Sugo, the hit Italian in Altrincham and Ancoats, will open its new site in Sale on April 26, it’s been confirmed. The restaurant announced it would be ‘stress testing’ the new site with a discounted menu from Tuesday next week too, though reservations were snapped up in minutes.
Reservations are filling up, but you can now grab a table at the new venue, part of the revamping of the Stanley Square shopping centre. Sibling owners Mike and Alex De Martiis crowdsourced the last chunk of the funding for the restaurant with a campaign in December last year.
They opened their first restaurant in Altrincham, opposite the market hall, in 2015, before following it with their site off Cutting Room Square in Ancoats in 2019. However, establishing the Sale site was the first time they’d crowdfunded for a venue.
Bonuses for donations to make up the final £85,000 included dinners for up to six people, an unlimited any dish offer for a whole year for £1000, or the entire place to yourself and all the food you can eat for £5000. Donors will also be getting their names on a wall inside the new place too.
Mike De Martiis told the MEN last year that banks were ‘deeming hospitality to be much riskier than what it was pre-Covid’, and as a result they went down the crowdfund route instead.
“The classical routes at the moment for lending money, for the hospitality industry, are just way more challenging and even if you’re getting offered finance or credit, the terms are pretty unreasonable,” he went on.
“That’s the bottom line. When they do their due diligence, essentially because of the trading gap in 2020, it doesn’t quite stack up.
“So ultimately for us, getting access to funds on reasonable terms, it’s got to be reasonable, that’s the funding brick wall we’ve hit this time around.”
It joins new a host of new food and drink ventures in Stanley Square, including Portuguese tapas bar Petisco, the new Sale Foodhall, with its rotating street food operators, the Hops & Boogie bar, greengrocers Ashby’s and modern Indian eatery Roti.
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