Delaware
Slots, showgirls and baccarat. Delaware Park casino unveils $10 million renovation
Delaware Park marks completion of renovation project
Delaware Park held a ceremony today to mark the completion of year-long renovation project. 1/25/24
Were there showgirls? Yes, there were showgirls, glitteringly bedazzled in costumes that were otherwise a blizzard of white, festooned like swans with snowy feathers.
There was confetti. There was a broad ribbon that existed only to be cut. And then there were the Mummers, large men buried beneath unconvincing orange wigs and dressed like Christmas trees or technicolor jesters, with maybe a back-pack made from a stand-up bass.
The assembled press stood gamely by, as did officials from the Delaware Lottery.
And if this all seemed festive for 9 a.m. on a Thursday, maybe there was good reason.
Jan. 25 was grand reopening day for the Delaware Park casino. After a year and $10 million in renovations, a Stanton casino formerly known for its dark carpets, its orange light and long banks of slot machines, had fully leaped into the new millennium with a first-floor renovation inspired by the glamour of modern Sin City.
“We’re bringing Vegas inspiration right here in Delaware,” announced Terry Glebocki, president and general manager of Delaware Park Casino & Racing, which was first founded as a racetrack in 1937.
The recent renovation began at the beginning of 2023, a little over a year after Delaware Park changed ownership. The Rickman family, which had controlled the racetrack and casino for almost four decades, sold the facility to a joint venture between Rubico Gaming and a private equity firm called Clairvest Group.
Last year: $10 million renovation boosts Delaware Park casino. Here’s what’s new.
Now, finally, the renovation is almost complete.
Glebocki, standing in front of a bank of slot machines, said the space where she stood was once an ill-used and mostly vacant room reserved for back-of-house staff.
“We stored some scissor lifts in it,” she said, inspiring laughter. Now, she said, the slot machines they’ve added here are premium machines that would be the envy of other casinos.
“On social media they’d say ‘If you know, you know,’” she said. “People love these machines. Nobody can compete with the amount of premium slot product we have right here on our floor.”
New Delaware Park Casino has bright lights, baccarat, pan-Asian food and hundreds of premium slots
What does a Vegas-inspired renovation in Delaware mean?
In part, it means glitzy carpets busy enough to stress out a bee. It means brighter lights, and bright bar surfaces with slot machines embedded inside. It means brighter everything. There’s a glass menagerie of chandeliers, and about 1,500 new gaming machines spread out across an expanded and opened-out floor space
There’s a new suite of high-roller games and a mess of new food that includes slow-cooked brisket cheesesteaks and bowls of Vietnamese pho.
There’s a bank of baccarat tables — a game wildly popular in China and across Southeast Asia, especially in gambling-fueled Macau. There’s late night “pan-Asian” food from a new late-night fast-casual spot called Foo Noodle.
Delaware Park is also newly open on Christmas, a popular day for Asian Americans to drop everything and hit the slots.
The casino offers blackjack tables, of course: the kind where you touch the cards and turn them over. But there are also video blackjack tables with a televised female robo-host who offers a reasonable facsimile of looking bored when no players are present. She looks nervously from side to side before smiling and asking, perhaps too suggestively, “Don’t you want to play with me?”
And there are bank after bank of what slots manager Andrew Gomeringer assures us are the most in-demand slot machines in the country. Lightning Buffalo Link slots. NFL slots. Dragon Link and Monopoly slots. If you know, you know.
These are slots you won’t find as easily in neighboring New Jersey or Maryland or pretty much anywhere in the country, said Gomeringer — the result of a privilege, or quirk, of Delaware. In Delaware, casinos pay much more in taxes to the state than in neighboring states like New Jersey. But they don’t pay direct fees on premium slots.
In other states, casinos might pay slot machine vendors a daily usage fee or a percentage of revenue for each machine. This means premium slots cost a lot more, and casino operators have an incentive to bring in fewer of them. But in Delaware, vendors get their cut through agreements with the Delaware Lottery, not with an individual casino.
And so Delaware Park has every reason to get the best slots, the most premium slots.
An entire lounge is devoted only to the games of premium slot maker Aristocrat, filled with human-high slots themed for dragons or adorned with drawings of broad-chested men. There are slots themed for bygone days of China, and slots that look like a computerized rainbow is exploding.
Gosh, it’s loud: This is what winning sounds like in 2024. It’s what losing sounds like, too.
The new, spacious layout at Delaware Park incorporates the lessons of the pandemic
But though the casino has added more than 200 “premium” slots on its first floor, the casino is more spacious than it was previously, said slots manager Gomeringer.
During the pandemic, casino staff noticed that customers enjoyed having more room and more privacy, Gomeringer said.
The old-school casino wisdom, he said, is to cram as many slot machines as you can together in a line — thus maximizing earnings potential. But customers don’t like feeling cramped, he said. One previous room, which consisted of two tight banks of machines jammed closely together in an X, was barely used.
Now, the same space has slot machines spaced out in shorter rows, or arranged in a circular “carousel.”
This does mean fewer slots per square feet, Gomeringer said. But to make up for this, the casino opened out more floor space by removing a boutique store and a cafe that weren’t needed. Delaware Park also opened out a lot of space that was formerly used by back-of house staff, and opened these out to slots as well.
The result is an airier space, but still enough slots that seats are rarely more than 75% occupied — a happy ratio that means customers won’t have to fight to find a slot machine.
The in-house brewery, 1937, has expanded its options. So has the deli, called Rooney’s, which now offers a brisket cheesesteak whose meat is roasted slow-and-low overnight in an electric oven. Head chef Steve Demilio says the steak has already ballooned into the most popular food item in the entire casino. A thousand brisket cheesesteaks went out the door in the first month alone, he said.
We did order one of those cheesesteaks on our way out. And we’ll admit: We thought its slow-cooked meat resembled pot roast more than steak.
But that cheesesteak, like much at Delaware Park Casino, is new. The chandeliers, once treasured antiques, are now new. The premium slots, the high-stakes tables, the baccarat, the noodles — all are new.
“The antiques are gone,” said Globecki, “It’s glitz and glamour now.”
Matthew Korfhage is business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all the things that touch land and money, and the many corporations that call the First State home. A longtime food writer, he also tends to turn up with stories about tacos, oysters and beer. Send tips and insults to mkorfhage@gannett.com.
Delaware
The Office of the Marijuana Commissioner Has Published the Official Proposed Regulations. – State of Delaware News
NEWS FEED
The Office of the Marijuana Commissioner Has Published the Official Proposed Regulations.
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Delaware
Delaware families are still grappling with infant formula shortages, price hikes
After a bacterial contamination led to a massive recall of infant formula in 2022, parents faced widespread shortages and price hikes. Formula is still unaffordable for many new parents. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in just the past year, the cost of baby food and formula has gone up more than 8%.
The First State is giving away the last of the infant formula it had ordered from overseas last year as part of an initiative by Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long to get the food to desperate parents unable to find it on grocery shelves.
That effort saw 44,000 canisters of formula shipped into Delaware from Australia last year. Parents in high-poverty areas were first limited to one 28-ounce can, but that limit has since been removed. There are about 12,500 canisters left, with statewide distribution points. This size canister can produce 20–24 bottles, Hall-Long said.
One of those distribution partners is the Food Bank of Delaware. CEO Cathy Kanefsky said that while supply has rebounded, scarcity is still an issue.
“If you don’t find it, call the Food Bank because we can make sure that we do have it,” she said at a Harper’s Heart event to raise public awareness of the state’s remaining cache of formula. “We do mobile distributions throughout the communities in Delaware as well. But again, we want to make sure that it’s not in a truck or on a shelf, it’s in your home.”
Abbott Nutrition voluntarily recalled several infant formulas in early 2022, leading to nationwide supply disruptions across the U.S. In a report issued by the Federal Trade Commission in March, the agency blamed the concentration of the market as a contributing factor. Abbott, Mead Johnson and Gerber controlled about 84% of the manufacturing of formula that year.
In a statement accompanying the report, members of the FTC said “families often have little choice when it comes to infant formula brands and can be highly sensitive to price hikes and supply disruptions.” There are also specialty types of formulas which can be more sensitive to supply changes because they help babies who have special needs, including digestive issues, allergies and metabolic disorders.
Delaware
Delaware's oldest Black men's organization The Monday Club visits President Biden at the White House
Thursday, May 2, 2024 2:18AM
The Monday Club was invited to Washington D.C. There, they took some of the First State’s most pressing issues to President Joe Biden.
DELAWARE (WPVI) — Delaware’s oldest Black men’s organization recently got a seat at the table in the White House.
The Monday Club was invited to Washington D.C. There, they took some of the First State’s most pressing issues to President Joe Biden.
The group also discusses the increased traffic that the port of Wilmington is now seeing since the March collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland.
Action News’ Christie Ileto has more on the Monday Club and their trip to D.C. in the video above.
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