THE FORMER LEGUME AND ITS SIDEKICK BUTTERJOINT IN JANUARY 2020 | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

One of Pittsburgh’s most celebrated restaurants is changing hands. 

Trevett and Sarah Hooper, who have owned Butterjoint since it opened in 2012, have announced that they are retiring from the restaurant industry, and have sold their North Oakland restaurant to George Austin, Butterjoint’s executive chef. 

“It’s not often that somebody wants to buy your restaurant and wants to keep it pretty much the same,” Trevett Hooper says. “I’m really lucky it worked out like this.”

The decision to sell the restaurant has been in the works for a while, after the pandemic closed in-person dining at Butterjoint for more than a year, causing the Hoopers to reexamine their professional lives. 

“When we got back from COVID and we reopened the dining room and began doing regular daily service, it just felt like starting a brand-new restaurant again,” Hooper says. “I was 45 at that point, and I opened Legume when I was 32, and I just thought, ‘I don’t see how I’m going to be able to spend that much time and energy on it anymore.’”

Hooper, who had been working in the kitchen daily to maintain the restaurant’s takeout-only business, decided that hiring an executive chef was the only way for the business to continue. 

“When I met George… I could tell it was right,” he says. “He was doing such a good job, and I realized that he was either going to buy the restaurant or move on. And if I thought that he would work for me for 20 more years, I wouldn’t have sold it. But no chef is going to put that much heart and soul into something that they don’t own, and I thought this was just the right opportunity.”

It’s hard to express the impact that the Hoopers have had on Pittsburgh’s culinary scene, starting when they first opened Legume in a small space in Regent Square in 2007. (Full disclosure: Legume was a client of my marketing agency from 2016 to 2018). Over the years, the restaurant has gone through different iterations, moving to a larger location in Oakland in 2011, opening Butterjoint next door a year later, opening diner-style Pie for Breakfast (again, next door) in 2018, and consolidating everything and rebranding as solely Butterjoint in 2020. 

TREVETT HOOPER IN 2016 | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

Known as one of the city’s pioneers in promoting the use of (truly) local and seasonal ingredients, Hooper made building relationships with local farms, such as Who Cooks For You Farm, Jubilee Hilltop Ranch and Burns Heritage Farms, a priority. During the 15 years he actively ran the kitchen, he prioritized slow-food dining, creating an extensive fermentation program at Legume, experimenting with in-house butchering, and making some of Pittsburgh’s most loved dishes, including blue fish pate, ‘chicken cooked under a skillet,’ and a seasonal cassoulet, which contained jowl bacon, housemade pork sausage and Tarbais beans that Hooper had grown specifically for the restaurant.

“I think I was so fortunate to have so many years to have this kind of laboratory, so to speak, that I really had the opportunity to exhaust all of my talents,” says Hooper. “I got to see how good of a cook I am, and I don’t think I would have progressed any further.”

Legume was also a critical darling, earning a spot on Pittsburgh Magazine’s Best Restaurants list every year that it was open and garnering a James Beard nomination in 2018. It served as a culinary home to a deep roster of some of the city’s most talented chefs, including Neil Blazin of Driftwood Oven in Lawrenceville, Jamilka Borges of the newly opened Lilith in Shadyside, and Csilla Thackray, who now runs the kitchen at Churchview Farm in Baldwin Borough.  

“I love restaurant people, and that’s what I’m going to miss the most,” Hooper says. “The kitchen environment, it’s a team environment. I know it sounds like a platitude, but it’s just a beautiful thing to have this group of people come together, and make food, and just do it every day. And that’s what I will miss.”

The day-to-day work in the kitchen? That’s been easier to let go of. 

“It’s surreal to me, because during COVID, when we were doing takeout, I was in the kitchen every day, just doing the work, and doing what we could for the business to survive,” Hooper says. “I started graduate school, and I was with the kids (the Hoopers have five children, ages 6 to almost 18), and I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to process it. But that’s been OK.”

Sarah is currently training to become a chaplain, and Trevett is studying to become a clinical mental health therapist. 

“It kind of fits,” he says, about his career change. “I think chefs are psychologists. If you don’t have some kind of intuition about human nature, it’s hard to motivate people to do something. And as a chef, you have to motivate a lot of people.”

And while the restaurant’s ownership has shifted, there won’t be much of a noticeable change in the dining experience under the leadership of Austin, who has overseen the kitchen since 2021. 

Austin, who grew up in Ohio and moved to Pittsburgh in his early 20s, started his career in the city at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association before running the kitchen at Angelo’s Restaurant in Washington, Pa. for nine years, learning the ins-and-outs of running a restaurant from Angelo’s owner Michael Passalacqua. 

“I learned everything there,” he says, “the boring stuff, the office stuff. That place just gave me so much.”

After making initial moves to open his own restaurant in Fox Chapel (the deal fell through when a once-enthusiastic investor relationship fizzled out), Austin became the executive chef at Il Pizzaiolo in Mt. Lebanon but always kept an eye on the happenings at Legume. 

“Legume was my favorite restaurant for a long time,” he says, “and, Trevett had his newsletter — he’s a really good writer, a really talented chef, and I would read his newsletters, and go eat his food, and he was so in line with what I felt like I wanted to do.”

After hiring Austin to be the executive chef, Hooper took a noticeable step back at Butterjoint. 

While the two weren’t working side-by-side, Austin says, they spoke regularly in the last two years. “He’s helped me with introductions, processes… there’s just so much knowledge there,” Austin says. “When I came here, I hadn’t worked with local farmers, I wasn’t in the scene like that, so I was really excited for that.” 

And while they’re still tying up some loose ends, the sale is official. 

“I’ve been running the kitchen fully for about two years now, so if you’ve been to Butterjoint, you’ve experienced what I have to offer,” Austin says. “And we did change the style of the menu a bit, but I still want to hold on to what made me want to take this job in the first place.”

That means maintaining relationships with the farms and farmers that the Hoopers have cultivated and continuing with the restaurant’s fermentation program. 

Austin also took over the Sidecar, the adjacent coffee and bake shop that churns out muffins, scones and breakfast sandwiches made using their own milk bread buns. 

“For the last couple of years, it kind of has been my Butterjoint,” says Austin. “I’m not going to suddenly turn it into a taco place. I’m so proud of what we have been doing, and I love that it’s this casual restaurant where people can come repeatedly. You can come and get a great burger, or a duck confit, and it’s not going to blow your budget.”

Emily Catalano is publisher of Good Food Pittsburgh.