When it comes to his destination restaurant Viron Rondo Osteria, Viron Rondos always goes big.
The Cheshire parking lot and building are enormous, a striking contemporary mid-Century style chandelier weighing 1,500 pounds hangs in one of his dining rooms, he employs about 170 to 190 people, depending on the season and customers say the food portions are huge too. Even the complimentary olives are gigantic, customers say.
So in true Rondos form — he says he does everything but sleep at the restaurant — the landscaped patio for outdoor dining is about to get super-sized too.
Viron Rondo Osteria (Winter Caplanson)
He is planning a 20,000-square-foot garden patio expansion and, added to the 6,000-square-feet already there, that will make the space 26,000-square-feet of landscaped lushness. There will be evergreen and colorful “traditional and not so traditional” annuals and perennials.
“It’s made with a lot of love and authenticity,” he said of the business, acclaimed for its Mediterranean cuisine. “It’s a labor of love. For me it’s not just another business.”
A spokeswoman for the restaurateur suggested it will be the largest in Cheshire or maybe even in the state. Neither could be verified.
The current patio is surrounded by plants and trees too. The addition will more than triple his outdoor eating space.
“There’s nothing like this around. It’s going to be a unique feeling. They will feel like they’re dining in a garden,” he said, noting, “It is a very expensive project.”
Expensive because it’s not like Rondos to bring in a local landscaper to throw in a few plants and evergreen trees.
He’s going big.
He has a design team led by a landscape architect in France with whom he has worked before. He’ll add a bar, a couple of service stations for staff, six bathrooms and a reflecting pool with a fountain, fieldstone walls, and he’ll employ a landscape team to keep it perfect.
It will all have an organic feel, he said.
Viron Rondo Osteria (Winter Caplanson)
The new section will be known as, “The Secret Garden” and Rondos said, “This concept from the beginning was to take it to the next level.” All the plants and trees will create a noise buffer to Route 10, he said.
Outdoor dining got popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and remained that way, he said.
“We are booked all the time. We just keep growing,” Rondos said, of his critically acclaimed restaurant.
The restaurant that serves Italian fare with Greek influence is so good one online reviewer once said they would return to Connecticut from Canada just to dine there again.
He said they hope to start construction on the new space mid-August and be finished by the end of this year.
The zone has already been changed from light industrial to hospitality for the project.
Rondos, who is Greek, said that, where he grew up in Albania, the outdoor season was about nine months of the year and he brought the outdoor dining gardens here because of that.
Viron Rondo Osteria (Winter Caplanson)
“With outdoors there’s always areas to be discovered,” he said. He grew up in Himara, a coastal town on the Albanian Riviera.
“This is on a different scale you see in the Mediterranean,” Rondos said. “I have never seen anything like it here.”
In 2022, Rondos was named Connecticut’s “Small Business Person of the Year” by the federal Small Business Administration.
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