The downtown Scranton nanobrewery has updated its Tuesday specials…
There are worse ways to spend a Tuesday in Scranton than with a cheap taco in one hand, a wing bone in the other, and a beer with an absurd name sweating on the table.
Mutant Brewing is betting on exactly that. The downtown Scranton taproom has updated its Tuesday night lineup with $3 tacos, $5 margaritas, and 75-cent wings every Tuesday from 4 to 9 p.m., beginning May 12. Discounted tacos, margaritas, and wings? All on the same night? Humanity desperately needs this right now.
Mutant has always been a strange little beast. The brewery at 121 North Washington Avenue arrived in downtown Scranton with an identity pulled from the loudest corners of internet culture: mutant apes, bright graphics, psychedelic merch, and beer names that sound like rejected Charli XCX song titles. The place could have been a gimmick and nothing more. Plenty of restaurants and breweries die that way, buried under their own cleverness.
But Mutant has been building something sturdier under the neon.
The beer board gives you the first clue. There is Mutant Serum, Boring Banana Bread (my personal favorite), Trippy Juicy IPA, PeachFUZZ, and Stuntman Sour in several fruit-loaded forms. The recently tapped Ctrl + Alt + Delete, a 4.5% pale ale brewed with oats and wheat and dry hopped with Citra and El Dorado, fits the house style and is a welcome addition to Mutant’s lineup.
Then there is the food, which has become the more interesting half of the operation.
The Tuesday deal is the hook, but it sits inside a broader menu that seems engineered for people who want flavor without manners. Mutant’s recent specials have included Nashville hot mozzarella sticks, elote street corn dip, buffalo chicken nachos, steak tacos, a beef tenderloin sandwich with fried onions, Cooper cheese, and beet horseradish sauce, plus a C.B.R. Detroit-style pizza with chicken, bacon, ranch, and chives. During Lent, the kitchen rolled out pagash pizza, fish tacos, fish and chips, birria queso dip, lobster rolls, and a truffle ribeye cheesesteak.
This is not precious food, but it’s also more creative and executed at a level that you’d probably not expect to find at a downtown pub.
The pizza deserves its own mention. NEPA Pizza Review praised Mutant’s Detroit-style pies, calling the pepperoni version arguably one of the most authentic Detroit-style pizzas in the region. That matters because in Scranton, pizza is not a casual side hustle. Pizza here is blood sport. People have opinions. Families fracture over sauce. If a brewery can get mentioned seriously in that conversation, it has done something right.
And in Scranton, this Tuesday-night deal has a particular usefulness. Downtown does not need another place asking people to mortgage their evening for one cocktail and a small plate of something “shareable” that leaves everyone hungry and quietly resentful. Nor does it need more generic, forgettable bar food.
Mutant Brewing is working in the space between those two extremes and executing it very well.
The place still has the oddball branding. It still has the mutant graphics and the crypto-culture residue and beer names built for people who remember AIM away messages and PlayStation cheat codes. Fine. Let it. Scranton has room for weird. Hell, Scranton is better when it gets weird.
What matters is whether the food and drink hold up after the novelty wears off. Increasingly, Mutant looks like a place where they might. Not because it is trying to be the grand temple of craft beer in NEPA, but because it understands the value of a Tuesday night: the low-stakes meal, the beer flight, the friend who says, “Screw it, let’s get another order.”
That is how a place becomes part of the weekly rhythm.
