smallSUGAR: An all-day café serving livable wages and workforce development.

By Stephanie Hunt / Photography By Shell Royster | March 29, 2019

Fresh baked breads, ending poverty and increasing food access in the Midlands.

Seventeen steps—that’s all it takes for Sarah Simmons to go from her home to her restaurant in The Vista, smallSUGAR, the most recent addition to Simmons’ and her husband/business partner Aaron Hoskins’ Columbia culinary portfolio. But she’s well aware that the distance, literally and figuratively, is much greater for her team—the line cooks, bakers, wait staff and dishwashers who make a restaurant function.

“I don’t have kids, but I know the school calendar off the top of my head,” says Simmons. “We employ a lot of single moms, and I don’t want someone to have to find childcare to be able to work.”

Those same moms and dads need advance notice of days off so they can make doctors and dentist appointments for their kids, which is why Simmons makes work schedules four weeks out. That’s just one of the factors Simmons keeps top of mind as she pencils in shifts and creates spreadsheets that make the workings and vision for smallSUGAR anything but small.

From creating feasible schedules and offering livable wages to teaching employees the white-linen nuances of fine dining when they’ve never eaten in a fancy restaurant, the menu that Simmons offers runs a lot deeper than the delicious tartines and hyper-seasonal bowls that smallSUGAR serves up.

And the deep, messy trenches of running a “business that’s sustainable not just for our bottom line but for our employees,” as Simmons aims to do, is far from the glossy pages of, say, Food & Wine magazine. There, in 2012, shortly after opening her much-heralded CITY GRIT culinary salon in New York, Simmons was celebrated as one of “America’s Best New Cooks,” and in those same pages in 2014 was touted as one of New York City’s top 50 chefs. Then there were the New Yorker blurbs, the New York Times ink and plenty of other media coverage.

Indeed Simmons, a former business consultant and at heart a home cook, has traveled much further than 17 steps from her dazzling first forays into New York City’s food-and-beverage world back to her roots in the Carolinas. When she opened CITY GRIT in 2011, Simmons shook up the traditional restaurant concept by offering a test-kitchen of sorts—a pop-up rotation of guest chefs who dished up a culinary adventure for diners, and in return got a New York audience and platform to show their stuff. Simmons, flashing her signature Southern smile outlined in lipstick the color of a bright red-checked tablecloth, simply set an inviting stage, and magic ensued. Fast Company dubbed her one of the “100 most creative people in business,” and Zagat hailed CITY GRIT as “one of the most innovative restaurants in the country.”

Next up was Birds & Bubbles, where Simmons concocted a wildly popular combo of high-end champagnes and fancy fried chicken that quickly became a Michelin-rated Manhattan favorite. But luck is a fickle thing—unforeseen structural issues related to water damage resulted in shuttering Birds & Bubbles in 2017. That same year she decided to relocate her umbrella company, CITY GRIT Hospitality Group, back to her native Columbia, where Simmons and Hoskins had already opened Rise Gourmet Goods and Bakeshop in 2016.

Though Columbia wasn’t as big and glamorous as New York, being back in the South only seemed to strengthen the grit of CITY GRIT that remains the key ingredient behind Sarah Simmons’ vision and success.

Consider the grit-fueled mission for her company: “Our corporate purpose is to end poverty and increase food access in the Midlands.” And the company’s hash tag—#feedthecity. Sure she still whips up killer fried chicken, but the recipe she’s really trying to hone is one that also provides job training for non-college-bound youth; that improves community access to fresh food; and ensures kids don’t go hungry when school’s out. And having fun, maybe with a little bubbly every now and then, is still nice, too.

“When I moved back to the South, I started noticing things I didn’t really notice before,” she says. “Like, the racial divide is real. Things I didn’t realize were a thing are definitely a thing.”

The fact that she and Hoskins moved back to Columbia during a time of business and personal transition—“we essentially lost both restaurants in three weeks”—gave them time to reevaluate.

Sarah Simmons enjoys fresh latte and baked goods.

Servers work toward living wages at smallSUGAR.

“With Birds & Bubbles, my intention was to dedicate my free time to having some impact on No Kid Hungry (a child poverty/hunger nonprofit she champions), but running a restaurant seven days a week in New York City didn’t give me any free time, and it always bothered me that we didn’t set the restaurant with that as a priority,” she says.

This time is different. All the pieces and parts that make up City Grit Hospitality Group, including Rise Bakeshop, smallSUGAR and the Café at Richland Library, as well as a private catering company, add up to one larger picture—the health and well-being of the greater Columbia community.

“We’re in the service business, and at one point I finally said, ‘look, these are all these things I wanted to provide for my employees. But we kept hearing, ‘the margins aren’t there,’ or ‘nobody does it like this,’” Simmons says. “At end of day, I’d rather take a longer-term view. I’d rather expend the extra care and training cost to hire people for their personality and potential rather than their experience,” she adds.

The CGHG labor costs are higher because they guarantee a wage rather than rely on gratuities, “with a map to get to a living wage of $17 an hour as quickly as possible,” she says. “Because that’s the type of business model that feels right to us. And if our business can’t do that, then we didn’t really want a business.”

In the same way that she fearlessly paired fried chicken and sparkling wine, Simmons embraces the role of food-focused social renegade, a role heightened, she believes, by being a female CEO in a male-dominated industry.

“Women are nurturers,” she says. “And for years in New York I constantly struggled with being seen as weak when you’re a nurturer. You want to be caring, but you don’t want to get run over.”

Today, however, she’s the one running over preconceived notions and misguided “that’s the way it is” mentalities.

“I’m utilizing my nurturing nature to build a better business,” says Simmons. She’s bounced back from challenges with more determination than ever to make the way easier for those who face systemic hard knocks due to their ZIP code or lack of educational opportunity.

“You can’t have a business without profitability, but if that’s all you’re thinking about, to me it’s just a waste of time. In a blink of an eye, thanks to nothing but bad luck, it can all be gone,” she says. “This is about much more than great lattes and great breakfast. It’s about changing peoples’ lives.”