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Kaisy’s Delights offers fine-dining option

Zum Chalet has same menu, same quality, but different experience
November 12, 2021

When you walk into Kaisy’s Delights in Wescoats Corner outside Lewes, you now have a choice. To the right is walk-up counter service as it’s been since the restaurant opened in 2017. To the left in a separate room, patrons can enjoy a nice meal with tablecloths, fine china and good silverware.

The new finer-dining concept called Zum Chalet is one that owner Thierry Langer said is often found Europe, particularly in the Alps.

“It is very common to stop for lunch somewhere on the ski slopes or the hiking trails and find a chalet just like this one,” he said. “You have these levels of service, but all of them with the same exact quality of food because it’s the same kitchen.”

Whatever is ordered at Kaisy’s, he said, is the highest possible quality.

“If it is in a cup at the drive-through, it is the same exact quality as you get with the finer china,” he said. “Everything is homemade from scratch. Nobody is doing that.”

Kaisy’s opened in Rehoboth Beach in 2015. Two years later, the Wescoats Corner location opened in the former Windsor’s Flowers shop. More recently, the business opened a kiosk in the Nemours building on Bayhealth’s Sussex campus in Milford.

Langer considers the Lewes location the business’s show house and central kitchen. The food is inspired by Austro-Hungarian cuisine mixed with French and Dutch touches.

The restaurant’s namesake is the Kaisy, aka Kaiserschmarrn, sort of an Austrian-style shredded pancake. When Langer realized no one in America knew about Kaiserschmarrn, he said he had to build his restaurant around it. The Kaisy can be enjoyed as breakfast with sausage and peach compote or as a tasty treat with homemade whipped cream and a choice of fruit compote or chocolate sauce.

Another option for breakfast is Tyroler Gröstl, an iconic morning meal from the Austrian Alps that translates very well to the U.S. It comprises an egg sunny-side up, sausage, sautéed potatoes and bacon.

Also available are pastries made by French Chef Ludovic Bezy from La Baguette in Dover.

“It is his process that we carry on here,” Langer said. “We’re doing this with the best in the area. I’m French, so I know what a croissant should look like.”

Langer said many of the restaurant’s recipes are from his aunt Ruth Langer, who was born in Austria in 1921 and escaped the country through the Dolomites, where the Kaisy originated, and then ended up in England.

“She was an amazing cook,” Langer said. “Her cookbook is the family inheritance.”

Other items on the Austro-Hungarian menu include wienerschnitzel, chicken paprikash and the aforementioned Tyroler Gröstl. Kaisy’s also has goulash soup and latkes.

“We are the only business in the world that sells latkes at a drive-through,” Langer said. “We could be in the Guinness.”

Kaisy’s also features a number of specialty sundaes made with Bassetts ice cream, which has had a shop in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market since 1892.

Speaking of Philly, Kaisy’s also gets its coffee from the city, using La Colombe as its coffee roaster.

“All the beans we use now are from organic farming,” Langer said. “If you want espresso shots, we have three variations. You can try them and you will see the colossal difference. It’s all in the details, and it’s all in the refinement of what we do.”

Kaisy’s is currently running a promotion to draw people to the new concept. When a customer buys one gift card from Kaisy’s Delights, they get one free to enjoy exclusively at the Zum Chalet.

Kaisy’s new Zum Chalet is located at 1548 Savannah Road just outside Lewes. To learn more about Kaisy’s, go to kaisysdelights.com.

 

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