Delaware
A dining spot from Bardea tops new restaurants opening in Delaware
New Delaware restaurants opening or coming soon
Here is a look at some new restaurants and food shops that are coming or have recently opened.
The end of the year is fast approaching, but that hasn’t stopped the Delaware restaurant industry.
Here is a look at some new restaurants and food shops that are coming or have recently opened.
Casa Nonna
DE.CO Food Hall, DuPont Building,10th and Orange streets, Wilmington
A new downtown Wilmington Italian American restaurant has a name that owners hope evokes warm, cozy feelings.
The owners of Bardea Food & Drink said the new restaurant at DE.CO Food Hall will be called Casa Nonna, or Grandmother’s House.
The name is an ode to Italian grandmas of chef/co-owner Antimo DiMeo’s grandmothers and their recipes. The Bardea team said it also represents “all the Nonnas of our region and their contributions to what we know as Italian-American cooking.”
The menu has not yet been released. The opening date, likely in early 2025, has not been set.
The restaurant will occupy the seating area adjacent to the bar in DE.CO that extends along Orange Street. The Italian trattoria will have about 70 seats and a full bar. It will offer lunch and dinner daily.
316 S Ridge Ave, Middletown, 302-295-5657, everestindiancuisinede.com
One of the world’s great treats has landed in Middletown: Himalayan-style momos.
Momos are Nepal’s delicious answer to the soup dumpling, a juicy veggie or meat-filled purse usually served with spicy sauce – and until now, they’ve been vanishingly hard to find in Delaware. Now you can slurp the garlicky minced-chicken middles out of a plate of momos at Everest Indian Cuisine, which opened in August next to Kohl’s in a dense Middletown commercial center along Ridge Avenue.
Everest serves some other Nepalese-style treats, including a chicken noodle soup called thukpa. The rest of the vegetarian or chicken-centric menu includes a broad array of Indian fare that includes biryani; chole bhatura; tandoor chicken; chicken kebab; butter chicken; and Indo-Chinese fare like chilli chicken and chicken 65.
600 N. Broad St., Middletown (inside Land of Spice supermarket), 302-380-2644, littlespiceusa.com.
Indian flavors in Middletown keep on coming, with a second location for beloved Newark-area Indian restaurant Little Spice.
The new location is tucked inside South Asian supermarket Land of Spice Desi Farmers Market. The opening menu is perhaps surprisingly broad for grocery store kitchen, from a wide variety of dosas – crisp South Indian crepes often packed with spiced potato – to a wealth of curries and gravies slathered over veggies, paneer cheese, chicken, goat or lamb.
The Middletown location also boasts street-food-style items perfect for a stroll through a supermarket, including protein-filled frankies sometimes dubbed Bombay burritos, or a sandwich stuffed with spicy ground-goat kheema.
The location allows online ordering for takeout, and catering for parties.
Word is out that the former Cafe Americana, and later the short-lived Ameri Home Cooking, in the Linden Hill Station, 4500 New Linden Hill Road in Pike Creek, will soon become home to Cafe Scalessa.
It’s a spinoff of the flagship Scalessa’s Old School Italian Kitchen in Wilmington’s Forty Acres neighborhood. We don’t have many details yet, but the cafe could open by the end of October, according to a social media post.
1128 Forrest Ave., unit C, Dover, 302-744-8010. locations.cleaneatz.com/de/dover/meal-prep-154.html
On a trip to their son’s hockey tournament in Ohio, Andrea and Ryan Maloney took a chance on a restaurant they’d never visited before. They liked it so much they decided to start one themselves.
In September, they opened the first Clean Eatz in Delaware across from the Modern Maturity Center in Dover.
Closed permanently: These Delaware restaurants and food businesses have closed in the past few months
Clean Eatz has 119 restaurants in 24 states with a menu that includes wraps, flatbreads, build-your-own bowls, protein smoothies and coffees, cauliflower crust pizza and burgers with turkey, bison, salmon or black beans.
They offer meal plans for the whole week, with take-home meals that are made fresh then frozen with directions for thawing or reheating. The meal packages list the calories, protein, fat and carbs in each serving.
The Dover restaurant is open Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
4008 N. Dupont Highway, near Minquadale, 302-991-1044. Visit chick-fil-a.com
On Thursday, Oct. 3, the newest location of the cultishly popular fried chicken spot opened at 4008 N. Dupont Highway, just south of Wilmington near Minquadale. The new location is 5,400 square feet, according to plans submitted with the county, with two drive-thru lanes – a feature that’s become commonplace at fast-food restaurants across the country to accommodate advance orders from phone apps and delivery websites. Chick-fil-A’s dedicated phone-app lane is called Mobile Thru.
The opening date underscores Chick-fil-A’s ever-increasing speed at plunking down new locations. It was just four months previous that construction fencing first came up on North Dupont Highway, in front of a self-storage facility.
The location was opened by franchisee Angelo Santos, a native of nearby Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, who got his first job at the Chick-fil-A in Ridley as a teen. The new location is holding giveaways for Chick-fil-A app users throughout the month of October. Details can be found on the North Dupont Chick-fil-A page.
379 Chestnut Hill Plaza, Brookside, 302-454-9938, tacobell.com.
A Taco Bell near Newark, so busy it was known for drive-thru lines that pushed back onto the street, was demolished this spring. Now it’s back as of the beginning of October, new and maybe improved, with multiple drive-thru lanes and a nubmer of self-service digital ordering screens inside.
The revamp comes as part of a contractual obligation to overhaul old stores, said Joe DePascale, development manager at Conshohocken, Pennsylvania-based franchise operator Summerwood Corp.
“In this case, the store does well enough and was old enough to warrant a full scrape and rebuild,” DePascale told The News Journal in March.
The new location is 2,700 square feet, according to plans submitted with New Castle County, built in accordance with an industrywide shift toward delivery, mobile apps and drive-thru – which means side-by-side drive-thru lanes and digital menu boards that theoretically help alleviate some of the drive-thru waits and lines.
9 W. Main St. in Middletown. facebook.com/ppfmiddletown/
The nation’s largest Philly-style pretzel brand opened its newest Delaware location in Middletown on Wednesday, Oct. 16.
Owners are Middletown residents Angela White and Tyeesha Edwards, who began training at Pretzel University at the Philly Pretzel Factory home office in July. Visit the Philly Pretzel Factory Middletown’s Facebook page for hours of operation and menu offerings.
Shops at Sea Coast, 19266 Coastal Highway, Unit 1, Rehoboth Beach. firststatebrewing.com/
First State Brewing Co.’s second location will be in Rehoboth Beach, at the former home of The Pond and TGI Fridays.
First State opened a brewery and restaurant in Middletown in 2020 and, in 2023, was named the best brewery in the country by USA TODAY.
More: First State Brewing Co. to open 2nd location on Coastal Highway in Rehoboth Beach
Details about the Rehoboth location, including an opening date, are still sparse, but First State spokesman Jeff Horne said food will be served there, as well.
Patricia Talorico writes about food and restaurants. You can find her on Instagram, X and Facebook. Email ptalorico@delawareonline.com. Sign up for her Delaware Eats newsletter.
Shannon Marvel McNaught reports on southern Delaware and beyond. Reach her at smcnaught@gannett.com or on Twitter @MarvelMcNaught.
Delaware Leaders Confront Crushing Utility Costs
Gov. Meyer urges PSC to freeze rates as Delaware tackles Delmarva’s returns, solar delays, data centers and nuclear options.
This story was produced by Spotlight Delaware as part of a partnership with Delaware Online/The News Journal. For more about Spotlight Delaware, visit www.spotlightdelaware.org.
New Castle County Councilman Tim Sheldon says he recently brokered a handshake deal to pause a data center development project near Newark.
Sheldon, who represents the Newark area, said the deal followed private negotiations with the developer’s prominent Delaware attorney, Shawn Tucker, who told him the New York-based developer behind the project, Shelbourne, agreed to consider the Newark site for uses other than a data center. “This is my art of the deal,” Sheldon said.
But the deal is dependent on the county finalizing an approval for an exploratory plan application from the developer, which would grandfather the land into zoning rules that existed prior to this year, Sheldon said.
That means the developer would not have to follow the county’s recently-passed data center regulations if the company ultimately decides to build a data center there. Since the property’s zoning already allows data center projects, the county likely does not have the legal authority to deny that exploratory plan application. An email sent between Sheldon and Tucker, dated June 10, shows that Tucker agreed to pause the data center project under those conditions.
Neither Tucker nor Shelbourne representatives responded to requests for comment about this deal.
Last year, Shelbourne filed documents with the county that showed plans to demolish the existing White Clay Center office and industrial buildings and construct a three-building data center campus that covered about 850,000 square feet.
After the filing, the plans became wrapped into a larger community backlash in northern Delaware against the growth of the data center industry. Neighbors have voiced fears that such data centers would use too much water and energy, and be too noisy.
Sheldon’s handshake agreement is not binding, and the developer still has the legal right to build a data center.
New Castle County General Manager of Land Use David Culver said he saw the email from Tucker but has no other information.
Sheldon noted that the agreement is between him and Tucker — and not with the county as a party. He further stated that if he decides not to run for reelection in 2028 or loses to a challenger, “it may be null and void.”
“If I’m not there, there’s no promises,” Sheldon said.
Asked if he would try to secure an official county deal barring a data center on that property, Sheldon said the project is “too far in the process” and he doesn’t want to risk the progress he’s made.
He said he will instead work to find another company to lease or buy the land. He said in a text after the interview that the deal is “the best I could’ve got.”
“Nobody else has even done this much and it seems like I’m getting hammered because I did something,” Sheldon said in the text.
Sheldon said an Amtrak train maintenance site will open next door to the White Clay Center property in the next few years, and he thinks the track upgrades needed for that project could make the neighboring site more attractive for manufacturing.
Delaware Public Media reported last week that Alstom, which conducts maintenance on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela trains – will open a new facility on 1601 Ogletown Road, next to the White Clay Center office and industrial buildings.
Alstom did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
What’s the status of data centers in Delaware?
Beyond Shelbourne’s proposal, several other building projects proposed in Delaware could become data centers.
The biggest is Project Washington, a 1.2-gigawatt data center campus planned for the land just north of the Delaware City Refinery. It would use enough energy to power almost a million homes.
That plan faced a major setback in March after a state board unanimously upheld Environmental Secretary Greg Patterson’s decision that the project is not permitted under Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act, a landmark law designed to limit heavy industry along the state’s shorelines.
Developer Starwood Digital Ventures was expected to appeal that decision, but it is unclear whether it will. Representatives from Starwood did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Another potential data center plan is slated for land near the southern approach to the St. Georges Bridge off U.S. Route 13. The St. Georges project includes the land that hosts the popular Halloween attraction Frightland.
County records show plans for three distribution centers covering 3.6 million square feet on farmland, along with 150 homes.
The records say the buildings will be warehouses. But project engineer Verdantas also submitted letters to the county suggesting that the buildings could be a data center campus.
Delmarva Power filings this winter showed two other potential data center projects. But Technical.ly reported that only one of those projects is still on the table, which would be located in Harrington. City officials are still in the preliminary stages of discussions about that plan, according to the report.
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Thursday, July 2, 2026 4:08AM
FELTON, Del. (WPVI) — A 65-year-old man was killed Tuesday after a camel fell on him in Delaware, according to police.
The incident happened around 7 p.m. on Indian Point Road in Felton.
According to Delaware State Police, the man was tending to his camel when the animal fell, resulting in fatal injuries.
The victim’s identity has not been released.
Officials have not provided additional details about the incident.
It is legal to own a camel in Delaware with a Department of Agriculture Exotic Animal Permit.
Copyright © 2026 WPVI-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Delaware is in the midst of a heat wave the like of which the First State hasn’t felt since 2011.
With temperatures hitting the 100s and heat index values reaching the 110s, it’s time for people to be careful outside – especially pet owners.
When a heat wave arrives, your pets will need extra attention, too. Dogs and cats can be vulnerable to extreme temperatures, making it important to know the signs of heat-related illness and how to keep them safe during hot weather. Here’s what pet owners should know.
Can heat stoke impact my pet?
When heat waves hit, dogs are also susceptible to heat stress and head strokes, according to the American Kennel Club.
- Heat stress: Heat stress in dogs occurs when a dog’s resting temperature hits 104 degrees. The signs and symptoms of heat stress include a dog looking for shade, limiting its movements, choosing to sit or lie down, panting, vomiting and excessive saliva.
- Heat stroke: This condition occurs when your dog’s resting body temperature exceeds 106 degrees. The symptoms include the dog acting confused; excessive drooling and thickening saliva; gums being bright red, blue or purple; refusing to drink water; losing consciousness; or having seizures. Immediate veterinary attention is required.
If your pet shows signs of heat stress, act quickly to help cool them down. The American Kennel Club recommends moving your dog to a shaded area, placing ice packs under its front legs and on its chest, and pouring cool water over its head and body. Offer fresh water to drink and, if available, have your dog lie or stand on a cooling mat to help lower its body temperature.
When should I walk my dog in a heat wave?
The first thing you should do is be aware of the type of dog you have. Overweight dogs and short-nosed dog breeds have a high risk of problems related to heat, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
When exercising, do the following:
- Do not walk, run or hike during the hottest part of the day or on particularly hot days.
- Take frequent breaks when exercising.
- Bring water for you and your pet.
- Avoid asphalt or other hot surfaces that can burn your pet’s paws. You can also use booties to cover its paws during walks.
How can I protect my pet around the house?
Even in your house, you pet could be battling the heat.
The AVMA and ASPCA offers these suggestions:
- Provide different temperature zones within your house for your pet’s comfort.
- Leave your pets at home if possible when you need to go out and about.
- Never leave a pet in the car, even in the shade or with windows cracked. Cars can overheat quickly to deadly temperatures, even when the weather isn’t severe.
- Make sure your pets have unlimited access to fresh water.Keep your pet free of parasites that are more common during warm weather, such as fleas, ticks and heartworms.
- Make sure all unscreened windows are closed and any screens are tightly secured.
- Talk to your vet or groomer about a summer haircut, but don’t shave your dog’s hair.
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