America’s Best Restaurants highlights Rostas Cafe in Hazleton on their roadshow this August.
HAZLETON – Local restaurant Rostas Cafe will be hosting a visit from America’s Best Restaurants (ABR) in late August 2023.
America’s Best Restaurants, a national media and marketing company focusing on bringing attention to local, independently-owned restaurants, will bring its ABR Roadshow to the restaurant on August 25. Popular dishes will be highlighted, along with an extensive on-camera interview with owner Brian Berlanda about the restaurant’s special place in the community. The episode will be aired extensively on social media channels at a later date.
“Good Food, Nice People” is Rostas Cafe’s motto, and Berlanda likes to add “integrity” as another cornerstone of his operation’s core values. The restaurant has been in operation since 1950. Berlanda took over the iconic Hazleton restaurant five years ago after retiring from a corporate job and needing something stable to occupy his time. He reversed the declining customer trend by offering an extensive menu, quality food, and a personal touch.
“We work with our customers, we interact with them regularly, we try to make it personal and personable,” Berlanda notes, adding that some customers come in daily to eat. “It’s a lot like ‘Cheers’; everybody knows everybody.”
Rostas Cafe, housed in a tidy brick standalone building with an outdoor patio that doubles the seating in the warmer months, is known for its award-winning barbecue, which Berlanda introduced to the menu a few years ago and says it has “taken off”. He also notes that the salads they offer are a big draw.
“People come from all around to experience our salads,” he says. He offers numerous varieties of chicken salad, antipasto, mozzarella salad and standbys such as a chef and grilled chicken caesar.
Rostas also offers “scamutz”, or scamorza, a specialty Italian cheese blend indigenous to the Hazleton area that he uses on the pizzas, meatballs, and the Italian sandwiches.
America’s Best Restaurants will be filming on location on Friday August 25th from 2 pm to 5 pm EST. The press is invited to attend. The restaurant’s finished episode premiere date will be announced on their Facebook page and will be featured on America’s Best Restaurants’ website at https://americasbestrestaurants.com/rests/pennsylvania/rostas-cafe.
Restaurants featured on the ABR Roadshow are found through customer nominations or by a restaurant applying to be featured at www.americasbestrestaurants.com.
