Maria Rondeau and JuanMa Calderón Built Boston’s Most Intimate Restaurants—Here's How

By Eric Barton | Nov. 6, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Maria Rondeau and JuanMa Calderón took very different, meandering paths to their partnership, in business and in life.

Maria grew up at a very long table in Guatemala that sat 18, maybe 20, she can’t be sure. Black bean soup might lead to cocido de carne and chirmol over steak, and the night flowed between cousins and grandparents entering and coming.

In Boston, JuanMa learned a different lesson about what food can do for a room: on his birthday, which everyone used to skip because it fell just after the holidays, he cooked three big pots of beans, and the house filled. “That’s when I discovered the power my food held,” he says.

Between them came a rule that, now as restaurateurs, governs their restaurants: build the night around the table and let everything else—light, sound, pacing—serve the gathering.

Few restaurant owners have fused design and Peruvian cooking into such intimate, high-functioning rooms, then repeated the feat without losing the pulse. They built a New England mini-canon of places that feel personal: Celeste, La Royal, Esmeralda, and next, Rosa y Marigold. They are restaurants that feel like homes. As Maria puts it, the goal is “a generous space that gives and does not judge or hold back in any way.” The work has reshaped how Boston eats Peruvian food: less spectacle, more communion.

Maria Rondeau JuanMa Calderon

The story starts long before Cambridge. Maria grew up in Guatemala at that very long family table, where meals were both everyday and ceremonial. “Simple, powerful food, made from the heart,” she says. The lesson wasn’t just flavor; it was flow. Nights organized themselves, “a certain formality in form,” she says, “but the spirit that the night is meant to simply flow.”

In Lima, teenage JuanMa learned markets first—prices, haggling, quality—and then seasoning. “I was lucky,” he says. “I was the first to taste and the first to sit down to eat those freshly made stews, those steaming soups were engraved in my memory forever.” He would chase another art form too: film. He spent the ’90s documenting the city’s alternative scenes and never quite let go of the camera.

Maria’s path ran through the most experimental corners of American architecture, at mOrphosis, office dA, MPdL Studio, a visiting stint at RISD, and later, Concepcion 41, an artist residency in the charming colonial city of Antigua. The work taught her to think by drawing and to let the plan lead the feeling. “I learned the importance of the plan and how a simple plan move implies intricacies far beyond the line,” she says. Corners might disappear; materials had to be honest. Light would do half the talking.

Celeste

They met, they made a home, and then they opened it up to strangers. Before they became restaurant owners, there was a speakeasy at their place—Kriollo Real—with an 1800s Irish country table so long they tore down walls to fit it. The formula—kitchen, counter, table—became doctrine. “Cooking and hosting people at home is a party in itself,” JuanMa says. “That’s what we’ve been doing every day for over 15 years.” When the pop-up spilled beyond the front door, Maria translated that party into public space: open kitchens as hearts, rooms tuned for sightlines and spontaneity.

La Royal

Kriollo Real

Celeste captured the lightness they love—620 square feet of conviction—and La Royal layered new materials against old bones: brick and steel meeting mirrored stainless, copper, and cast resins that glimmered instead of shouting. Maria calls it material honesty. Guests just call it fun.

The dinner-party vibe isn’t accidental. A childhood birthday drought taught JuanMa what food could do for a room: fill it. “That’s when I discovered the power my food held,” he says. Big pots of beans became big parties, a lesson he carried to New York and then Boston. The menu reads like family memory—his mother’s recipes, an aunt’s secrets, a grandfather’s Chinese thread—and the soundtrack is the same he cooked to in the Rímac neighborhood.

La Royal

Rosa y Marigold, opening next, is the synthesis and the next experiment. Maria wants the joy of Celeste with the reflective play of La Royal, a space “imbued with a sense of wonder and magic,” and a quiet homage to their friend Louise Glück’s Marigold and Rose. “The kitchen is at the heart of it all,” she says. It always was.

Meanwhile, JuanMa’s other narrative engine revs again. After years devoted to restaurants, he’s returning to film with Muerte en el Festival, a comedy murder mystery to be shot in Lima. Cooking didn’t eclipse cinema; it bankrolled and deepened it. “Cinema, just like cooking, is a way of sharing love,” he says. “Both complemented each other… everything has a narrative.”

Maria at Esmeralda

Look ahead and they resist over-promising. “We started humbly with Celeste,” JuanMa says, and the rest came from persistence and community love. Maria imagines more rooms that let people unplug and reconnect—maybe in Guatemala, maybe in Mexico City—small spaces that remember what the long table taught them. The next trick, as always, will be the thing she learned early on: let the table be at the forefront, and build the night around it.

JuanMa at Esmeralda