On the Pizza Trail: Senape’s Tavern in Hazleton

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Wow, 1933!

When I saw that date on a banner in Senape’s Tavern on Hazleton’s Vine Street, and realized the Senape family has been making pizza here for all those years, ever since Prohibition ended and the tavern was able to reopen, I was overwhelmed by the sense of history.

Oh, sure, I’d had Senape’s “Pitza” before. After all, I married into a West Hazleton family, and often, when my husband and I visited his homestead over the years, we’d find a box of the square variety of Senape’s on the kitchen table, just waiting for someone to have a snack.

But now that the Times Leader is hot on the Luzerne County Pizza Trail, Mark and I decided to make an event out of visiting Senape’s Tavern and sampling the “pitza” fresh from the oven. We invited a friend to join us, and after driving up from Wilkes-Barre, the three of us settled in to the cozy dining room shortly after 4 p.m., which is when the place opens on Sundays.

“You can’t have Senape’s without Farmer’s Ice Tea,” my husband said when the server asked for our drink order. OK, I decided to listen to the expert.

Did we want square or round?

“Square,” the expert said.

Did we want “scamutz?”

You bet we did. How could we not want a blend of cheeses with such a fun name?

Of course, many toppings were available. Veggie lover that I am, I suggested mushrooms, sweet peppers and onions and, hearing no objections, that’s what we had.

I can honestly say the three of us enjoyed the entire package — from crust to toppings, from sauce and scamutz. We consumed eight of our 12 cuts right there, and took four home in a box.

If you take a look at the tavern’s Facebook page, you can learn many interesting facts, from immigrant Saverio Senape opening an Italian-American bakery in Hazleton, after an injury forced him to stop working in the mines; to Tipper Gore’s 1998 visit to the tavern dining room after she gave a speech, to comments from present-day loyal customers who sometimes drive all the way from Washington, D.C.

When you think about all the generations who have grown up with this “pitza” — it’s still spelled that way decades after a sign-maker first spelled the word phonetically — it’s easy to see the truth of a slogan on the wall: “Come back to Hazleton; Come home to Senape’s.”