Dining will be an adventure at Fuse, a new restaurant in downtown Aiken.
Co-owner and chef Chris Najmola enjoys being creative in the kitchen and he is encouraging his staff to have the same sort of attitude.
“We’re always going to be looking for the next wow moment,” said Najmola during a soft opening Nov. 6. “If somebody gets inspired, we will start studying a dish or a cuisine. Whenever we think it’s good enough to make it to the menu, we’ll all taste it and sign off on it. Then it will become part of what we do.”
Karen Draper and her brother, Eric, founded Fuse in 2015 in Augusta. The eatery closed in October 2019 when the lease at its site on Broad Street ended.
Not long afterward, Najmola and Ian Dingess, who were Fuse employees, “basically acquired the rights” to the restaurant’s name and its recipes, Dingess told the Aiken Standard late last year.
Before choosing Aiken as Fuse’s new home, Dingess and Najmola looked at other locations in Augusta along with places in Evans, Georgia, and North Augusta.
“It means a lot to us that we were able to come here to this beautiful location in this beautiful community,” Najmola said. “It is just an honor to be able to do our thing here. From the moment we stepped in Aiken, everybody was extremely welcoming.”
The plan was to have Fuse up and running by the end of February at the earliest or sometime in the spring at the latest.
The former home of restaurants such as Up Your Alley and Trio Bar & Kitchen in Aiken is …
But then the novel coronavirus pandemic started disrupting business in South Carolina, and the schedule for the launch of the Aiken version of Fuse changed.
The delay “gave us the opportunity to add extra touches,” Najmola said, while renovating the new home for the restaurant, a 3,960-square-foot brick building at 222 The Alley S.W.
“Myself, Ian and our general manager, Sean Dyer, did a lot of the work ourselves,” Najmola added. “We kept the stained glass, but we took down a wall and we took out the booths.”
Fuse’s menu includes favorites from Fuse in Augusta, including the mushroom medley and the lamb burger.
“We’re taking what happened in Augusta and we’re elevating it,” Najmola said. “We’re trying to be a nice modern take on the farm-to-table cliché. What we do is we take local ingredients and we make dishes that are from other countries."
Najmola described the umami pork shoulder, for example, as a marriage of the cuisine of the South and Korean-style cooking.
Chicken paprikash is a Hungarian spiced chicken breast, and chocolate chili chicken offers a taste of Latin America.
Visitors to The Alley in downtown Aiken recently might have noticed an increase in activity …
The mission at Fuse is to showcase farm products from the Aiken area “as much as possible” in the restaurant’s food, Najmola said.
“Our menu will change seasonally,” he continued, “and it will change as inspiration strikes us.”
Fuse's official Aiken opening is scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 11.
The eatery's operating hours will be 4-10 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Brunch will be served from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
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