Farewell to Andy Perugino’s: Luzerne loses a landmark…
Ninety years is a long time for any restaurant to stay open. In Luzerne, Pennsylvania — a borough where everyone knows which corner store sells the best cannoli and who’s pouring at the Legion that weekend, Andy Perugino’s was the sort of place that seemed like it might just last forever. Until it didn’t.
The news came quietly, the way so many goodbyes do now: through a Facebook post. The owners said it wasn’t easy: “This restaurant has been our home, our passion, and our connection to so many of you who have become like family.” After more than nine decades, the doors are closing, the ovens cooling for the last time.
A Tradition That Stuck
Andy Perugino’s began in 1933, back when FDR was still in his first term and the idea of “Italian food” in America mostly meant spaghetti with red sauce. The Perugino family leaned into that simplicity: homemade marinara, chicken Francaise, broiled seafood platters — food that didn’t need to announce itself. According to the restaurant’s website, the recipes were “handed down through four generations,” and you could taste it.
If you grew up around Wilkes-Barre or the Back Mountain, there’s a good chance you went there after Sunday mass, or for a graduation, or maybe for one of those birthdays when the extended family commandeered the back room. The kind of night when the bread came out warm, and someone’s uncle ordered a second bottle of Chianti “for the table.”
This was food built for gathering — not to impress, but to comfort.
More Than a Restaurant
For Luzerne, Perugino’s wasn’t just another place to eat. It was a shared habit — a ritual. You went because you knew what you were getting, and that was the point.
It’s hard to overstate what that kind of consistency means in a region like this, where diners come and go, and national chains creep closer every year. Andy Perugino’s was steady. It was the baseline against which all the new places were measured.
The dining room was old-school without apology: the low lighting, the framed art, the servers who’d been there long enough to remember your order. It felt untouched by the rush to modernize — no QR codes, no Instagram-ready plating. Just food, served the way it had been for decades.
What People Remember
You don’t have to dig far through the online reviews to hear the affection.
One regular called the Chicken à la Andy “amazing,” the broiled seafood platter “excellent,” and praised Caitlin, a longtime server, for her warmth and knowledge of drinks. Another said, “The service was great. The food amazing. Crab au gratin still just as good.”
Yes, there were a few mixed reviews — a slower night here, a bland sauce there — but even those came from people who clearly cared. It wasn’t disappointment so much as heartbreak that something so familiar could falter.
That’s the thing about a restaurant like this: it’s not just about the food. It’s about recognition, ritual, continuity. The experience of being known.
The End of a Line
When the Perugino family cited health reasons for closing, no one could argue. Running a restaurant for 90 years — through recessions, floods, a pandemic — is more than most families could manage. The kitchen, as anyone who’s worked in one knows, takes its toll.
What’s left now is a kind of collective memory: the smell of tomato sauce simmering in the kitchen, the clatter of silverware against heavy white plates, the voices that filled the dining room.
Someone will eventually move into that space on Charles Street. Maybe it’ll be a café, or a taproom, or another Italian place hoping to capture the same magic. But Andy Perugino’s was of another time — and, for Luzerne, it was something more than a business. It was a thread that tied people together.
If you ever ate there, you probably remember your last meal — not because you knew it was the last, but because that’s what food like this does. It lingers.
The sauce, the bread, the people — all part of a story that now lives in memory, one plate at a time.
