Posted by Leslie Kopp on Monday, July 28th, 2025 10:52am.
Credit to: Coastal Point, Susan Canfora
Members of the Small Restaurant Regulatory Reform Task Force will begin meeting this week to work on ways to make it easier for small businesses to open without being faced with the same requirements imposed on those operating large establishments.
State Sens. Gerald Hocker and Russell Huxtable are among the 15 members of the task force, said state Rep. Jeff Spiegelman, a Realtor, who initiated it. Representing Townsend, Smyrna and Clayton, he said he has heard complaints from clients at his family’s real estate agency, The Moving Experience, but the concerns aren’t limited to northern Delaware.
“The problem is all throughout Delaware,” he said. “I’ve had clients in Sussex County. We are dealing with codes in place well before COVID, with regulations way before COVID happened, but during COVID there was a rise in delivery. During COVID, everybody learned the convenience of take-out and delivery from places like Grub Hub and Door Dash, and there was a real culture change. Since COVID, more and more people have continued that practice of getting take-out from smaller restaurants.
“This idea for the task force came from my clients trying to move from a catering business, where people are operating out of their houses into their first brick-and-mortar stores, or from a food truck into a brick-and-mortar. After COVID, it became more common to open smaller restaurants — 1,500 or 2,000 square feet, with mostly take-out and a couple tables.
“I noticed the cost. The regulations and overhead are almost the same for a 1,500-square-foot restaurant, and it creates a considerable barrier to having more food choices for Delawareans and to let people open small restaurants,” Spiegelman told the Coastal Point this week.
The cost for an exhaust hood and deep-fryer suppression, required by Delaware code, is based on the size of the fryer the restaurant owner is installing, but both small and large restaurants are required to have the same hood. That can be expensive, and smaller, independent restaurants don’t have the financial backing of large companies that have franchises, he said.
Task force members will study what other states are doing and determine if new legislation is necessary in Delaware to help, or whether regulations and best practices can be altered, he said.
Gray said task force members want to ease regulations.
“The fire marshal, for example, requires any restaurant to have a sprinkler system, and that is a lot more costly. You have to pay for the sprinkler system to be designed and approved, and then built, and you have to have inspections. The goal is reducing unnecessary burdens. By June 1, 2026, the task force will identify the unnecessary burdens created by regulations and take concrete steps to ease the burdens and determine what state funding, if any, will be necessary to ease these burdens,” Gray said.
Spiegelman — who said there are more than 2,100 eating and drinking establishments in Delaware, employing about 50,000 people — called for prudent regulation but worried, “We have gone overboard.”
House Republicans co-sponsoring the initiative include Gray and fellow representatives Rich Collins, Valerie Jones Giltner, Tim Dukes, Shannon Morris, Mike Smith and Lyndon Yearick.