Signature Dishes: Homemade spaghetti at Murrysville's Spaghetti & Steak House

This is part of an ongoing series highlighting Signature Dishes at locally-owned restaurants in the region. See Trib Total Media’s new online directory of restaurants, Dine Local, at dinelocal.triblive.com.

As soon as her cook arrives on Thursday afternoons, Monica Meehan heads to the back room in her kitchen at Spaghetti & Steak House to start making fresh pasta.

“It’s thicker and heavier than the boxed stuff,” said Meehan, who has owned the Murrysville restaurant since 1989.

As a child, Meehan learned how to make homemade pasta. Today, it’s the restaurant’s signature dish.

“We make our own pasta and sauces on-site, but we also purchase pasta that we sell,” Meehan said.

Batches of between 15 and 20 orders begin life as a simple dough that Meehan divides into portions and begins rolling out. Once it is thin enough, it gets another dusting of flour and she starts running it through the pasta maker, bringing it to just the right thickness before cutting it into spaghetti, which is then quickly blanched for use later in the evening.

“It’s not hard to do, but it’s time-consuming,” Meehan said as she worked another portion of dough. Thursdays are spaghetti night, when the dish is on special.

“It probably makes up 80% of the business on Thursdays,” she said.

Spaghetti & Steak House’s homemade spaghetti is $10.95, and comes with a choice of marinara sauce or Meehan’s family-recipe scratch meat sauce.

The restaurant also serves homemade gnocchi and ravioli.

As Meehan enters her fourth decade in the restaurant business, she said that having a dish so many people enjoy has helped develop the type of loyalty that was able to sustain her business over the past year.

It has also given her the chance to watch multiple generations enjoy her cooking.

“You get to know people and their families,” she said. “I’ve watched kids grow up, move away, and come back with their own kids to eat spaghetti.”

Spaghetti & Steak House (spaghettiand steakhouse.com) in Murrysville is located at 6371 William Penn Highway. Takeout orders can be placed by calling 724-327-1660.