Need to add some elegance to your evening out?
Some places feel like they’ve been waiting for you. The Stegmaier Mansion, recently ranked by 570+DOWN as the best restaurant in Wilkes-Barre, is one of them.
You start in the foyer, all polished wood and warm light, the air smelling faintly of old books and polished brass. This is the Mary Stegmaier Mansion, built in 1910 when Wilkes-Barre was flush with coal money and beer money—especially beer money. The Stegmaiers were brewing royalty here, their name stamped on bottles, barrels, and, eventually, the walls of the grand homes they built.
The new thing is this: a guided walk through that history, followed by a meal that feels as much a part of the house as the carved banisters. It’s called the Mansion Tour & Dinner. Ninety-four dollars buys you the whole evening—stories, rooms that have seemingly been transported from a bygone era, and a three-course dinner worth lingering over.
The Walk
The tour is short enough that you don’t start wishing for a chair, but long enough that you begin to notice the details: the curve of a staircase, a pane of stained glass that’s caught the sunset just right, a ceiling that someone clearly loved when they built it. You get the family history—the beer, the boom years, the slow fade—and how this place came to be both preserved and alive.
The Table
You’re seated. The bread arrives first—good bread, crusty and warm, with a smear of house-whipped seasonal butter and a dish of herbed olive oil. You could stop here and feel satisfied, but you don’t.
The first course is a choice, and it’s a hard one. Scallops, just-seared, over a saffron cauliflower purée that manages to be both earthy and bright. Or gnocchi alla Romana, made with semolina, which gives it more heft and chew than the pillowy potato version. There’s French onion soup for the traditionalists, a Caesar for the crisp-green crowd, even the “Stegmaier Secret Meatballs,” a mix of Kobe beef and Martin’s sausage, cooked long enough to get friendly.
The mains keep pace. A Frenched chicken breast, brined and roasted until the skin shatters. Alaskan king salmon with a crisp skin, the fish just past raw in the center, sitting on a pile of lemon risotto that smells like summer. A hand-cut filet mignon—eight ounces, seared in beef tallow, the way you’d want it—comes with heirloom carrots and a russet terrine. There’s always a vegetarian option if that’s your path.
Dessert is whatever the chef’s playing with that week, and that’s fine. It’s probably something seasonal, sweet but not silly, and you’re not here for a sugar bomb anyway.
The Why
You come to a dinner like this for the food, sure, but also for the way the evening feels. You’re eating in a place where people once made fortunes and threw parties that lasted until morning. You’re in rooms where the walls themselves could tell you how it used to be. You’re getting a piece of Wilkes-Barre history, plated up alongside the salmon and the steak.
The Stegmaier family’s brewery is gone, but the name’s still around, and not just on beer labels. It’s in these houses, in the careful restoration, in the fact that someone (this is another John Basalyga spot, by the way) thought it was worth opening the doors to strangers and feeding them well. And they were right.
You leave full—not just from the bread and the meatballs and the risotto, but from the whole thing. The tour, the flavors, the reminder that some stories are best told at the table.
