In the Spring of 2020, in the midst of the some of the worst months of COVID-19 pandemic we began to see a very clear signs of our communities need for well-made, healthy meals. We reached out to World Central Kitchen to inquire about doing community feeding in Columbia. We were immediately green-lighted by José Andres’ incredible organization and we put our team to work. We very quickly realized the need was much greater than we thought and we would be unable to continue without additional space. Our landlord offered us the use of the space next door to smallSUGAR, which had been dormant for a number of months. With the additional work space we scaled up our feeding and kept our team busy and working through some of the hardest months of the pandemic. As the summer ended, funding became harder to get and we decided to pause the community meals program. After all was said and done we had made 12,000+ meals for those in Columbia in need of a meal.

As business began to return to normal we realized we would need the space next door to continue growing smallSUGAR and to take on catering and community meals in the future. The space that would become CITY GRIT became our multi-use prep kitchen, operating on a hub-and-spoke model designed by Chef Sarah and executed by the culinary teams. Prep for smallSUGAR and il Focolare was planned and executed in the large commercial kitchen space we now had and gave us the bandwidth needed to resume full operations for smallSUGAR. To this day, the culinary team at CITY GRIT executes and plans all prep for all 3 of our restaurants as well as any catering needs. This allows us to not only concentrate our very skilled cooks and managers in one location but also to expand our buying power with our distributors, lower food waste, and expand on training opportunities with so much of our team concentrated in one space.

With smallSUGAR and il Focolare Pizzeria hitting their stride in late 2021, we realized the very large space we were using could be used for much more than prep. A rebirth of CITY GRIT was the natural solution to this problem and something Chef Sarah had been thinking about for 5 years.

The idea was this: the front half of the space would operate as a market for food made by us, for products made by women and people of color, and as a wine store - featuring one of the best selections of grower champagne in the State. The back half would host a wine bar and restaurant, open 4 days-a-week, that would give our team a place learn more advanced cooking and service concepts and techniques. The result has yielded a unique and bustling concept - retail market and lunch counter by day and one of the Columbia’s premier dining concepts by night.

Armed with paint rollers and a tile cutter, Aaron and Sarah did all the work themselves. Tile was replaced along the front counters, walls painted, and light-fixtures swapped out. Sarah refinished furniture and organized the retail space. We decided once again to not look for any additional partners in the business and fund the project ourselves. After months of work, we opened the doors to the new CITY GRIT in November of 2021. We continued to operate in a limited capacity for approximately a year and in officially grand-opened in November of 2022.