How does any business owner make an environment feel welcoming, particularly to a wide swath of community members? There’s an answer so simple that it’s surprisingly easy to miss: you invite them.

Alaina Webber and Matt Katase, who have owned and operated Brew Gentlemen for more than 10 years, opened Braddock Public House inside the former Superior Motors space in September 2024, marking the occasion with a grand parade. It was well attended by enthusiastic neighbors, in large part because Webber and Katase sought them out.

“The entire month before that,” Webber tells Pittsburgh City Paper, “we had text, phone, email invitations to every single person that we felt should feel comfortable in this space, and so many of them had never been in here. Vicki [Vargo], the executive director of the [Braddock Carnegie] Library, had never been in this building when it was a restaurant before. We’re talking about police officers, firefighters, borough managers, borough staff.”

Since opening Braddock Public House, with its Japanese-Hawaiian-inspired menu that “builds a bridge between Pittsburgh and the Pacific,” Katase, a Hawaii native, tells City Paper it’s been important to walk the walk of community-building, and “share the aloha spirit.” 

“There’s a note on my phone,” Webber says, “one day I just wrote, ‘What if this space was about love and connection?’ What would that look like? Because it wasn’t before, and that was a big reason why we took it on; it should be a community gathering space. The community deserves to be in this space.”

Keeping the restaurant welcoming and accessible has been core to its identity. Most dishes on the menu are under $20, some less than $10. Among the variety of pours that come from their brewery, “we always have a $5 beer,” Katase says.

“There was one point where we were so frustrated, like, why does no one from [Edgar Thomson Works] ever come down to [Brew Gentlemen]?” he says, “and it was because we opened at 5:00 [p.m.], and the mill shift, they get off at 3 [p.m.]. No one’s gonna sit around for two hours to wait for a beer. Now, [Braddock Public House is] down here. We’re closer to the mill. We open at noon. We have people from the mill in here all the time.”

Additionally, almost everyone” who works for the restaurant lives within 10 minutes of it, Katase says.

With neighbors filling both the dining room and kitchen, showing up for the community is a natural extension of their work. When a major storm hit in late April, and much of the region lost power, “we had a bunch of bottled water and let people come down here and charge their phones,” Katase says. They provided a keg to the library’s chili cookoff event and distributed 500 meals at Braddock’s Trunk or Treat event. Webber has also held various positions at the library and has served on its board since 2020.

Now, Webber and Katase — who wed this past summer — are thinking about how to expand beyond Braddock while digging deeper into it at the same time. They have concentrated on Downtown, working with the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership on various events, including Oktoberfest, and partnering with Riverlife to create Shore Thing, a floating entertainment complex for which they provided the food and drink. Webber and Katase invested 1% of the proceeds from Shore Thing back into Braddock.

“Downtown and Braddock are very connected,” Webber says, “Braddock is what built Pittsburgh, which built the nation in terms of steel.”

“Downtown is very much now an integral part of how we operate,” Katase adds.

But everything comes back to serving their neighbors.

“I think opening the restaurant in Braddock showed our commitment to Braddock,” Katase says, “We doubled down, and this will always be our anchor. This will always be our home base and our showpiece. This is where our heart is.”

This article appears in The Big Winter Issue: Winter Guide/People of the Year.

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