Original Article posted by: Abridge.org

The iconic Esquire Grill space on K Street has been empty for five years. Sacramento restaurateur Randy Paragary ran it for 20 years before it closed in 2019.

On April 20, Aiona opens there, and it arrives with a $4 million renovation, a 3,000-bottle wine cellar and a wood- and charcoal-fired grill at the center of everything.

Behind it is Deneb Williams, the chef and restaurateur who has been cooking in Sacramento since 2007, first at the Firehouse and then at Allora, the Michelin-recognized Italian restaurant he opened in East Sacramento in 2018. He is opening Aiona with his wife and partner Elizabeth-Rose Mandalou, an advanced sommelier and co-owner who helped design both the wine program and the room itself.

Asked what Aiona means, Williams pointed to Greek mythology.

“Aion is the Greek god of cyclical time and rebirth, often linked with the harvest or the renewal of spring,” he said.

Mandalou is Greek, and so is Angelo Tsakopoulos, the owner of the building. The name, the space, the timing — it all came together.

Fire as a philosophy

The heart of the restaurant is a central charcoal- and wood-fired  grill, and Williams is deliberate about why. At home on summer weekends, he’s grilling. On Thanksgiving, he’s cooking the turkey on the barbecue. Executive Chef Lee Hinton, who has worked alongside Williams at Allora for eight years, shares the instinct. He hikes into the mountains, builds fires at 10,000 feet and cooks for friends in the snow. When the two started talking about what their next restaurant would be, Williams said, they were both drawn to fire.

They traveled to Spain together to visit the Mibrasa factory (Aiona has one of the 50 grills the company makes each year), spent three days wandering the fish markets of Barcelona and cooked with the chefs there. The experience was research as much as inspiration.

“The food of the Mediterranean is very much iconically linked to cooking on charcoal and wood,” Hinton said. “That communal sense of, ‘we’re going to all share, break bread, become friends and drink wine in this very communal experience.’ You’re not separated from the people next to you.”

A family menu — ‘not fussy tweezer food’

Hinton describes the restaurant experience as a chance to recreate the feeling of a holiday table, where you order everything and share it with people you haven’t seen in months.

“Let’s order three bistecas, two roasted chickens and three branzinos,” Williams added. “And then all of our side dishes.”

The menu reflects that. Williams calls the main dishes “plates from the fire” — protein-centered preparations designed to be shared and paired with eight rotating sides. Right now the sides include gigante beans, roasted beets with farmer’s cheese, balsamic-glazed carrots with dukkah, papas bravas and asparagus grown in the Sacramento Delta.

If you want a more intimate approach with dinner coursed out, or a plate of pasta and a glass of wine solo at the bar, Aiona accommodates that, too.

“This is not fussy tweezer food,” Williams said. “We have that restaurant. This is not that.”

The anchor dish is the wood-roasted branzino. Hinton calls it the most direct expression of what the restaurant is trying to do. The fish comes with a pil pil sauce, a Basque preparation Hinton and Williams first encountered in Spain. Fish bones and skin are infused into olive oil with toasted chili and garlic, then emulsified into a sauce with the texture of hollandaise.

“Grilled fish over charcoal is about the best possible expression of that kind of thing you can have,” Hinton said. “It’s just iconically Mediterranean.”

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