greens. We’ve just got to take advantage of these awesome local greens while they last! It’s $18 at our House, and $20 to go, like always—but, per usual, our number of to-go orders will be very limited. And for an appetizer, we’ll be featuring some of those confit duck wings again—because we’ve really been enjoying them—this week fried and tossed with a honey-orange sauce, with pomegranate seeds and clementine…
Come join us for our Thursday happy hours at the bar, from 5-7 pm, with $1 off all beers and $2 off wines by the glass. Plus we’ll be serving our Thursday night feature that feigns healthiness, all while loaded with the tangy umami of ranch dressing: house favorite Herdic Pittsburgh salad, this week served with a confit duck leg, fresh-cut fries, grated cheddar and parmesan ranch. Plus, Hannah will be mixing up black manhattans at the bar, with some of the new, delicious amaro we just received…
But the real news this week is that we’re officially celebrating our 41st anniversary in business this Saturday evening, November 15, with a raucous Beautiful Fools party starting at 7:00 pm, and featuring a terrific band playing under the moniker Fats Walter and the Susquehanna Boomrats, headed up by the talented Walt Straiton—they were kind enough to play for our anniversary last year (see Liz in full dance mode above), and they are truly excellent at bringing the ’20s to life. It’ll be a party to remember (even if the attendees end up with only hazy recollections), and we still have tickets available. Tickets are $75 and include a welcome glass of champagne and a “parting shot” when the band finishes playing, in honor of 41 excellent years, as well as the menu below.
The inspiration for our anniversary theme this year is the Great Gatsby, since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stunningly beautiful and timely book was published exactly 100 years ago. We’ll have our best party-foot forward this Saturday evening, in honor of the evocative scenes of Gatsby’s huge parties, as we dance our hearts out to some great 20’s jazz…and we’ll be celebrating the 41 years of wonderful people the restaurant business has introduced us to—be they customers, employees, farmers, and even just neighbors in our community. (And hopefully many of those wonderful people will be celebrating with us!) 41 years of forming party of the fabric of our community is, to us, worth a blow-out party—and we’re hoping that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have approved…
And our delicious menu for this Saturday’s festivities! Butlered hors d’oeuvres:
- Fried oysters with remoulade dip
- Scallops wrapped in bacon
“On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” Stationary hors d’oeuvres:
- Turkeys “bewitched to a dark gold”
- Smoked salmon
- Harlequin salads: the Waldorf, the Astoria, the Plaza
- Deviled eggs
- Shrimp cocktail
Together we scrutinized the 12 lemon cakes from the delicatessen shop. ‘Will they do?’ I asked. Desserts:
- Lemon cakes
- Pistachio macarons
Tickets are $75 and can be reserved via email (hit us up at herdichouse@gmail.com) or phone at 570.322.0165. Beautiful fools, indeed…
P.S. Empty-headed, Gatsby-themed parties seem to be a bit of the rage lately, and we’ve been thinking a lot about how much we too love “large parties”, and how to reconcile that with the novel’s theme of disdain for wealth and privilege. And we’ve been rereading Gatsby, which some of us (ahem: Liz) haven’t read since high school.
As Liz has been reading it to the kids at bedtime (don’t judge: books that are over their heads are excellent for inducing sleepiness), she’s been struck by how succinct a summation Fitzgerald’s 100-year-old book is of our very own era—his observations on the cruelty of privilege and the frivolity of wealth still ring pretty true in 2025. It makes us appreciate how impressive a feat Fitzgerald managed 100 years ago—to paint a picture of a decadent time that is somehow both damning and sympathetic. If you, like Liz, haven’t reread Gatsby in a while, you should revisit it. It’s not a hopeful novel, but it’s astute and eloquent…and a remarkable feeling, to understand your own era better through the lens of a 100 year old novel…