After 38 years on Main Street, Newark’s signature pizza shop is closing its doors on Sunday.
Famous for its late hours and great pizza, Margherita’s Pizza is moving to a new location in the Park-N-Shop shopping center on South Main Street.
Margherita’s has stayed consistent while the Main Street pizza scene has gone through several changes in recent years. The old Peace of Pizza changed its brand and concept to SNAP Pizza, MOD Pizza took the location of the COSI restaurant, Papa Johns moved into the shuttered Cereal Bowl at N. Chapel Street, Seasons Pizza remodeled its location, Big Z replaced Pizza University in the Newark Shopping Center, and Calios Calzones grabbed a corner location when Grass Roots downsized the footprint of their corner location at Academy Street.
With so many pizza shops along Main Street, the move to South Main Street is likely to open up a larger market for the family-owned pizzeria.
Those of you that say you avoid Main Street due to the raising of parking rates by the city, the hiring of meter readers to hand out parking tickets, the limited parking or the traffic are now in luck.
With one of Main Street’s icons moving to a location with more parking, those enormous New York Style Pizza slices will now be easier to get your hands on. That’s great news for pizza lovers across Newark.
The location is not the only change Margherita’s is making. The new location, expected open next Spring, will also have shorter hours. The 3:00 am closing regulars are used to will change to 10:00 pm.
This is not the first business to relocate to the Park-N-Shop shopping center in recent years. In a similar move, the always popular D.P. Doughs Calzones closed its location on Main Street in July or 2014. In August 2017, a new D.P. Doughs franchise owner, a former employee of the Main Street location, opened his location in the same shopping center that Margherita’s is headed to. Jerry’s Artarama, which does not sell pizza, relocated from Wilmington, opening its doors in November.