Restaurants in Butler

The chefs at Chef Dato craft elegant American entrees using ingredients purchased from local grocery stores, farmers, and bakers. Recognized on the Food Network, the restaurant’s Hollywood burger is covered with mango salsa, creamy adjika, and biryani seasoning and served with a bodyguard and five paparazzi. Also popular on the menu: the wild mushroom risotto and the hand-cut, grilled New York strip steak. The dressings for the specialty salads are made by hand; the salads also come topped with maple glazed salmon or grilled chicken and mandarin oranges.

Hookah is all about embracing a slower pace of life. When seated in front of a shisha, one is committed to doing nothing, at least for a little while. The street cafes of Cairo hum with groups of friends exercising this ethos, taking turns inhaling sweet, fragrant smoke and sipping tea. Despite Pittsburgh’s distance from the Sahara, KOAL Hookah Lounge brings a bit of that mentality to Slippery Rock.

After boiling tobacco leaves with one of 21 fruit varietals, the staff at KOAL pack ornate water pipes for parties of three or five. Though most menu flavors reflect long-established tradition, the lounge experiments with unconventional blends such as the Vanilla Sky, a mixture of vanilla and blackberry tobacco. The modern décor further illustrates this embrace of old and new, with track lighting illuminating a bottle-lined wall, and bold reds encapsulating a row of sleek black stools. Guests can dramatically exhale on the outdoor patio, as well, as they savor hot chocolate and fervently detail the interesting dream they had last night.

As the winner of WPXI's 2011 Pittsburgh’s Best Burger contest, Burgh’ers Restaurant testifies to the fact that chef Fiore Moletz knows how to combine business and family. As a boy, he learned to cook from his mother and grandmother, who would teach him the basics as they prepared weekly feasts for their large Italian family. The skills he learned from those marathon family-cooking sessions colors his work at Burgh’ers Restaurant, where he tops his unique hamburgers with Italian herbs such as fennel, along with locally sourced vegetables and hormone-free black angus beef raised in nearby Saxonburg. Chef Moletz’s restaurant not only reflects his own culture, but the city’s as well, with burgers named for Pittsburgh neighborhoods and a bar stocked with eight local microbrews on tap, whiskey, and seasonal craft cocktails. The handcrafted bar top was even constructed by an area artisan, and meals are served on stainless-steel plates to prevent professional wrestlers from shattering them on each other’s heads when the referee turns his back.

In 1927, young James Stoughton left a life of tending fields and animals to erect a small roadside sandwich stand. As its popularity grew over the decades, he gave in to his artistic proclivities and built a professional theater. Room by room, the stand and the playhouse grew into a sprawling estate, and Green Gables Restaurant was born.

Today, owner and descendant Mary Louise Stoughton grins at a sea of diners and wedding-reception guests as they chat in the restaurant's hand-hewn wooden halls. The revelers excuse themselves from tables momentarily to wander the building, which is home to a bevy of hidden whimsies. Observant explorers discover statues of inquisitive human forms, carved in the nineteen-twenties by French sculptor Crenier, that silently heft monolithic urns which bear the weight of the ceiling above. Beside wrought-iron chairs and tables, glass windows bloom with verdant plants, and antique shelves bear rows of antique Pennsylvania glass, china, and pottery. The Tuscany Room's skylights spill natural light over hand-carved wooden beams harvested from local barns and a dance floor inlaid with fleurs-de-lis, all bordered by four towering oak trees.

Executive Chef Susan Kroft fills each room with spice-laden aromas from duck, beef, and shellfish. Stoughton, who is also a sommelier with training from the French Wine Academy, fills clinking glasses with more than 100 grape elixirs during normal meal hours, at monthly wine tastings or at occasional wine-and-dining events that save pupils the trouble of breaking open a satyr's piggy bank. A network of paths and terraces leads to the adjoining Huddleson Court country inn, as well as to the doors of Mountain Playhouse, the property's original theater.

Chef Ryan Sarel honed his craft in kitchens all over Pennsylvania and Colorado—even doing a stint as the catering manager for the Denver Broncos—but never felt he'd "made a mark of his own" until founding Ryan's Red Box Deli. Drawing on Ryan's classical education from the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute's Le Cordon Bleu program, the deli builds formally excellent sandwiches while following environmentally conscious practices.

The deli stays earth-friendly by purchasing humanely raised meats and locally grown produce whenever possible, which helps Ryan to create sandwiches with garden-fresh flavors. He also donates his used oil to a local biofuel manufacturer, and exclusively stocks the deli with biodegradable utensils, packaging, and tables.

The deli's cherry-red counter and key-lime-green walls add vibrant splashes of color amid gleaming wood floors and polished wooden booths. Behind the counter, a pair of red-framed chalkboards lists the entire menu along with a brief lesson on the quadratic equation.