It’s serving the same Texas wieners, but with a new owner and from a remodeled restaurant…
Coney Island Lunch is serving Texas wieners again on Scranton’s Lackawanna Avenue. The wieners and the chili are the same ones that people have loved since 1988. Almost everything else is different.
The red vinyl booths are new. So are the chrome-edged chairs, the checkerboard floor, and the long white counter lined with round red stools. Overhead, an embossed silver-colored ceiling catches the light while thin bands of red illumination trace the room. Old photographs, newspaper clippings, and Scranton memorabilia climb the walls. The effect is less preserved luncheonette than a particularly vivid memory of one.
Then lunch arrives in a red plastic basket, and all that polish becomes secondary.
Coney Island Lunch reopened this past Monday at 515 Lackawanna Avenue after closing in December 2023, changing owners and surviving a renovation that nearly took the building with it. Owner John Basalyga told The Times-Tribune that his staff had cooked only five Texas wieners before opening. By the end of the first day, he estimated they had made 800 or 900.
So much for a quiet opening.
The reason people came is still remarkably simple. The Texas Wiener starts with an all-beef wiener split lengthwise, then adds Düsseldorf mustard, freshly diced onions, and Coney Island’s original chili sauce, all tucked into a National Bakery roll. It’s $4.50, or three for $12.
It’s a combination designed to defeat neatness. Mustard supplies the sharpness, raw onion the crunch, and the chili works its way downward until the roll begins absorbing everything you thought you were going to keep off your fingers. Former owner Pete Ventura once told WVIA that the chili should be spicy rather than sweet.
The same mustard-onion-chili combination appears on the Texas Burger, a smash patty served on a brioche roll. You can order it as a single, double, or triple, a progression that feels less like portion sizing than a measure of ambition. The rest of the menu stays close to luncheonette territory: fries and onion rings, homemade soup and chili, fish fillet and crispy chicken sandwiches, egg and tuna salad, a turkey club and a Cobb salad. Fries can be dressed with gravy, cheese, or chili sauce. The restaurant will even send you home with its original wiener chili sauce by the half-pint, pint, or quart.
And then there is Pete’s Old Fashioned Rice Pudding.
Made with eggs, butter, sugar, vanilla, whole milk, and rice. It costs $3 and carries the name of one of the original founders. That nod to the history of the place isn’t a one-off. In all sorts of ways, the new Coney Island Lunch pays homage to the history of the original.
That history begins in 1923, when Greek immigrant Steve Karampilas opened Coney Island on Cedar Avenue. After his death in 1972, sons Ted and John took over. John eventually left the Cedar Avenue operation and, in 1988, helped his stepsons Pete and Bob Ventura establish Coney Island Lunch at 515 Lackawanna Ave.
It also explains one of downtown Scranton’s enduring little confusions. There are two Coney Islands within a short walk of each other. The Cedar Avenue restaurant and the Lackawanna Avenue Coney Island share family roots but have operated independently for decades.
Pete and Bob Ventura ran the Lackawanna Avenue restaurant for nearly half a century before retiring and closing it in December 2023. Basalyga’s JBAS Realty bought the property for $300,000 and set about bringing it back.
Then, on Dec. 30, 2024, the building’s front wall collapsed during renovations.
Basalyga kept going.
What emerged is far more theatrical than the old lunch counter. At night, enormous red CONEY ISLAND letters burn against the brick facade. Above them, a grinning cowboy-hatted wiener gives passersby a thumbs-up. Another illuminated strip advertises TEXAS WIENER • FRIES • SHAKES • BURGERS • ICE CREAM, while the sign for the adjoining Raegan’s Ice Cream Shoppe glows nearby.
Inside, the renovation walks a tricky line. The place feels shiny and new, but manages to carry the weight of a restaurant that’s been here for decades. The red vinyl seats are fresh out of the package, but the same distinct smell of hamburgers, hot dogs, and chili is everywhere. Baseball memorabilia hangs beside photographs and clippings. In a glass case sits a two-foot knife identified as the one used to cut the first Texas-style wiener in 1923.
And now there are people in the booths again.
That may be the detail that matters most. Customers crowd the red banquettes and counter during the lunchtime rush. Condiment bottles migrate across tabletops. Crumpled napkins collect beside red baskets. The pristine new dining room has already begun acquiring the pleasant disorder of a place where people actually eat.
Restaurants can recreate tile and chrome. They can commission signs, install booths, and turn nostalgia into a design brief. What they cannot order from a catalog is the affection people have accumulated for a place over generations.
The original Coney Island Lunch had that, and there’s a reason to believe the new one might live up to the tradition in every way.
