Helen’s Sausage House opens a new location in Newark.
The new Helen’s opened on Main Street last week and customers are still lining up outside the doors just before they open at 6 a.m.
Dwayne Hunter was first in line Friday morning. The Smyrna resident has frequented the original location off Route 13 there for 12 years, but the new location is closer to his workplace.
“The sausage, it’s good, it tastes good, I usually get a lot of sausage from North Carolina and it’s the closest thing I can get up here north,” Hunter says.
Michael Hodgson lives in Elkton, Maryland, and also visits the Smyrna location.
“That’s a 35-minute ride from my house, plus the toll, just to get the sandwich," Hodgson says. "It was worth it.”
Helen’s has all the breakfast staples – sausage, bacon, scrapple, and ham sandwiches with eggs and cheese, omelets, sausage gravy and pork chop platters, and sides of homefries, hashbrowns, and meats. Murphy says the sausage and scrapple come from Kirby and Holloway, the bacon from Hatfield and the pork chops are local from BJ’s.
Newark resident Alexis Holland is a long-time Helen’s fan who stopped by Friday morning.
“The sausage is amazing. So I’ve been going up and down to Smyrna for the last 10 years or so. And so when I found out this location opened I was so excited. And this is actually my first time actually getting a sausage here. And when I came in, it smells the same when I went to the one in Smyrna.”
Owner Clifford Murphy says his grandmother started the business in the 1980s and credits the early morning truckers and hunters for the business’ initial success.
Being on Route 13, it was all before Route 1, so everybody had to drive past it. So you see this little hole-in-the-wall place and a lot of people want to swing in there so I think that’s how it slowly started building. Once you see more and more cars at a place, people tend to get more and more curious.”
Murphy says the original Smyrna location is open from 4 a.m. to noon, drawing those Route 13 truck drivers and local hunters, but the Newark location is geared to the UD and Newark community, open 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.
He adds once they have more staff, they plan nighttime hours too, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Thursdays through Saturdays.
Murphy says he doesn’t know when they’ll expand again but wants to eventually open a beach location.
Murphy says the new location also takes credit and debit cards now – the original location is cash only – noting order sizes have increased with the new payment option.
