The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
BIGGER & BETTER
Viron Rondo Osteria to see major expansion
CHESHIRE » Since it opened in 2014, Viron Rondo Osteria has been a hub of activity, sometimes at all hours of the day, first with customers and then later, after closing time, with the restaurant’s staff preparing for the next day.
“We have people staying very late, sometimes all night, especially in the summer, to make sure everything is made fresh,” said Viron Rondo, owner of the Highland Avenue restaurant that bears his name.
The National Restaurant Association has identified ultra-locally sourced food as one of the hot trends for restaurants this year and Viron Rondo Osteria is no exception. The restaurant gets ingredients from a number of local farms, including tomatoes, zucchini and eggplant from March Farms in Bethlehem, Rondo said.
Long hours and attention to deal are necessary to keep diners coming back to a restaurant for more, he said. But Rondo also has a strong sense of personal pride driving him to make his business better.
“I hate mediocrity,” he said “Absolutely hate it.”
If you think that’s lip service, consider this: the Litchfield resident is adding 4,100 square feet to the restaurant, a project Rondo says will cost “in the six-figure range.”
“It is not something I like to talk about,” he said of the dollar value of the restaurant expansion. “I want to impress hard work, not how much money I spend.”
Rondo said he expects construction of the addition will take three to four months.
“We’re going to remain open during the construction,” Rondo said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do before we can start construction, so it’s more likely we will begin work in the spring.”
Rondo said the expansion will create more space for the restaurant’s kitchen, add two new restrooms and double the size of the restaurant’s bar. It will also relocate the bar from the center of the restaurant to the U-shaped addition that will sit adjacent to the outdoor patio and the north parking lot.
Rondo also is adding a second entrance to restaurant from Highland Avenue, bringing customers in from the north parking lot.
The patio will remain open-air once expansion is complete and become almost like a courtyard, Rondo said. Servers will be able to move from the restaurant’s main dining room to the bar without having step outside.
“The town and surrounding communities have been very welcoming to us,” Rondo said. “We want to create something that’s very beautiful, very sophisticated.”
Relocating the bar has practical purposes, as well. While patrons of Viron Rondo Osteria rave about the food and drinks, many complain about the noise level at the restaurant, which makes it difficult for diners to carry on a conversation.
“It’s something that we’ve tried to come up with a solution for since we opened,” Rondo said. “We’ve tried different types of drapes, different types of cloth. But it is not a problem that can be rectified easily.”
Moving the bar to the other side of the building, into what will be a specially sound-proofed space separated from main dining room by a courtyard, should improve the acoustics, he said.
It will also add to the restaurant’s seating capacity. Viron Rondo Osteria currently has space for 150 people inside and another 60 outside. The addition will expand the restaurant’s seating capacity by between 20 and 30 people, Rondo said.
Another reason for the expansion is to give the restaurant’s staff more room to work. The expansion calls for doubling the size of the restaurant’s kitchen.
“The kitchen was not the size we wanted when we moved in,” Rondo said. “We have people using our ov-
ens, baking bread for the next day, until two or three in the morning.”
The need for more kitchen space was best illustrated last November, when high temperatures from one of the restaurant’s custommade Italian ovens set off fire sprinklers, which caused minor water damage, according to Cheshire Fire Department officials.
“We were very fortunate it wasn’t worse,” Rondo said.
Rondo came to America from Greece in 1999, having started working in the restaurant business as a 16-yearold. He spent 10 years working in a number of New York City restaurants. He later moved his family to Litchfield County and became a partner in a restaurant in the town of Litchfield that also had a sister location in Avon. When the partnership unraveled, Rondo headed out on his own and opened his own place in Cheshire.
“We have been very blessed,” he said. “We have partons come from all over: Litchfield County, the Farmington River Valley, all over. And our local customers have been so wonderful.”
One of the restaurant’s customers’ favorite dishes at Viron Rondo Osteria, My Mother’s Chips, pays homage to Rondo’s mother’s Greek cooking.
“My mother found a way to slice vegetables thinner than anyone else,” Rondo said. In making My Mother’s Chips, Rondo fries ultrathin slices of crispy eggplant and zucchini, serving the appetizer with a cucumber yogurt dip.
Rondo and his wife have three children. He calls the restaurant “my fourth child, my baby.”
“I treat it with the same love and care that I do with my children,” he said.
Visit Viron Rondo Osteria at 1721 Highland Ave. or online at vironrondoosteria.com.