First look: The newest Grain restaurant has Newark's only outdoor bar, opening May 10 (2024)

From the outdoor bar at the newest Grain Craft Bar + Kitchen, you can see the top of the renovated Delaware Stadium with the blue-and-gold "Delaware Blue Hens" logo peeking over a row of trees.

"You'll be able to hear the cheers," co-owner Lee Mikles says during a recent tour of the new restaurant, located at University of Delaware's STAR Campus off South College Avenue near the football stadium.

Grain Exchange (591 Collaboration Way, Newark) will open Wednesday, May 10 serving the 3,000-plus UD employees and tenant companies at the Science, Technology and Advanced Research Campus, while paying homage to Delaware's long lineage of innovators.

While the business will rely on the STAR community to keep breakfast, lunch and happy hours busy, they also hope to draw a dinner and weekend brunch crowd from locals looking to avoid the bustle and parking crunch of downtown Newark's Main Street.

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Grain Exchange, located on the ground floor of the FinTechInnovation Hub (owned by Delaware Technology Park, not UD), will be the official postgame spot for UD football and lacrosse games.

And because the UD parking lots that surround the restaurant are paid lots during football games, Mikles and fellow co-owner Jim O'Donoghue expect Grain Exchange to be a pregame and postgame tailgate spot, shuttling orders of breakfasts, wings and sandwiches to Blue Hen fans.

They also envision large tents on the lawn that faces Grain's outdoor bar for the festivities.

But game day won't be the only time that Grain Exchange will be more than a food hub for science and tech workers.

Armed with Newark's only outdoor bar, the 4,800-square-foot Grain will also host live music on its patio, which has a fire pit in the center. It can seat 140 people with the patio open and about 75 without.

Delaware innovators honored

Grain Exchange is named for the grain exchanges of yesteryear, which allowed farmers to sell their crops at set prices and consumers to purchase them at transparent prices.

A large mural created by artist Ed Schmidt of Newark-based Schmidt Advertising & Design is anchored by a massive historic black-and-white image of a grain exchange with postcards from all the major grain American exchanges worked into the design. He even changed one of the towns in the main image to read "Newark" to give it a local feel.

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But Schmidt's real masterpiece is the line of eight Work Projects Administration-style posters on another wall under a heading "Delaware Innovations." It is there where his colorful designs promote eight innovations with First State fingerprints all over them, playing off the innovation theme of the campus.

And just like Newark's original Grain Craft Kitchen + Bar on Main Street where diners clamor to be among the caricatures of regular customers painted on the wall, Mikles hopes local businesses and inventors will ask to be added to what he expects to be a rotating display.

The first eight posters have many Delaware-made innovations you have heard of ... and some you probably haven't:

• Nylon: The first nylon was made in 1935 at the DuPont Experimental Station in Alapocas by chemist Wallace Carothers.
• Affinity cards: Created in 1983 by MBNA, branded affinity cards have largely replaced the boring standard design on credit cards for many.
• Gore-Tex: Invented in 1969 by W. L. Gore & Associates in Newark, the waterproof, breathable fabric repels water.
• Ice cream: Aunt Sallie Shadd, a freed slave who lived in Wilmington, owned a catering business making a popular frozen mixture of fruit, cream and sugar. Legend has it that first lady Dolly Madison was impressed with Shadd's strawberry ice cream and served it at President James Madison’s second inaugural ball in 1813. In 2021, Ben & Jerry's proclaimed her "America’s first Founding Mother of Ice Cream."

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• Hopping: The concept of continuous hopping is attributed to Dogfish head founder Sam Calagione, who used a vibrating electric football tabletop game on top of his boil kettle in the early '90s, adding hops throughout the entire boil.
• Kevlar: Developed by DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek in 1965 in anticipation of a gasoline shortage, thedurable, heat-resistantsynthetic fiber was initially developed to make strong, but lightweight tires. Five times stronger than steel, it is now used in many products, including body armor.
• Automobile: Newport-born Oliver Evans invented the Oruktor Amphibolos, a crude, stream-powered amphibious vehicle designed for dredging, believed to be the first automobile
• Multi-touch: The multi-touch screen technology integral to Apple's iPhone was gained by the acquisition of Newark's FingerWorks, founded by UD student/professor team of John Elias and Wayne Westerman in 1998. They produced a line ofmulti-touch products including the iGesture Pad and the TouchStream keyboard, which became the basis for the iPhone touchscreen.

What's on the menu?

Grain Exchange will serve hot meals around the clock, open seven days a week: Sunday 9 a.m.- 9 p.m., Monday-Thursday 8 a.m.-9 p.m., Friday 9 a.m.-11 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m.-11 p.m.

Near the main entrance is a to-go counter, slinging quick cups of coffee, espressos, lattes and tea from Grain's own Lewes Coffee Company in the morning, along with breakfast sandwiches, wraps, bagels, muffins, yogurt parfaits and more.

The same counter will have grab-and-go lunches after 11 a.m., a first for any of the six locations that have opened since Grain's founding in 2015. Expect everything from $9.50 sandwiches and wraps (pastrami, Asian tuna, roasted vegetables, chicken Caesar) to salad bowls ($7.50-$9.50) and their fan-favorite cream of Chesapeake crab soup ($7.75).

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On their main lunch and dinner menu, Grain regulars will be familiar with nearly the whole lineup, including hamburgers ($13.35-$15.25), wraps and salads ($15.50-$19), flatbreads ($16), tacos ($17-$18) and soups ($5.50-$7.75). Appetizers include fried pickles ($9.50), wings ($13), cheesesteak egg rolls ($11.50) and jumbo pretzels ($12).

New items introduced at Exchange and not regularly available at other Grain locations include a hot pastrami sandwich with Swiss cheese Dijon mustard on multigrain bread ($14) and a roast pork sandwich topped with sautéed garlic spinach and sharp provolone cheese with a side of aus jus dipping sauce.

Their large kitchen will also be used for catering to nearby businesses, as well as a spacious prep kitchen for some of the items sold at all their locations, such as their fried pickles.

How Grain Exchange came to be

UD reached out to local restaurateurs, realizing their complex was a bit of a food desert in need of more than just the easily-overwhelmed food trucks that would pull up.

Grain began talks about the possibility of a location at STAR in 2021, even before they opened their fifth location in Wilmington's Forty Acres neighborhood near Trolley Square last year.

At first, they looked in existing STAR buildings, but none were a perfect fit. One in particular was designed in a way that Grain staffers would have to haul garbage out through the main lobby.

"Could you imagine? The president of the university is talking and there's somebody hauling a bag of garbage juice?" jokes Mikles, laughing at the vision that (thankfully) never came to be. "We figured if we did that one it would become an issue."

Instead they waited for the build of the FinTechInnovation Hub, which opened in January and was planned with Grain in mind, making it the first from-scratch Grain in its roster of locations (Newark, Bear, Lewes, Wilmington, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania).

Even so, they know plenty of their customers will be eating their food at work and are toying with ways to get it out to the thousands of hungry workers who surround them.

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"We may even have somebody with a bike who's just delivering to this campus, removing any friction for them to make an easy order and eat their desk," Mikles says.

Residents of STAR Campus include Bloom Energy, Chemours, ChristianaCare Gene Editing Institute, Delaware Biotechnology Institute, Delle Donne & Associates, SevOne, UD Biomedical Engineering, UD College of Health Sciences and Wilmington Area Planning Council, among others.

As they await final approvals ― planning to open immediately once they do ― O'Donoghue says their scheme for how Exchange will play out are just a theory of how things will go once they fire up their sparking new commercial ranges and khakis begin plopping in chairs.

To prepare, they will have staff from other Grain restaurants working at Exchange to help train new employees and make sure everything runs smoothly. Even baristas from their Lewes Coffee Company have traveled north to train their coffee-makers under the watchful eye of general manager Pete Krause, a 1998 UD graduate.

"We have no idea what is going to happen. This campus is very transient with people coming and going all day," says O'Donoghue, a 1990 UD grad, just like Mikles. "So we're set up to be successful out of the gate and we'll see where it all takes us."

Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and Twitter (@ryancormier).