Corner Market owners expand menu, add pizza at Lewes restaurant

im Richards and Johnny DiLeo have teamed up to bring the kind food they’re each known for to the Corner Market at Wescoats Corner.

“What we really want to be known as is a place where people can come to get good food to go,” said Richards. DiLeo owns Casa DiLeo in Rehoboth. The Corner Market will prepare and feature several of DiLeo’s most popular items.

Featuring breakfast, lunch and dinner, the Corner Market is rolling toward full speed as restaurant improvements proceed.

The business was previously Kupchick’s Corner Market, owned and operated by DK Krasnoff, until Richards and Dileo took over in April.

“I used to work with DK doing catering,” Richards said. He said the restaurant would change to Casa Amici after alterations are finished.

“We’re going to be adding pizza ovens and a little more work space.

“I’m not taking away what was here, I’m going to add to it,” Richards said.

He said the restaurant would also offer catering for small events.

“We’re going to serve authentic Italian cuisine as well as comfort food,” DiLeo said.

The restaurant will continue to feature homemade soups and a selection of dinner entrees, such as chicken and slippery dumplings every Thursday.

“We place a big emphasis on being very reasonably priced because we cater to the locals in Lewes, whether it’s in season or year around,” DiLeo said.

He said he learned what’s important to Lewes-area residents when in 1979, when he purchased and operated Lou Ianire’s Restaurant in downtown Lewes and turned it into DiLeo’s Restaurant.

DiLeo said he and Richards are reuniting after having worked together about a decade ago at the Tutto Bene Restaurant in the Midway Shopping Center.

“We did a lot of catering and elbow rubbing there,” DiLeo said. He said it was only recently they discovered they had grown up in the same town, Dunmore, Pa. “We went to the same vocational school for cooking. Johnny went in the morning, and I went at night. We never knew each other until we moved down here,” Richards said.

Richards owned and operated Jasper’s, a 40-seat restaurant in Hillsboro, N.J., for 20 years. Three years after opening Jasper’s, he bought a facility that seated more than 400 people for banquets and catering.

“The last three years I turned it into a microbrewery, Jersey Jim’s,” Richards said.

Both men attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. Richards has been an executive chef at Dover Downs, cooked at Wesley College in Dover and was food service director for Compass Group North America, a food service company.

Richards said he’s still getting the new restaurant staffed with experienced people such as Amy Magee, who worked at Norma’s Sub Shop in Milton for 30 years during its heyday. “She knows the customer’s name, she knows their order, and she’ll be getting it ready before they’re in the door,” Richards said.

Richards and DiLeo have also brought in Noel Sickler, who has cooked in Cape Region restaurants for 35 years, five of them at Kupchick’s Restaurant when it was on Lewes Beach.

“Noel was Kupchick’s chef, and he put out some of the finest food in the area when he was there,” DiLeo said.

Sickler has also been a chef at Casa DiLeo, The Back Porch Café and Chez La Mer, which later became the Porcini House Bistro.

Visit the restaurant
Corner Market hours are from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., and when the pizza ovens are installed until 9 p.m., Monday through Friday; and from 3 to 9 p.m. on Saturday.

“Sunday we’re going to leave open at this point. We need just one day to rest,” Richards said. For more information and to place orders to go, call 302-645-6211. The restaurant is at 33711 Wescoats Road, just south of Windsor’s Flowers & Plants.