NILES — The Smith family bought Niles’ 219 Front St. property because they loved its second-floor balcony, brick walls and woodwork.

Three-and-a-half years later, the foursome opened the building’s doors again as The Rage, an American fusion restaurant.

The opening came amid lengthy community anticipation for the restaurant. The Rage’s large, all-caps sign hung over Front Street for months. For weeks, occasional work on the building’s exterior and patio could be witnessed.

From 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, it will serve what Chance Smith called simple American food with unique twists from its single-page menu (its kitchen will stop serving an hour before closing).

“We were so picky about the menu,” he said. “You would not believe how many samples we tried. We got sick some days.”

The 23-year-old Brandywine High School graduate set up and helps run The Rage with his sister, Sage, and his parents. Sage and Chance have been the public figures behind The Rage’s construction and, now, its opening.

“I think we’ve grown so much, and we created this atmosphere and this menu that we never thought in a million years that we could,” Chance said.

The Rage’s menu offers five different main courses — salads, pizza, tacos, burgers and macaroni and cheese — and six different appetizers.

Many items start in their simplest form, usually without meat. Then, different items can be added, from broccoli in the mac to grass-fed angus on a burger.

The most expensive baseline entrée is $10. Meat adds between $1 and $4.

Smith said he and the other staff are happy with how the menu and restaurant turned out.

“People, I think, will understand that the wait will be worth [it] when people come in and see everything we’ve done,” he said.

The more than 3-year wait for the restaurant to open largely came from one challenge, said Smith: the unknowns of buying a building.

“It was beautiful cosmetically, but then once we got down to the nitty-gritty stuff, we thought, ‘Oh, this might take a little longer than expected,”’ Smith said.

He and his family wanted to keep the bones of the building intact because it was what made them and others fall in love with the property when it was known as the Riverfront Café.

Nearly everything else, he said, had to be changed.

So, they gutted the kitchen, painted, put in new carpet, fixed the ceiling, cleaned and re-stained the wood.

“The natural woodwork and the brick are what really makes this building shine,” he said. “We wanted to modernize it without taking that away.”

The carpeting and pressed metal of the former Riverfront Café has been replaced with black and gray colors and black seating to match. Wall décor has been removed to show off the building’s brick walls in their entirety.

The second floor, which can be seen on ground level thanks to a second-floor balcony, is still unlit. Smith said work is still being done to open The Rage Café on that floor. It will serve coffee, frozen yogurt and goods from an in-house bakery.

The Rage’s patio is being worked on, too, but Smith said it should be available for outdoor seating in the near future.

While the bar on the main floor needs no further repairs, the Smiths are still working toward serving alcohol.

“We can’t let that bar go to waste,” Smith said. “It’s a gorgeous bar.”

For now, customers can order teas and sodas from Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Brix Soda.

When Smith looks around at all the work put into both menu and building, he said he sees all the small, incremental steps he and his family took to make The Rage what it is now.

“We’ve seen this grow into something that we never thought it would be,” he said.