After a year of prep, City Grit culinary market ready for full debut in Columbia’s Vista

When you step off bustling Gervais Street in Columbia’s Vista district and through the doors of City Grit, you begin a tour through the culinary world, in a number of different forms.

And after nearly a year of preparation, planning and tweaking during a soft opening period, the business is set to offer customers a wide array of options and offerings.

Located at 707 Gervais in the spot that once housed Newk’s restaurant, the City Grit storefront will mark its grand opening Friday. Chefs Sarah Simmons and Aaron Hoskins are behind the operation. They are familiar names on the Columbia restaurant scene, as they also run smallSUGAR cafe at 709 Gervais St. and il Focolare Pizzeria on Sumter Street in Cottontown.

City Grit has a retail shop offering a wide array of specialty sauces, crackers, a large selection of wines, plates and bowls crafted in Tunisia, cookbooks offering recipes from cultures across the world and much more. The location also includes the Wine Bar at City Grit, which offers upscale, casual dinners Wednesday through Saturday evenings. The food menu for Wine Bar is stocked with offerings imagined by Hoskins. For example, one of the items on the menu is gnudi, which includes ricotta dumplings, braised brisket, tomato, crispy parm and basil.

The store also offers restaurant-quality meals that customers can take home and prepare and, beginning Friday, it will debut a lunch deli counter where you’ll be able to pick up soups, sandwiches, chicken salad, tuna salad, egg salad, artisan cheeses and much more.

“This is a specialty store for culinary enthusiasts,” Simmons told The State. “That’s a very broad description, because it serves a lot of purposes.”

Simmons first founded the City Grit brand 12 years ago, and established a dining space for guest chefs in New York City. While that NYC spot later closed, the ethos of City Grit lived on. Simmons’ various restaurant and culinary efforts in Columbia — including, among other things, a workforce development program for non-college bound youth from impoverished area neighborhoods — operate as part of the City Grit Hospitality Group.

Simmons said she is excited about the evolution of the multi-faceted market space on Gervais Street.

“This space, right now, is the culmination of a vision that I had a decade ago,” she said, “which is a place for people to go grab ready-to-eat, restaurant quality food; to discover new products, specifically products made by women and minorities; to explore new cookbooks that aren’t typically ones you see on every shelf in a bookstore, really and truly trying to bring some of the overlooked and often marginalized food writers to the forefront.

“And it’s a beer and wine store for super boutique wines and, to be honest, beers that we love, mostly made by our friends.”

Special programs and events also will be a key piece of the action at City Grit. For instance, there will be a quarterly Cookbook Club, one of which will be marked on Nov. 19 with a potluck dinner that will highlight the new cookbook “I Am From Here,” by James Beard Foundation award-winning chef Vishwesh Bhatt. Customers can get a copy of the book and a ticket to the potluck for $45. More info about that event is available in-store.

With many of the unique products offered throughout the store, there are QR codes along the accompanying shelves, which customers can scan to learn more about the makers of those goods. And City Grit is piloting an artisan incubator program, one that currently includes a flavorful local business.

Jess Henry and Reshma Mahadkar, best friends and neighbors in nearby Forest Acres, are the creators of Sakhar Jams. The duo makes spirited artisanal jams, with the Sakhar website noting they use “delicate florals, teas, and high end liquor to produce novel flavors like Mixed Berries with Gin, Peach Masala Chai, and Strawberry Chamomile.”

As part of the incubator program, Henry and Mahadkar have been using the kitchen at City Grit to make their jams, and Simmons has been helping them with ideas to scale their business. The jam makers recently got their wholesale license and, beginning Friday, Sakhar jams and jellies will be sold at City Grit’s spot on Gervais.

“When we first started out, we were (making the jams) at home during the pandemic,” Henry said. “We knew we wanted to grow our business. And it was like, ‘How are we going to find kitchen space?’ We knew we needed to be in a commercial kitchen if we were going to grow and do what we wanted to do with our business, and that is a daunting thing. ... So, when Resh put out a call that we were looking for a kitchen, we literally cried when Sarah answered that call.”

Mahadkar said the jam business “couldn’t have asked for a better collaboration” than the one with City Grit.

Simmons said there has been much work involved with getting the City Grit storefront to this point, but she’s energized by the possibilities of the market.

“I love the building, and I love the neighborhood,” Simmons said. “And I just love the whole idea of having something really special in Columbia, something that I think fills a gap.”