Pittsburgh's First TasteCasting – Melange Bistro Bar

A while ago I was invited into the Pittsburgh TasteCasting group. TasteCasting is a team of people that get invited to restaurants and eateries for a complementary tasting. In exchange the team members share their experience with their collective networks of friends on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. The Pittsburgh TasteCasting group is a new addition to the ever growing number of cities that have TasteCasting groups. The first TasteCasting was at Melange Bistro Bar in downtown Pittsburgh. I rarely eat downtown so I was excited to check it out. Melange is located at 136 sixth street, which is baiscally a walk from anywhere in the cultural district of downtown. Melange is a new restaurant opened on March 7th, so you probably have not heard about it.

The atmosphere inside the resturant is great, it gives you a relaxing feeling. One thing I really liked was all of the large photographs on the wall. There restuarant can probably fit around 50 people, maybe a little more. There is a full bar and they even had a live DJ mixing music all night.

The name Melange means mixture in French and that is what Melange wants to offer it’s customers, great food from all over the world. Our tasting started with beet chips with fruit salsa. This was something totally different for me and it was great! I could eat the fruit salsa all day! It was made of fresh melons, mango, cilantro, and a touch of vinegar.

Next we had crab cakes topped with a balsamic glaze. They are normally stuff with smoked salmon, but for us they had the salmon in the middle of the plate.

To show us that they offer foods for everyone they next served us a sampler plate of 4 of their entrees. It included chicken marsala over parmesan potatoes, shrimp scampi over a bed of rice pilaf, spiced lamb with curried cous cous, and duck breast with blueberry glaze. Out of the 4 entrees the duck was my favorite.

Finally we were served Tiramisu for dessert. It was a great way to finish off the tasting and it tasted great!

After eating a Melange I would definitely go back! They have something for everyone on the menu! Chef Noxon was very nice and came out and explained all of the dishes to us. They have specials if you work in the city and show you ID, which is nice. If I worked downtown Melange would be a great relaxing place to spend my lunch break. Melange is very web-savvy too, you can make reservations online and they even have a twitter account, @melange_bistro. You can follow them and they tweet out specials and other events that they have going on. You can see all of the pictures I took at the event in my Flickr set. Here is a short video Carley and I made…

Thanks to Melange and TasteCasting for this great event!