Summer is the theme of the refreshed seasonal menu at the popular downtown Wilkes-Barre eatery…
Summer has reached The Burnt Norton, and it tastes like peaches, pickles, street corn, and limoncello.
The downtown Wilkes-Barre restaurant introduced its new Summer menu on July 17, replacing the Spring lineup that accompanied its reopening in May. This is more than a few warm-weather specials slipped onto the bottom of a menu. Brunch, tapas, pizza, salads and cocktails have all been reconsidered, with familiar dishes kept where they still make sense and seasonal ones moved in around them.
That May reopening came after an ugly and very public dispute over the restaurant’s kitchen ventilation. Owner Dez Sabecky said the ventless hood had been installed, inspected and approved before the city later determined that the kitchen needed a Type 1 hood with fire suppression. The disagreement limited what the restaurant could cook and led to an unusual series of events, including community fundraising and a fraudulent offer from an anonymous donor. The resulting two-week closure gave The Burnt Norton time to reorganize its menu around pizzas, tapas, brunch and rotating weekend entrées.
The Summer menu is the clearest picture yet of what that revised concept can become.
Brunch offers the best place to begin. The Spring menu leaned heavily on strawberries, which appeared on bruschetta and inside cheesecake French toast. Summer brings peaches, but the change goes well beyond substituting one fruit for another.
The Peach Toast combines sliced peaches with prosciutto, burrata, basil and honey on sourdough—a sensible arrangement of sweet fruit, salty pork, rich cheese and enough bread to hold it together. Shakshuka puts eggs into a creamy tomato base with feta and toasted sourdough. A Caprese Croissant adds tomato, mozzarella, basil and balsamic to a buttery pastry, while the Crab Rangoon Eggs Benny folds crab, cream cheese and hollandaise into the brunch format.
These dishes are richer and more complicated than eggs and toast, but the underlying ideas are straightforward. Use ripe produce. Add salt, fat or acidity. Put the result on good bread when appropriate.
The restaurant has also retained its Baked Eggs, made with garlic, herbs and Boursin and served with toast points. Keeping it was the right move. Seasonal cooking does not require removing everything people already like.
Tapas received an even broader overhaul. The former Dirty Martini Olive Dip, Hummus Trio and Charcuterie Nachos are gone. In their place are Street Corn Ribs, Crab Rangoon Dip, French Onion Dip and a Bruschetta Boursin Dip.
The Street Corn Ribs are particularly well suited to summer: strips of corn dressed with the creamy, tangy and chile-spiked flavors associated with elote. The Bruschetta Boursin Dip uses tomato and soft cheese in a form built for passing around the table. Neither dish is especially restrained, but restraint is not the point of a tapas menu that also includes Buffalo Wing Dip and butter-poached Mini Lobster Rolls.
The permanent pizza lineup remains the menu’s center of gravity. The Margie, Garlic Marg, Sweetie Pie and Buffy Pie return, preserving a foundation of tomato, mozzarella, basil, garlic, honey and—in the case of the Buffy—The Burnt Norton’s chicken wing dip.
The newcomers are less conventional. Big Dill turns ranch, pickles, and cheese into a pizza. Birria Street brings together shredded birria and street-corn flavors. Hot Honey Charcuterie combines cured meat with the sweetness and heat that have become nearly unavoidable on contemporary pizza menus. Here, at least, the combination belongs: salty meat, melted cheese and honey have been getting along for a long time.
The bar follows the kitchen’s seasonal logic but has more fun with it. Spring’s blueberry, blood orange, hibiscus and espresso drinks have largely cleared the way for peach, pineapple, raspberry, coconut and limoncello.
Peach, Please! puts the season’s obvious fruit to work rather than merely using it as decoration. Fresh 75 brightens the list with citrus and sparkling elements, while Summer Lovin’ moves toward the sweeter, tropical end of the spectrum. The cleverly named Ya Filthy Animal takes the opposite route, using pickle vodka to build a drink for people who prefer brine to fruit.
Taken together, the cocktails do what a seasonal bar menu should do: offer cold, direct flavors that make sense in July. Some are tart, some sweet, one unapologetically pickled. None seems confused about the weather.
The regular menu still tells only part of the story. On Fridays and Saturdays, The Burnt Norton offers a separate chef-curated dinner menu that changes from week to week.
Since May, those menus have included Chicken Milanese, Scallop Risotto, Miso-Braised Short Rib, Burrata Lasagna, coffee-rubbed pork chops and steak-and-shrimp tostadas. Starters have ranged from Peach Crostini to Sticky Chicken Bao Buns, while desserts rotate through tiramisu, cheesecake, cookies and other familiar pleasures.
The prices and format have shifted, too. Some weekends offered three courses and a drink for $40 or $50 per person; more elaborate menus reached $75. That flexibility gives the kitchen space to cook full entrées without forcing them onto the permanent menu, where they might sit unchanged for months.
This is the useful distinction in The Burnt Norton’s revised approach. The everyday menu provides a recognizable framework: pizza, dips, brunch, boards and cocktails. The weekend menu permits experimentation. One gives regulars something dependable; the other gives them a reason to check what is cooking before they leave home.
Plenty of restaurants describe their food as seasonal while changing little more than a garnish. The Burnt Norton is making the word do some actual work. Strawberries give way to peaches. Old dips leave; corn and tomatoes arrive. The cocktails become brighter, colder, and fruitier.
The menu will change again. That is the point.
