There’s a lot of good spots I’ve covered through CT Eats so far in Rochester, but they’re all gate-kept by two sad burdens of the casual eater: distance from campus and real dollar-bills.
When I started writing this column, I had high hopes of getting people off this campus and out into town with a nice meal to help make their weekends all the better. However, in doing so, I lost sight of what the UR lifestyle is all about: studying, working, not sleeping, and rushing meals. For so long, I neglected the existing food culture that our campus already has in order to push these false-prophet restaurants I’d found through my own exploration. To make it all up to you, I’ve decided to eat at the finest of eateries that campus has to offer: the Pit.
Say you’ve had a long day studying for that midterm. You got drunk the last two nights when you actually had time to study, and now it’s Sunday, and you’re 100 percent not ready for this Monday morning exam. You’re tired, you’re cranky, and you just want to go home and relax, but you can’t allow yourself to drink and ignore your responsibilities because you’ve already done that for two days and your exam’s literally tomorrow. Well, the only real alternative is to eat until you de-stress, and the Pit’s ready to serve you.
The Pit is unlike anything you’ve seen before. You might have heard of a little something called “continental breakfast.” Usually, your average bed-and-breakfast inn has an assembly line buffet of pancakes, waffles, bagels with cream cheese, and scrambled eggs to pick from for its continental breakfast. The Pit doesn’t skimp out like that. At the Pit, each of the seven continents is represented by a delicious breakfast platter, ornately put together by Michelin star chefs and kitchen hands from countries across the globe. From North America, you have Eggs Benedict and bacon as far as the eye can see. From Australia you have shark fin on a bed of greens. They’ve even got a 120-ounce glass of French wine with a cigarette on the side for Europe.
After a certain point in the day, though, breakfast has to end. Thankfully, after breakfast, the Pit moves straight into brunch hours. That’s right, not lunch, but brunch. It is common knowledge that lunch is a commodity of working class peons who actually work a full eight-plus hours a day, and so, in keeping in touch with its audience of patrons who pay $70,000 a year for our University’s wonderful culinary expertise, the Pit refuses to stoop to the level of lower-class standards in dining. Instead, the Pit offers cardamom-vanilla granola, pumpkin Dutch baby with pears, braised kale frittatas, and baked brie with cran-apple chutney, to name a few of their signature brunch items. Be sure to have some freshly made mimosas at the Pit cocktail bar before you rush out to confront your busy schedule. With a few of those, the Pit guarantees that you’ll be as day-drunk as Agnes at the Scarsdale Country Club’s Annual Silent Auction!
Finally, we end our day with supper, the superior form of dinner. One might wonder: How could such a wonderful previous two meals of the day be beat by the day’s end? The answer: caviar. Once supper hits, the door to the long-lost pool room of the Spurrier Gym opens to reveal an Olympic swimming pool filled to the brim with caviar. Tickets for this event can only be purchased at the daily supper queue in the Pit, which opens at 7 p.m. and are always sold out by 7:15 p.m., considering there are only five of them available each day.
At seven Michelin stars, the Pit is one of the finest dining experiences in Rochester, and, after doing a quick Google search, I’ve also discovered that it’s apparently one of the finest dining experiences in the world. So there you have it, a hurrah for UR in promoting its international prominence as both a research institution and a home to one of the greatest fine dining experiences of all time. You can eat within the alternate reality that hosts this Pit in the year 3XXX, when multiverse theory is applied for the first time, from 7 a.m. to 12 a.m. Meals there will cost you around $70,000 a year and a portion of your hopes and dreams.
