05/27/2026
Pull up a stool at the last pharmacy lunch counter in Pittsburgh
Adzema Pharmacy in McCandless has been serving hearty, inexpensive breakfasts and lunches since 1959
Photo of Gretchen McKay
Gretchen McKay
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
[email protected]
May 27, 2026
4:00 AM
9
If you’ve lived in a town long enough, you probably have a favorite spot to grab a quick bite for breakfast or lunch.
For Mike Zebley, that spot is Adzema Pharmacy on Perry Highway in McCandless.
He was a teenager when his family moved to Pittsburgh in 1967, and he would occasionally stop in with his parents for a meal at the lunch counter pharmacist Robert “Bob” Adzema established in 1959.
After opening Kress Tire Co. across Rt. 19 in 1970, Zebley became a regular, claiming a seat at the counter at least three times a week to wolf down one of its lunch specials because, well, “it was just plain convenient.”
It soon became a family mainstay.
His son, Kurt, worked for Adzema when he was a high school student and his now daughter-in-law, Cynthia, took orders and served food at its counter. Flash forward several decades to today, and you’ll find his granddaughter, Penny, ringing up sales at the register.
“And I also bring in my grandkids,” Zebley said on a recent Thursday as he munched on the fries that came with one of his favorite dishes, a grilled cheese sandwich on Italian bread.
“I’m a simple guy,” he explained with a shrug.
What brings him back day after day, year after year, is not just the pharmacy’s bargain-priced daily specials — they’ll fill you up for less than a crisp Alexander Hamilton. He also loves its legacy as a local hangout.
“It’s like a TV show where you know everybody,” Zebley said.
That would include Norm Voegler, who was enjoying a bowl of mushroom soup while his 5-year-old grandson, Jameson, crunched on chicken fingers and sipped soda from a foam cup. Semi-retired from the construction business advertised in capital letters on his black baseball cap, the McCandless resident started eating at Adzema Pharmacy “only” about 15 years ago, often with one of his four grandsons in tow.
But having picked up prescriptions there since he was young, and done a couple remodeling jobs for current owner Jay Adzema, the 68-year-old “Pappy,” like Zebley, is considered family.
“It’s like walking back in time, really,” Voegler said of the blue-edged laminate lunch counter, where coffee is served in mismatched cups donated over the years from customer and crayon-colored placemats are posted on columns.
“Everybody knows everyone. And when you walk in, they say ‘Hi.’
“And where else can you get food for $10?” Voegler asked with a knowing look as server Cherie Bachor tucked an old-school green GuestCheck between a napkin holder and plastic basket of crackers.
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Jay Adzema took over Adzema Pharmacy and its lunch counter when his father, Bob, retired in the mid-1990s.(Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Post-Gazette)
Like father, like son
Jay Adzema laughs when he recalls how he came to run the last remaining pharmacy lunch counter in the Pittsburgh area.
When his father was growing up on Pittsburgh’s North Side in the 1940s, every corner drugstore had a lunch counter where you could order a sandwich or thin-patty burger or linger with friends over a milkshake or soda. So when Bob became the first in his family to go to college — his father was a guard at the state penitentiary — it was only natural that his pharmacy would have a lunch counter.
“It was a neighborhood thing,” Jay says. “You just had to have it.”
Bob decided to attend the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, his son says, in part because he worked in drugstores as a teenager, mopping floors before they opened and making deliveries.
After graduating in 1950, he served as a medic in the Army in Korea and worked in drugstores on the North Side before eventually opening his own pharmacy at age 31 in a storefront just up the road from its current location “on the Perry Highway.”
Back then, pharmacists were more like merchants, offering dry goods and hardware supplies along with prescription drugs and other health items. They also had lunch counters where customers could cool their heels and socialize over food — and spend a few extra dollars — as they waited for their scripts to be filled.
“He was a huckster,” Jay says of his father, who sold everything from wallpaper and hardware to ice cream, batteries and wall clocks on shelves that reached to the ceiling.
In 1963, he moved the business to its current location at 8105 Perry Highway in a former lumber yard building. Being the ultimate “go-getter,” he expanded the store in 1971 to double its size at a time when independent pharmacies like Adzema’s could still make a nice profit. He used salvaged materials, including bricks for stairs that he dug up on the North Side.
Jay, who studied chemistry and biology at Carnegie Mellon University after graduating from North Allegheny High School in 1981, says he never intended to follow in his father’s footsteps. In fact, Bob warned him against it, citing work days that stretched from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. But having worked for his dad since he was 15 — one of his first jobs was running its lottery machine in 1978 — it turned out being a pharmacist was in Jay’s blood.
After transferring to Duquesne University, he received his pharmacy degree in 1988 and — at his father’s insistence — worked for Thrift Drug in Squirrel Hill for two years so he could learn how a chain pharmacy works. Upon returning to Adzema Pharmacy in 1990, he decided fairly quickly that the family-owned store was a perfect fit.
When you work for a corporate drug chain, you don’t get to make your own decisions, Jay says. As someone who loves merchandising, “I knew I could out-customer them” with service.
Overseeing the lunch counter, which has opened promptly at 8 a.m. since its inception, “is part of who we are,” he says.
Since his father’s retirement in the mid-’90s, Jay has put in an uncountable number of 12-hour days — some of which start with him in the kitchen when a cook calls in sick.
“I cook at home, so along the way I’ve jumped in,” he says.
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Lou and Anna Mae Caracciolo of McCandless enjoy homemade soup and a sandwich at Adzema Pharmacy's lunch counter.(Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Post-Gazette)
‘They don’t need fancy’
Jay moved the counter from a side wall to the back of the store in 2000. Tables were added to supplement the pharmacy’s signature counter seating during the coronavirus pandemic, after businesses were permitted to reopen, because it allowed customers to stay six feet apart “and people like sitting.”
Familiarity — with both the food and the service — might be the reason why the lunch counter at Adzema Pharmacy has survived.
Rather than chase culinary trends, the menu has changed little since the beginning, featuring two homemade soups and three lunch specials each weekday, fried fish on Friday and a breakfast special on Sunday.
With dishes like stuffed peppers, Salisbury steak and grilled Reubens, there’s nothing fancy, “but they don’t need fancy,” Jay says. And like some of the customers they see each day, many of its servers and cooks grew up eating at the counter.
Kitchen manager Bob Hickey was an Eagle scout in Troop 171, which Jay headed up years ago. “I’ve known him since he was 10 years old.”
Longtime server Chris Florijan of Valencia started by filling in occasionally for a friend who worked there. Fifteen years later, her daughter, Andrea, subs for her when she heads to Florida for the winter.
Because she sees a lot of the same people each day, customers “are like family,” Florijan says. Some love to hang out, lingering over their coffee or pancakes for two or three hours “making or solving the world’s problems.”
The lunch counter itself, she adds, is a fixture in the North Hills.
“It’s a throwback to childhood,” when waitresses knew how people liked their coffee before they opened their mouth to tell them.
Willa Neil of Ross, who was lunching with fellow retired librarian Susan Brennan on a recent Wednesday, was more succinct: “It’s Cheers!” she says, referring to the fictional Boston bar where everybody famously knows your name. “And the waitresses are a hoot.”
Brennan, who also lives in Ross, says that the homestyle food is as craveable as it is inexpensive. Anytime her grandson Jack calls and asks if Nanny wants to go to breakfast, both know where they’re going.
“He thinks it’s the best place ever,” she says. “And we always sit at the counter.”
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Dishes are prepared from scratch in the kitchen of Adzema Pharmacy.(Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Post-Gazette)
Pull up a stool
Pharmacy lunch counters are actually an outgrowth of an equally iconic American eating establishment: the soda fountain.
In the early 19th century, druggists believed carbonated waters — some boosted with “tonics” like caffeine or co***ne — could help with digestion and cure physical ailments.
“Sodas” caught on in the mid-1800s along with the temperance movement, and drug store owners realized adding a soda fountain would not only draw customers in but entice them to stay, and spend more money, after picking up a prescription.
After pharmacist Jacob Baur started the Liquid Carbonic Company in 1888, soda fountains really flourished. “The Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages” by A. Emil Hiss, first published in 1897, contained more than 1,500 formulas for carbonated drinks, notes author and historian Brian Butko, director of publications at the Senator John Heinz History Center.
In the 1910s, many druggists took the concept a step further and began offering light lunches along with fountain drinks. The Industrial Revolution brought about a whole different way of life, with second- and third-shift workers looking for places to eat at all hours of the day.
Not every drugstore had a lunch counter, but they were certainly ubiquitous since offering prepared foods was an easy way to double your business.
“A pharmacist could be on one side of the store, and the lunch counter on the other,” Butko says.
Five-and-dime stores soon followed suit. In the early 1920s, F.W. Woolworth Company opened its first lunch counter in Indiana. By the 1950s and ’60s, they had become common in drugstores and general stores to keep people shopping, according to diner historian Richard Gutman, who has written four books on the subject.
As depicted in movies like “The Last Picture Show” and “It’s a Wonderful Like,” lunch counters were “little hubs of activity,” he says.
Two things helped pushed them out: major retail drug chains like CVS and Walgreens, and fast food restaurants, “which is a shame,” Gutman says.
Whereas pharmacy and other lunch counters were mostly in the center of town, requiring patrons to feed a parking meter, fast food was easily accessible from interstate highways and had their own parking lots. Butko remembers the “big thrill” of hearing pins strike in the underground bowling alley at Duquesne Village while he sat at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s above it.
“It’s just this onward march of businesses getting bigger and squashing the smaller ones,” he says.
Locally, some consider Lincoln’s P&G Diner, which started in 1928 as a soda fountain at Lincoln Pharmacy in Millvale, an old-school lunch counter. But because the P&G in its name refers to Pamela and Gail of Pamela’s Diner fame — others argue it’s not really a pharmacy lunch counter.
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The lunch counter has been a mainstay at Adzema Pharmacy since it opened in 1959.(Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Post-Gazette)
Totally committed
Jay says continueing to run the lunch counter at Adzema Pharmacy is a “total commitment.”
Like his father — who died in March 2008 — Jay has learned to juggle multiple responsibilities to keep the business humming along and a good place for its 30 employees to make a living. Independent pharmacies are really hurting because insurance companies make it hard to turn a profit, he says. And truth be told, the food part of the business just breaks even.
“I’m not in it for the profit,” Jay says, “but the traffic.”
His CPA wife and college sweetheart, Sharon, is happy to help with the books while doing taxes. Their two kids have no interest in becoming third-generation owners. Older son Max is in charge of tours at Fallingwater and his younger brother, Jake, is an engineer (though he serves as the pharmacy’s “go-to computer guy”).
“Do I want them to take over? Not really. It’s a hard life,” Jay says.
What he loves about the business is that he gets to talk to people, offer advice and answer questions.
Sure, his customer base skews older. A lot older, with most diners enjoying their golden years of retirement.
“I always wanted to be a hipster place, but the vibe isn’t there,” he admits ruefully. For instance, the one time he tried to serve a “foodie” dish he makes at home — rice and beans — people were like, “What is that?” A lasagna and pierogi soup drew similar objections.
That said, on a busy day, all 50 seats could be filled with people eager to crush one of the counter’s scratch-made chipped ham- and American cheese-topped Frizzle burgers or hand-breaded fish sandwiches that’s “this big with a bun that’s this big,” Jay says, measuring the air between two outstretched hands.
Not following the latest trends also allows him to keep prices relatively low. Breakfast specials like two pancakes with bacon, served daily until 10:30 a.m., cost $3.95. A bacon cheeseburger, patty melt or fried chicken sandwich runs $6.20, and old-fashioned milkshakes — a soda fountain icon — cost $3.95.
To make the store more fun, Jay has set up displays featuring pharmaceutical trinkets from the past.
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The lunch counter is in the back of Adzema Pharmacy, which has an old-school vibe.(Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Post-Gazette)
A glass case near the pharmacy counter, for example, holds a (reusable!) glass syringe used by diabetics in the 1950s along with a collection of ampoules and ancient-looking bottles of medicine found in basements and garages. A wallpapered wall in a nook where a group of ladies have gathered nearly every Thursday for lunch for decades displays photos of longtime customers and friends.
The pharmacy students who stop by “think we’re a dinosaur,” Jay says. “But I love service and knowing people.”
He pauses, and gives one of the smiles that have brightened customers’ days for more than 30 years.
“If I was young and raising a family, I’d probably be out of business. But you know what? It’s home, I guess. It’s where I’m supposed to be.”
First Published: May 27, 2026, 4:00 a.m.
