This Week at the Herdic House
A simple and satisfying Blue Plate tonight, made with ingredients from some of our favorite local vendors—Lamb Keema: Indian-style ground lamb from Walnut Run Farm simmered with potatoes, local shell and snow peas and yogurt and served over basmati rice. It’s $15 at the House and $17 to go…
And tomorrow, our Happy Hours continue! Join us from 5-7 pm on Thursday evenings at the bar for some cocktail specials—$2 off wines by the glass, $1 off beers by the bottle and a rotating $9 craft cocktail, plus we’ll be making classic Pittsburgh-style salads, with housemade ranch dressing, crisp seasonal veggies, Yukon Gold fries. grated cheddar and grilled tenderloin tips… And this week’s cocktail will be a Sour Cherry Gin Sling, with cherries from Liz’s garden…
It seems like the summer swells in sporadic crescendos of celebration, and this weekend the largest (though by no means the last) swell is upon us: the Fourth of July will roll across the US in a flurry of fireworks, heralded by rippling American flags and children with sparklers and a simultaneous (but coincidental!) peak in the firefly population. And we’ll be there on Friday to help you begin your own celebrations, with wonderful artwork by Luana Cleveland, delicious food and, most importantly, a reading of the Declaration of Independence, to remind us of what got us into this mess of democracy in the first place.
Our reader this year will be the suave and handsome Dr. Zachary Ritter, who we know will bring great pizazz to his role (in our experience, Zach never does anything by halves), and represent our founding fathers as they might have wished, had they ever thought that their wild experiment would still be rolling on its quirky (and often twisted) path almost 250 years later. The reading will kick off on the patio at about 7:00 (those of you familiar with the Herdic time schedule know that, much as is true for its owner, all Herdic start times are approximate), but we’ll be serving food and drink all evening, of course, and the talented Luana Cleveland will be displaying her oil portraits of birds in our lounge starting Friday, through the month of July (see below for her piece called “Pompador”).
All in all, it promises to be a First Friday for the books, here at the Herdic House. Call down to snag a patio reservation for dinner or just drop in for a drink, a little culture and some historical perspective—either way we’ll be delighted to celebrate the Fourth with you! But just in case, here’s Friday’s list of features…
- Black raspberry mojito—did we mention the berries and the mint are from the Herdic Row properties?
- Chicken corn chowder, with Landis Farm chicken
- Sliced local tomatoes layered with housemade ricotta, fresh basil, kalamata olives and spicy garlic oil
- Spiced and grilled 10 oz. Misty Mountain Farm pork chop, served over a scallion, pea and potato salad with a sweet cherry barbecue sauce
- Purely American sour cherry pie, made with cherries from just down Fourth St. at Liz’s house, and served with housemade vanilla ice cream
PS If you think it’s weird how much fruit we have on Fourth St., just wait until our plums start to ripen! We may have gone a little overboard on the “fresh and local” thing…