When a Craigslist ad for servers brought Lish Danielle to Cafe Sam, she was surprised to find the restaurant was a house with a front porch.
“I feel like it was kind of strange,” Danielle tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I think I just walked in there.” She barely remembers any formal interview process, but before long, she was working parties, hauling 60-pound trays of food and ice buckets up the building’s three stories and to the rooftop patio.
“It was just nothing but stairs,” Danielle says.
A fixture on Baum Boulevard, Cafe Sam has long felt shrouded in mystery, as if transported from another time. In 2018, the restaurant quietly closed after nearly 30 years in business. There was no fanfare or even public notice. And though the Pittsburgh Business Times, one of the only outlets to announce the closure, got wind of it that summer, they were only able to report it in Oct. 2019, when the property was officially listed for sale. The restaurant’s former site was a prime candidate, they wrote, for redevelopment “in the heart of the busy Baum-Centre corridor.”
Passing by where the building still stands, it’s difficult to miss a large Victorian house that looks like it’s been lifted directly out of the tree-lined streets of Friendship and plunked down on a concrete lot amidst the hospitals and chichi apartments. In addition to its front porch, the converted brick house has stained glass windows, a garden facing the street, green and white striped awnings that evoke a Parisian cafe, and its signature Cafe Sam sign — green script with a single rose.
In one of the only existing write-ups about the restaurant from 2004 (which also included their creme brûlée recipe), owner Andrew Zins told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that the building was originally constructed as a private residence in 1911, and was once home to a brothel. Perhaps as an homage, an antique mannequin named Samantha — last photographed in a leopard print blouse — always sat at the bar. County property records show the site’s 1987 purchase from Don Allen Chevrolet, where, in the early 20th century, it presumably stood as a part of Pittsburgh’s Automobile Row.
Beyond its incongruous building, the restaurant itself seemed enigmatic — offering an eclectic, mostly upscale American menu that, around the time of its closing, included everything from escargot to blackened tilapia to a classic fried fish sandwich.
“I’m dying for the seasoned fries and French onion soup,” one person commented on the Business Times’ story about the redevelopment.
But Danielle — a Pittsburgh artist, personal trainer, and owner of Legit Fit LLC — told City Paper she talks about her time working at Cafe Sam often, and that she might be “the only person who could tell [its] story because [I’m] just as mysterious as the restaurant.”
Danielle started at Cafe Sam when she was 18, among a group of young waitstaff. The restaurant drew diners from Hillman Cancer Center and the Marriott hotel next door, as well as its share of regulars, and the clientele was older.
“Mary would be like, ‘The chancellor from Pitt is here,’” Danielle remembers. “But then it wouldn't be the current chancellor, it would be the chancellor from 30 years ago.”
Though she puts the average customer’s age around 50, she remembers, “These two men would come in. And he’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m 91. And this is my dad, he’s 108.’ I was like, wait, what?! It was like that.”
Up until its closing, the restaurant remained a kind of time capsule, continuing the high-end trends from the sit-down restaurant boom of the 1980s — the so-called Decade of Decadence — yet still catering to a more laid-back Pittsburgh crowd, all unfolding in a Victorian house. In trying to bridge these divides, you could order any meat on the menu prepared “Buffalo style" with cheese and hot sauce, Danielle says, but also, the place never lost a sense of grandeur about itself — they put hand-sliced lemons in every glass of water and brought fresh bread with Cafe Sam’s “famous” pesto oil (an ‘80s trend) to the table.
In keeping with the fine dining aesthetic, servers had to wear “this whole outfit” as their uniform, Danielle tells City Paper, including a bowtie, black pants, nonstick shoes, an apron, a side towel (usually carried by chefs), and a corkscrew for table-side bottle service. The restaurant’s systems, she says, were “archaic,” and she started her shifts by punching into an actual time clock. To take orders, servers wrote every item down and keyed everything into a register with an elaborate numbering system to ring them up.
Restaurant patrons entered through a foyer, and could eat in upstairs or downstairs dining rooms — each with wrap-around wooden benches that Danielle believes were original to the house, and decked out with pink cushions, tablecloths, and individually folded napkins.
“It was even set up like a house,” Danielle recalls, “Because all of our stations were … these rinky-dink old wooden dressers.” Servers grabbed silverware out of the dressers, and when they cleared their tables, stacked sugar, salt ramekins (small dishes), side plates (another small dish often used for bread), and the napkins.
“There was really nothing new,” she tells CP. “There was nothing new about it.”
Cafe Sam’s extensive menu is perhaps the most storied part of the restaurant, and Danielle recalls learning 40 items and up to a dozen rotating specials, which she read off a double-sided card. Though it blended high-end French and Italian dishes with a casual hamburger, the restaurant maintained until the end that it offered contemporary American food.
Among the items Danielle remembers are bouillabaisse — a French soup with shrimp, clams, and oysters — duck, mussels, a prime rib special, rainbow tilapia with a cream sauce, even more exotic foods like alligator and bison meatballs, and a beloved portobello soup that remained a staple until the restaurant closed. There was also a varied dessert menu and a signature flaky chocolate chip cookie that came complimentary at the end of each meal.
“People would go crazy for those cookies,” Danielle remarks.
In the summertime, the restaurant experimented with gazpachos, serving a cold wildberry soup.
Danielle believes the owner, who was a lawyer before opening the restaurant he named after a family member, “just got bored and wanted to try things out … He wanted to have everything” at his restaurant, she says.
“And that was the only time I’d ever see him gleeful,” she tells CP, “when he was asking us to try these different things.”
Naturally, the menu and all the accouterments were meant to give the restaurant a refined air, reflecting the owner’s taste, but also maybe to spite Ritter’s Diner across the street, Danielle speculates.
The restaurant and its college-aged staff also became a world unto itself. Danielle often worked 16-hour shifts and, over the course of six years, her co-workers grew into a found family. The job saw her through college and two pregnancies, from being a student to becoming a young working mother, and she kept picking up shifts even after she started a full-time job.
“I was a big cut-up, because the place was very stuffy,” she tells CP. At the same time, “it had all of this charm,” and looked “so snooty, even though it really wasn’t.”
Cafe Sam, she says, would hire anyone, and she met people she wouldn’t have otherwise. Once, one of the veteran chefs, Bill, turned out to have a side hustle as a Polish DJ, playing polka music around town. It was the kind of place, common in service jobs, where they “rode you hard as a worker,” but she also remembers being supported. Some years, they gave all the servers extravagant Christmas gifts — Louboutin makeup or Coach purses.
The largesse wasn't what stuck with Danielle, though. “Before I ever left Pittsburgh, and understood what it was like to work in a different setting, I worked for [Cafe Sam],” Danielle says. “So I just had this belief that people who come from Pittsburgh know how to work extremely hard … the amount of effort everyone [put in] to be there on their worst days shaped me into a hard worker. On days I really [didn’t] really feel like working, [I thought] I'll be better once I just get there.”
Over time, regulars at the restaurant began to dwindle and Danielle remembers picking up a New Year’s Eve shift — which at one time would’ve packed the place — and realizing she’d earned less than her outfit cost. The ultimate irony of creating a dynamic, sophisticated menu, Danielle says, is that the restaurant’s aging clientele often ordered the same dishes over and over.
The fine dining concept also became an anachronism, part of an older Pittsburgh, as the surrounding neighborhood changed, rapidly developing and becoming home to younger residents less interested in Old World fare. The restaurant’s building didn’t meet modern accessibility standards, and today, Danielle guesses, it would suffer in a more germophobic post-COVID world.
“[Restaurants] don’t put pepper shakers on the tables anymore,” she says. “It’s not pre-wrapped silverware.” At a place like Cafe Sam, “someone has touched this fork, this knife, this spoon.”
But the vision remained of an elegant restaurant that could offer gourmet food on Baum Boulevard.
The mystery of Cafe Sam might come down to the restaurateurs themselves.
“I think that they were really cool people,” Danielle says, “And essentially, the restaurant was as quirky and strange as they were.”
