Dined on December 30, 2024
- Overall 4
- Food 4
- Service 3
- Ambience 4
I’m excited about the concept of One, as well as the effort they are making to bring fine dining with a seasonal tasting menu to PGH. Overall the food is pretty good - some dishes stood out, others need refining, service was a bit verbose and had plenty of dead space (~2.5 hours), and there are some awkward aspects of the “one” layout.
Upon arrival guests are seated in the lounge and greeted with several welcome bites, as well as a house made juice to cleanse the palette. These were great - some of the best bites of the night. Particularly the smoked bass truffle tartelette. The lounge seating is awkward. The tables are too low for the guests, and certainly too low for the servers. It is a bit crazy watching them reach down to such a short table to serve each bite. Having separate servers present each bite in this setting could be improved - many guests are meeting up with their party at this point, and I even missed one of the bites and had to ask a server for it since I was parking the car.
After this, guests are invited to join the communal table where the entire menu is served in synch for the group. The chairs are precisely spaced, meaning you are equidistant from members of your party and members of others. This distance is a bit too far to carry conversation with your party over the music in the restaurant. Clumping parties together or adding a few more settings to service would fix this. Once the evening kicks off, guests are able to select whether they want the Alcoholic/NA experience, or something in between. After some introductions, service began. In general the cuisine was great! The lamb tartare, sweetbreads, and chicharrones stood out. The ravioli accompanying the bass was my least favorite bite of the night. The bread was served cold and had too much going on between itself and the compound butter.
There is promise, but some things need to be worked out to command the price point One occupies. We were happy to dine there for its first week.
