The former home of restaurants such as Up Your Alley and Trio Bar & Kitchen in Aiken is the location of another eatery that is getting ready to open.
According to signs on the 3,960-square-foot brick building in The Alley, Fuse is “coming soon.”
A Sept. 21 post on the Fuse Aiken page on Facebook stated that the restaurant was accepting applications for all positions, both front and back of house.
At fuseaiken.com, there is a menu that includes Umami pork shoulder, chocolate chili chicken, chicken paprikash and a veggie burger.
Karen Draper and her brother, Eric, established Fuse in 2015 in Augusta.
The eatery closed in October 2019 when the lease at its original site on Broad Street ended.
Two months later, Ian Dingess told the Aiken Standard that he and Chris Najmola, who were Fuse employees, had “basically acquired the rights” to the restaurant’s name and recipes.
In their search for a new home for Fuse, Dingess and Najmola looked at other places in Augusta, as well as locations in Evans, Georgia, and North Augusta.
“We went to Aiken on kind of a lark,” Dingess said, and ended up finding an available space they liked.
At the time the Aiken Standard interviewed Dingess, he wanted to complete renovations and start welcoming customers to Fuse’s new site in late February or early March of this year, but said “sometime in the spring” would be “a better guess.”
In mid-March, however, the novel coronavirus pandemic started disrupting South Carolina’s economy. Businesses closed temporarily or for good, and plans for new ventures were put on hold.
The address for Fuse is 222 The Alley.
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