Augusta Eats: Feeling salty? Two new cafés in Augusta and Aiken can help your craving

Local pastry lovers already know the sweet side of award-winning chef Kelsey Lucius.

Now she’s getting salty.

Lucius, a 2020 champion on the televised dessert competition Chopped Sweets, opened Bottom Line Bakery & Café in Evans in 2022 to bring upscale pastry to the Augusta area. Now, in just the past three months, she has opened two more eateries, the Salty Tomatoes Café, in Augusta and in Aiken, S.C.

Lucius moved with her family to Columbia County in 2006 from Long Island, N.Y., after her father retired from a 30-year career as a New York City firefighter.

As a middle-schooler, she began fundraising bake sales to buy toys and supplies for child patients at Augusta’s Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta. Another fundraiser helped purchase a medical bed for a young girl with muscular dystrophy.

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By the time Lucius graduated from Evans High School in 2012, she was preparing earnestly for a culinary career, enrolling at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. What started as an associate’s degree in baking and pastry arts ended with a dual major, a second associate’s degree in culinary arts and a bachelor’s degree in food service management.

She also traveled to the south of France to attend the École Nationale Supérieure de Pâtisserie, run by three-star Michelin chef Alain Ducasse and often considered the Harvard of pastry schools.

At just 23, Lucius began her three-year stint as executive pastry chef at the short-lived Washington, D.C., restaurant DBGB, begun by chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud. Her signature desserts – rhubarb  vacherin with strawberry elderflower consommé; goat cheese mousse with fig and hazelnut cake; praline Paris-Brest with candied hazelnut spike – helped fuel her nomination for a prestigious rising-star culinary award from the James Beard Foundation in 2018.

Lucius’ win on the “Million Dollar Desserts” episode of the Food Network’s Chopped Sweets pumped even more fuel to propel her toward her dream of opening her own bakery in 2021 at 4234 Washington Rd. in Evans.

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The Bottom Line menu includes unconventional approaches to favorite dishes. Bottom Line’s French toast, described as “decadence in a forkful,” is served in ramekins as a custard bake – croissant, brioche, and sourdough breads soaked overnight in a vanilla bean custard, baked to order, then finished with butter and homemade bourbon pecan caramel.

Custom cakes require at least a day’s notice, depending on the cake. Listed prices start at $28 for simpler, more familiar flavors and designs and rise to $1,600 for bespoke, fussed-over creations. If you can’t decide which of at least 17 cake flavors you’d like to order, Bottom Line provides a “cake box” featuring nine of the bakery’s favorite flavors.

Both Salty Tomatoes locations show Lucius’ savory side. The café at 1493 Wrightsboro Rd. is in the ground floor of the Beacon Station Apartments in Augusta’s medical district. The Aiken café, at 148 Laurens St. SW, held its January soft opening in the former location of restaurants including Café Rio, Una Mas Taqueria and most recently The Whitney.

Salty Tomatoes breeds familiarity with its selection of comfort foods that it perfected first as an Augusta-area food truck. Combining several comforts into one is the Grown Grilled Cheese, with bacon jam, ham, cheddar and Gruyere cheeses and a chef’s secret sauce.

Speaking to The Augusta Chronicle in 2020, Lucius looked back on growing up in Columbia County and the need to help others that shaped her professional life.

"I just found that I could make a difference through baked goods and baking and cooking in general, and I realized that if I could make any sort of difference through food, that's what I would go into," she said.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Augusta Eats: Pastry chef cooks up two new cafes by just adding salt