South Street Subs is slicing hoagies again in Nanticoke, but this time the counter sits inside a converted wing of a former church. The shop reopened at the corner of Green and Market streets near Patriot Square, occupying part of the building that once housed Berean Lighthouse Church, and loyal customers had gone more than six years without its food before the doors opened again.
The comeback was engineered by Deanna Shimko, a day-one employee of the original South Street Subs who worked alongside founder Keith Bartle for nearly a decade before the pandemic forced its closure. According to the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice, Shimko bought the former Berean Lighthouse Church from her own pastor grandparents, Dan and Sylvia Thomas, and then convinced Bartle to bring the business back to life inside it. Bartle had originally opened South Street Subs in 2011 at 80 W. South St. in Nanticoke, in a space that had previously been home to Nana Jean's Deli and South Street Meat Market.
The family tie runs deeper than real estate. Shimko's grandfather was baptized at the former Berean Lighthouse Church, and she said her grandmother has already stopped by the reopened shop three times. “We are very blessed,” Shimko said, per the same report.
From Closure to Comeback
When COVID-19 hit, Bartle was forced to close South Street Subs and sell the original building, after which he went back to work as a commercial truck driver. Shimko, meanwhile, spent the intervening years working as a speech pathologist in local schools. Bartle, now 50, and Shimko, 29, reunited to reconfigure a wing of the church into a working sub shop, complete with a new slogan plastered on the menu board: “Holy Hoagies & Good Buns.”
The reopened shop keeps the classic hoagie lineup that built its following the first time around, including Italian, American, ham and cheese, turkey, tuna and roast beef versions, alongside mild and hot grab-and-go hoagies loaded with capicola, salami, provolone and peppers. The hot grab-and-go version carries what Bartle calls a secret shake, a seasoning blend he credits to Paul Catalano of Catalano Importing Co. in West Scranton.
A Seasoning Secret Rooted in West Scranton
Catalano, 83, has run the hundred-year-old family deli at 130 S. Main Ave. since 1963, after his father started the business in the 1920s, according to a WNEP segment on the shop. Catalano's father taught him to use only the finest meats and cheeses on his hoagies, and to leave off lettuce, tomatoes and onions entirely, a house rule South Street Subs' grab-and-go sandwiches still echo. Catalano has said his family's approach has served as a model for other sub shops outside Lackawanna County, and the deli is also known regionally for a room-temperature tomato pie, prepared with tangy sauce over a soft yeast crust, that routinely sells out, according to the NEPA Pizza Review. Grab-and-go Italian delis like Catalano's represent a distinct food tradition spanning Lackawanna and Luzerne counties.
South Street Subs sources its buns fresh every morning from a Lackawanna County bakery it declines to name. Beyond the standard hoagie menu, the shop rotates specials including Meatball Mondays and Sausage and Peppers Thursdays, with kielbasa supplied fresh from Tarnowski's Kielbasa, a Nanticoke butcher on East Main Street that has produced Polish sausage using the same old-world family recipe since 1946, per DiscoverNEPA. Tarnowski's has repeatedly placed first in both fresh and smoked sausage categories at the annual Plymouth Alive Kielbasa Festival, including in 2022 and 2024, a contest the Times Leader has described as carrying a polka-party atmosphere.
A City Built on Coal and Kielbasa
The kielbasa connection fits naturally into Nanticoke's identity. The city, the third-largest in Luzerne County with a population of 10,628 as of the 2020 Census according to Wikipedia, was incorporated in 1926 at the height of the regional anthracite coal boom and still counts roughly half its residents as having Polish ancestry. Eastern European immigrants settled heavily in Luzerne County mining towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a legacy visible in the sausage-heavy menus still found across the Wyoming Valley.
Economically, Nanticoke carries a median household income of $57,462 and a poverty rate near 19.4 percent, according to estimates compiled by World Population Review, figures that underscore why competitive pricing and loyal local customers matter so much to small food businesses in former industrial communities. The city is also home to the 167-acre main campus of Luzerne County Community College, an anchor that brings thousands of students and employees into Nanticoke daily and sits near enough to Patriot Square to feed potential foot traffic to the new shop, per DiscoverNEPA.
For now, South Street Subs is take-out only, open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and closed Sundays, with Saturday hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. offered as often as Bartle and Shimko's other commitments allow. The pair plan to eventually add in-house seating, turning the former church wing into more than just a pickup counter. For a city still shaped by the rhythms of its mining past and its Polish parishes, a hoagie shop reborn inside a church feels, as Shimko put it, like a blessing.
