The Abridged version:
- Deneb Williams and Elizabeth-Rose Mandalou, the team behind Michelin-recognized Allora, will open Aiona at 1213 K St. on April 20 in the former Esquire Grill space.
- The restaurant is built around a central wood- and charcoal-fired grill, with a menu that draws from Mediterranean traditions without fusing them.
- The 3,000-bottle wine cellar is overseen by Elizabeth-Rose Mandalou, one of only a few advanced sommeliers in Sacramento.
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.
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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.”
Cooking from scratch
The slow-food philosophy Williams describes is more a marketing term than a production method — it’s how good chefs have always cooked. Their rotisserie chicken is organic Mary’s chicken, wet-brined for 24 hours, rubbed with toum, a Lebanese garlic marinade, hung on racks for a day and a half, and then roasted. The 72-hour short rib is sous vide at 130 degrees for three days. Every stock, every sauce and every pastry is made from scratch.
“Slow food is really just about cooking with the season,” Williams said. “Slowing down.”
The Mediterranean menu does not fuse cuisines so much as let them coexist. The restaurant’s “kalamari” is Greek, served with skordalia (Greek garlicky sauce) and fried lemon. The mussels are Spanish, with chorizo, piquillo and focaccia. The pasta is Italian. Hinton handles much of the North African and Lebanese influence — chermoula (herb-and-spice marinade) on the short rib, lamb arayes (grilled sandwiches) on pita, harissa throughout.
“I don’t do fusion,” Williams said. “I do dishes that are representative of that culture.”
The room and the wine
The restaurant itself is a statement. Williams worked with interior designer Emily McCuiston and Mandalou over several months, the three of them spreading fabric swatches, dish samples and material references across every surface of the Williams home.
They went for texture and warmth — coral banquettes, wood paneling and a large-scale mural by Los Angeles artist Mike Willcox, known for his art deco work rooted in ancient Greek imagery. The ceilings are high, a wraparound bar runs through the space, the open kitchen puts the fire front and center and a full view of the wine cellar is visible from the dining room. A private dining room sits off to the side for larger groups, and a heated covered patio is built for year-round use.
The wine program is Mandalou’s. She is one of a small number of advanced sommeliers in Sacramento and, according to Williams, the only one actively working the floor at her own restaurant. The menu runs from a $45 bottle to a $6,500 one, organized by grape variety with regions listed alongside so guests can navigate it without assistance.
“I want people to be able to look at the wine list and if they don’t want to talk to me, can still select the wine,” Mandalou said.
Her current pairing of note is a Cuvée Monsignori Assyrtiko from Santorini, made from ungrafted vines over 200 years old.
“It’s briny and salty and like lemon peel,” she said. “Super expressive and dry with really bracing acidity.”
When asked what she would pair it with, she pointed to the branzino.
K Street and what comes next
On the question of K Street and its long struggle to find its footing, Williams points out that Aiona is technically at the corner of 13th and K, bookended by the Sheraton Grand and the Hyatt Regency, across from the convention center and the performing arts center, next door to the Esquire IMAX Theatre. The restaurant already has a booking for an 80-person corporate happy hour on the patio, where Brett Walker, a bartender who has been with the team for six years, will be running the cocktail program. Valet parking will be available for guests who find downtown parking a deterrent.
“For me, this location is about captive audience,” he said.
Williams sees the stretch immediately around Aiona as already strong. Ella, Mayahuel and Brasserie du Monde are neighbors. Brasserie draws him in twice a week. Ella, he said, is the business model he hopes to emulate — not in style but in longevity and consistency. What he wants for the broader corridor is patience. The railyards will eventually fill in what’s between DOCO and K Street.
Not chasing awards
Williams has been cooking in Sacramento for 19 years. He is not chasing Michelin at Aiona, just as he wasn’t chasing it at Allora.
“I think chasing awards is a fool’s errand,” he said. “It’d be kind of like a musician writing a song that they think people want to listen to.”
He is more focused on what’s happening around him in Sacramento and where Aiona fits into it.
“I tell you what is inspiring is so many other people in the city cooking in such an inspired way,” he said. “I feel like the rising tide raises all boats.”
Aiona
Address: 1213 K St., Sacramento
Phone: (916) 790-3473
Website: aionasacramento.com
Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Happy hour 3 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Dinner 5 to 9:30 p.m. weekdays, 5 to 10:30 p.m. weekends, Monday through Saturday. Closed Sundays.
Reservations: OpenTable. Walk-ins welcome.
Average spend: $30 to $35 at lunch, $65 to $75 at dinner.
Happy hour: $6 wine, $6 beers, $10 craft cocktails.