Local Novelist Eats Up Success, Pittsburgh Food Scene - Keystone Edge - What's Next & Best in Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh chef and foodie Mira Rinaldi is a woman worth meeting. Even though she's a work of fiction.

As the fiery co-owner of a chic trattoria in Meredith Mileti's new book, “Aftertaste,” Mira is intelligent and steadfastly devoted to her family, friends and fresh ingredients. In the first few pages of the book, we watch as Mira goes on the attack.

She has just discovered her husband, Jake, sleeping with the restaurant's hostess, Nicola. With all the strength of her “hot-blooded Italian ancestors,” Mira tackles them in bed and proceeds to yank out handfuls of Nicola's thick, dark hair by the roots.

It's a great beginning to “Aftertaste, (a novel in five courses),” the story of Mira's life after Jake leaves her for Nicola. (She winds up in anger management classes.)

Forced to relinquish her beloved Manhattan restaurant, Grappa, Mira packs up her young daughter, Chloe, and returns to her hometown of Pittsburgh where she moves in with her father, a Carnegie Mellon professor, and begins shopping and cooking her way back into healthier relationships.

Mileti has woven a vivid story from the threads of her own life in Pittsburgh. These are exciting times for the first-time novelist, Mt. Lebanon resident, wife of attorney David Cohen and mother of three. The book, released in September, has been praised by Romantic Times and the New York Journal of Books.

Mileti, now on the book-signing and book club circuit, joins several celebrated Pittsburgh authors, including Gwen Cready, at the first annual WomenRead/Women Write event on Jan. 7, 2012, from noon to 4 p.m., at Barnes & Noble in Bethel Park.

“Pittsburgh is a terrific food town,” she says, sipping a black coffee with a splash of cream in one of her favorite local coffee shops, Uptown Coffee in Mt. Lebanon.

(She has several favorites: 21st Street in the Strip, Aldo’s in Mt. Lebanon–which recently reopened as the coffee house Orbis Capulus–Espresso a Mano in Lawrenceville and La Prima Espresso in The Strip, which reminds her the most of Italy.)

“It's really exciting to see the new restaurants that are opening up, fresh ingredients, so much locally grown. I applaud what so many of these young chefs here are doing. “

Before Mileti picked up the pen, she was a developmental and educational psychologist with the School of Education at Pitt, where she worked as a research professor. It was while working on her doctorate, and tiring of tedious research, that she began dreaming up the story of a woman chef as a distraction. It took three years for her to write and finish “Aftertaste.”