McCandless Restaurant Week Showed Where the Town Really Eats

For one week this month, the most talked-about burger in McCandless came from a pharmacy. During the town's first Restaurant Week, Adzema Pharmacy on Perry Highway served a Frizzle Burger: grilled chipped ham and American cheese stacked with a provolone cheeseburger. The Pittsburgh Wire listed it at $7.99. That is about $13 less than the McCandless Meatball Pie at Large Plain Pizza and Pints on Duncan Avenue, and it came from a business whose main job is filling prescriptions.

The Town of McCandless Restaurant Week ran October 12 to 16, 2026, with 18 participants. Read the roster again two weeks later and it looks more like a map of everyday stops than a list of dining destinations. A pharmacy counter, a library café, a park boathouse, a golf simulator bar and an ice cream stand all sat on the list next to the full-service restaurants. Much of McCandless's local food lives inside places that were built to do something else.

Eighteen Stops Spread Across Five Corridors

Patch printed the full roster of 18 restaurants and food businesses. Sorted by the roads they sit on, they form five clusters, plus a café inside the library and a brewery.

According to TribLive, the program was open to every eligible McCandless business with no cap on numbers. The town put out a public call in early July, then delivered letters to businesses in person and by mail. The 18 that signed up weren't selected by anyone. The list simply shows who answered, which makes it a fairly honest snapshot of the township's independent and neighborhood food spots, with a few national names mixed in.

The Counters Hiding Inside Other Businesses

Look at the roster through that lens and the unusual entries stand out first. Adzema Pharmacy runs a lunch counter at 8105 Perry Highway, and its Restaurant Week special was the Frizzle Burger. Commonplace Coffee operates inside Northland Public Library on Cumberland Road. OTB serves burgers, sandwiches and wraps from the North Park Boathouse on Pearce Mill Road, and its special was a chicken parm sandwich. Shooters Golf, on Pine Creek Road, serves burgers and bar food next to its golf simulators and offered specialty burgers for the week.

Lucky Bug Coffee on West Ingomar Road made a salted caramel apple latte. Convive Coffee on Providence Boulevard steamed spiced apple cider made with cider from Soergel's. Bruster's in Ingomar built a sundae or Blast around a strawberry-pretzel theme. Most of these specials were small, cheap upgrades on a stop people were probably already making, like a library visit, a pharmacy run or a walk around North Park.

Where the Specials Got Ambitious

The bigger plays came from the full kitchens, and they were spread across four corridors. On Duncan Avenue, Large Plain Pizza and Pints created the McCandless Meatball Pie for $20.99. The Pittsburgh Wire described a hand-tossed pizza topped with house sauce, meatballs, hot peppers, ricotta, mozzarella and hot honey, served dine-in only. TribLive photographed general manager Doug Teaderman holding the Restaurant Week poster in the dining room.

On Blazier Drive, Little Viet Kitchen served a roasted chicken rice plate. The Pittsburgh Wire reported it as a $20 pairing with passionfruit lemonade, made new for the event. Little Viet's own site says its North Pittsburgh location opened in fall 2023, so this was a three-year-old kitchen using the week to try a new dish. Up on Providence Boulevard, Shabu-Shabu Hotpot & Grill, which offers all-you-can-eat Japanese hot pot, Korean barbecue and sushi, gave away a free hand-crafted drink with a regular dine-in meal.

On Babcock Boulevard, Mark's North Park Lounge put together two $18.99 bundles. One was a cheeseburger and fries, the other a 10-inch pizza with salad, and each came with a choice of domestic beer, milkshake or fountain drink. General manager Scott Brady told CBS Pittsburgh he hoped the event would come back year after year.

Every one of those TOM Specials ended on October 16. What's left are the businesses themselves, now sorted onto a map that most residents had probably never seen drawn in one place.

The Pine Creek Road Corner Has the Most Going On

Of the five clusters, Blazier Drive and Pine Creek Road has the widest range packed into the shortest drive. Clark's Restaurant in Pine Creek Shopping Center is a family-friendly bar and restaurant with burgers, sandwiches, soups and salads. Little Viet Kitchen is a Vietnamese takeout spot a few doors down the same street. Shooters Golf adds a simulator bar on Pine Creek Road. Its own site gives a Wexford mailing address, but TribLive lists it as a McCandless participant. That's dinner, takeout and an evening out within one short stretch.

This corner is also where the town's next visible project is going. TribLive reported that McCandless won a second $25,000 Allegheny County Main Streets grant to paint a 175th anniversary mural on the Harmony Short Line abutment on Pine Creek Road. Minutes from the town's August 19 Heritage and Cultural Center committee meeting say the grant agreement was still being finalized. The mural will include a historical component, the Heritage and Cultural Center will supply reference images, and the goal is a finished mural in 2027.

What Still Carries Into November

Restaurant Week came with a second layer. Patch reported that a McCandless Restaurant Week Passport was handed out at participating businesses during the event. Its extra offers can be redeemed through November 30, 2026, a deadline meant to keep people visiting after the week ended. If you picked one up between October 12 and 16, you have about a month left to use it.

The timing was deliberate. According to Patch, the event was designed to bring customers to local spots during what can be a slower time of year for restaurants, and to give people a reason to try something new. The Nov. 30 window covers the late-fall weeks between Halloween and the holidays, which is exactly when those businesses could use the traffic.

Here's one way to use the map before then, built around stops you may already make:

1. Morning coffee at Commonplace inside Northland Public Library, or at Lucky Bug on West Ingomar Road.
2. Lunch at the counter at Adzema Pharmacy on Perry Highway.
3. A loop around North Park, then something from OTB at the boathouse.
4. Dinner on Duncan Avenue at Large Plain, or on Blazier Drive at Clark's or Little Viet Kitchen.
5. Ice cream at Bruster's in Ingomar on the way home.

The 175th Year Has a Beer, Too

Restaurant Week is one piece of a larger anniversary year. July Town Council minutes say Allusion Brewing Company, a brewery that serves its own beer and food on-site, named its anniversary beer "Harmony Brew." The same minutes describe a McCandless 175 birthday 5K that had already been held, and a Community Day planned for September 19 with the return of the parade. Next on the town's calendar, the Shining Star Gala, honoring eight local volunteers, is set for Friday, November 6, at The Camelot Event Center.

As for a second Restaurant Week, community engagement manager Lizz Venanzi told TribLive the town plans to build on the first one by starting outreach earlier and recruiting more McCandless businesses. No date has been announced for 2027. If outreach starts earlier, though, the businesses that sat out this year will have more time to sign up, and some of them may be other counters and cafés tucked inside businesses that don't look like restaurants from the road.

Being within a short drive of places like Adzema's counter or the North Park boathouse is part of what a McCandless address offers, and buyers notice it. If you're curious what your home is worth in a township with this kind of everyday convenience, The Honeywill Team can walk you through it. Request a Free Market Valuation, and we'll show you how your corner of McCandless compares.