Treetops Restaurant at Polymath Park

Last Saturday we spent the day in the Laurel Highlands at Polymath Park. That evening we dined at Treetops Restaurant, located on the grounds at Polymath. When we entered Treetops, there were 3 other tables occupied.

Each of the tables had high-backed chairs in the style of furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. We both agreed that the restaurant would be very pretty in the summertime, as the restaurant has a outdoor seating area that overlooks the forest and the mountains in the distance.

We were given an amuse bouche, a tiny complementary appetizer that roughly translates to "happy mouth" but I prefer to think of as "party in my mouth". It was a little piece of crostini with a tomato/basil mix. It was tasty enough.

For dinner, DB~ had the Chicken Roulade. It was a chicken dish stuffed with spinach and ricotta. The side dish was a classical risotto that she loved, although not as much as the risotto she had in Greece. I had a fist-sized and shaped piece of steak filet done perfectly medium-well. It was crusted in espresso and then served in a pool of bourbon cream sauce.

After our dinner, the chef came out to see the patrons in the restaurant. We ended speaking with Chef Miller for about 15 minutes and he was quite pleasant to speak with. He had spent a few years performing various jobs at Nemacolin Resort, from food and beverage coordinator to executive chef at one of the restaurants. He was there at the same time as Dave Racicot, the owner/head chef of Notion in Oakmont.

Chef Miller also shared his vision concept for a restaurant that he would like to start up in Pittsburgh in the near future. I don't want to say what it is, because his concept is a unique one that I would hate to see scooped up by someone else. It's such a great concept that I would love for DB~ and I to be part of it...even if our stake would only involve us getting a free meal now and then.

Treetops is worth going to even if you don't want to stay at Polymath Park. It's that good of a restaurant.

Just a standard weekend in the Laurel Highlands

Last weekend, DB~ and I used a gift card we received as a Christmas gift (cough, back in 2009, cough) to Polymath Park in the Laurel Highlands. What is Polymath? Well, I'm not sure of the "polymath" part, but the place is set in the forest and is composed of 3 separate houses, one of which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (Duncan House). The other two houses (Balter and Blum) were designed by apprentices of FLW. We stayed for one night in the Blum house.

We drove up early on Saturday and got to the general area around 10 a.m. I say "general area" because we couldn't find this place for at least 15 minutes. We were looking for a side road called Dillon, but the problem was that there was no sign marking the road or a directional Polymath Park sign pointing to the right (like there was in the opposite direction pointing to the left once we doubled back).

Then once we got to the place, we followed the sign to the Blum house, but it was locked. There isn't a check-in place, so we drove to the Duncan house just to verify no one was working there, either. DB~ called the number on the website and Heather answered. She was surprised when we told her we were at the Blum house, because apparently the gate into Polymath was supposed to be closed and we drove right through the open gate. Heather blamed it on a group of Chinese people from Hong Kong that had a "language barrier".

We were the only people scheduled to be in the 3 bedroom Blum house that night, but our room wouldn't be ready until 2:30, so DB~ and I decided to see what the area had to offer. She had never been to Seven Springs, which surprised me, but I knew she was more of a Hidden Valley girl.

After we wandered around the ski shop and checked out a bunch of ski and snowboard apparel that we would never buy, we went into the main lodge to see if anything was cracking. As soon as we walked in, there were a large group of people clustered around the entrance to one of the convention halls. Most of them had blue T-shirts on with lanyards, so we knew it was some type of conference. As we continued to walk through the hallway of the lodge, we saw more and more people with their blue shirts that said Start to Live! on them.

"When we sit down, we should Google..." I started to say.
"I'm already on it," DB~ replied as she furiously was thumbing away at her iPhone.

By the time we bought our hot chocolate, we found out that Start to Live is a Narcotics drug rehab group that stresses positive thinking during the recovery phase for users. So for the next 20 minutes, she and I were deciding what type of drug each person was addicted to and what their back story was. We saw a lot of boyfriend-girlfriend types and wondered if they were both ex-users or if one was supporting the other. There were packs of young 20-something guys, older women, older men, people both black and white. We couldn't imagine what it would be like if we were staying the night at Seven Springs, instead of Polymath. Would the bar be packed or empty?

After that experience, we headed down the road to a little bar/restaurant called Black Diamond Pub. It was good, nothing spectacular. Once we left there, we did a couple of multi-caches in Laurel State Park. By the time we did those, we were able to check in at Blum House. The house was unlocked and our key was waiting in the foyer, delivered by Heather. We started to joke that Heather would be our server at Polymath's restaurant (Treetops) later that night...until we needed a chirping battery looked at and our eventual chef (in his chef outfit) came over to replace the battery. I've have a separate post about our excellent dinner at Treetops.

Neither of us had ever heard of Polymath before. Of course we knew about Fallingwater and I have checked out Kentuck Knob in the past, but I wondered how many Pittsburghers know about Polymath.

It's pretty expensive and I'm not sure it's entirely worth it. The house is in Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian style. The Blum house is a low-slung ranch, with a single sloped roof. The center piece of the house is a large dry-stack massive fireplace that really throws out the heat. The bedrooms were nice enough, although we weren't sure how it would have been if all the bedrooms were occupied. There was a nice sitting room that we couldn't fully enjoy because it wasn't heated. The house had a large amount of glass full-length windows, which was great for us to enjoy the views of the forest and mountains in the distance.



However, the decor was very dated and seemed like cheap 1960's stuff. The bathroom was very dark in color scheme and the water from the shower head smelled like rotten eggs, indicating the presence of sulfur dioxide in the system somewhere. The rate for the Blum house was $250/night regularly and for the Duncan House it would be $350/night. We didn't pay full-rate, as we had a gift certificate, but I don't think I would pay that rate normally.