It is out with fried chicken and in with empanadas at the corner of Routes 35 and 36 in Eatontown.
Fuze Eatery Empanada House & Smoothie Bar is taking over the shuttered Cluck-U Chicken across from Monmouth Square, a new town center being constructed at the site of the former Monmouth Mall.
Brothers and co-owners Bryan and Stalin Larco, who run the business with their mother Monica, father Stalin and sister Angie, hope to open their restaurant in about three weeks, Bryan said.
“This is a long time coming,” Bryan said. “We’re really excited about this location.”
A family recipe for Ecuadorian empanadas was the inspiration behind Fuze Eatery Empanada House & Smoothie Bar, opening in December in Eatontown.
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While new to this particular spot, the family-run business is not new to Long Branch. Fuze first opened in 2016 in the former Strollo’s Lighthouse location at Seaview and Ocean avenues.
They moved to Monmouth Mall’s food court two years later, where they remained until construction began earlier this year.
The business also operated for a year at Menlo Park Mall in Edison.
‘You need to sell this’
Bryan was 3 years old when his family moved from Ecuador to New Jersey in the early 1990s. He attended Long Branch High School and was a student at Monmouth University when Superstorm Sandy came ashore in 2012.
Monica and Stalin invited college friends of Bryan’s who lived far away to dinner, and she made traditional Ecuadorian cheese empanadas.
“Accompanied with that, there’s a hot sauce that every family makes … so they tried both the empanadas and the hot sauce and they were blown away,” Bryan said of his friends. “They said ‘You need to sell this.’
“That idea stuck with us,” he said.
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Something for everyone
The menu at Fuze features a dozen flaky-crusted savory empanadas and half a dozen sweet empanadas, all of which are filled and fried to order.
Savory options include arroz con pollo, plantain and cheese, pulled pork, pizza, and Buffalo chicken; sweet varieties include guava and cream cheese, dulce de leche, and peanut butter with banana, among other flavors ($4.50 and $5 each).
The Mom’s Cheese empanada, filled with housemade cheese, “is very quintessential Ecuadorian, mostly from the capital, Quito, where we’re from,” Bryan said.
The variety, he said “allows everyone the comfort to take a risk and do a traditional empanada they might not be able to pronounce — like arroz con pollo (filled with chicken, rice and peas) — or they can go with something they’re comfortable with, like the Buffalo chicken.”
A family recipe for Ecuadorian empanadas was the inspiration behind Fuze Eatery Empanada House & Smoothie Bar, opening in December in Eatontown.
There are gluten-free options, too, made with a corn-based dough.
“The thing that we pride ourselves on is we want people to know about these hidden gems of foods that we grew up with, but that most people wouldn’t know,” Bryan said.
This includes a family recipe for aji, a tomato-based hot sauce that’s served with Fuze’s empanadas.
“We try to make it … so it’s not insanely spicy,” Bryan said. “It adds so much flavor to the empanadas.”
Fuze also will offer a mayo-based green sauce and pink sauce, a traditional sauce made of mayonnaise and ketchup.
A dulce de leche stuffed empanada with a mixed berry coconut milk smoothie.
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The other half of Fuze’s menu is fruit smoothies, which are customizable and can be enhanced with ingredients like spinach, matcha, peanut butter and Nutella.
“Empanadas are a grab-and-go kind of food, and in Latin America, and in Ecuador especially, you always pair it with a fruit smoothie, whether its water- or fruit-based,” Bryan said. “We offer a lot of traditional fruits … passionfruit (maracuya) or naranjilla, which is like a cross between an orange and a lime. And we offer soursop. In Spanish it’s called guanábana.”
Mora, or blackberry, is another popular smoothie choice in Ecuador and South America, he said.
“We’ve always been really excited to share our culture with everyone, and we’ve tried to make it in the most approachable way as possible,” Bryan said.
Go: 15 Route 36, Eatontown; fuzeeatery.com.
Sarah Griesemer joined the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey in 2003 and has been writing all things food since 2014. Send restaurant tips to sgriesemer@gannettnj.com, follow on Instagram at Jersey Shore Eats and subscribe to her weekly newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Fuze Eatery, an empanada and smoothie shop, opening in Eatontown
