A Peruvian Restaurant Dream Team Has Big Plans for Back Bay
Boston's Rosa y Marigold—soon-to-be sibling of Celeste and La Royal—will open at the Lyrik development in fall 2025, paying tribute to Nobel laureate poet Louise Glück.
The first site visit for Rosa y Marigold. From left: partners Jose Saravia, JuanMa Calderón, and Maria Rondeau, and Teo Heredia, a longtime team member at Rosa y Marigold siblings Celeste and La Royal. / Courtesy photo
Ceviche, tiradito, anticuchos, and more: The team behind acclaimed Peruvian restaurants Celeste, La Royal, and Esmeralda is working on its biggest project yet. Rosa y Marigold is slated to open this fall at the Lyrik Back Bay development at the nexus of Newbury Street, Massachusetts Avenue, and the Pike. There’ll be plenty of Peruvian cuisine, fun cocktails, and live music—and, we expect, the dinner-party-esque magic that permeates all of Maria Rondeau and JuanMa Calderón’s culinary projects. Their restaurant empire, after all, was born out of a pop-up they ran in their Cambridge home.
Like at their other restaurants, Calderón is executive chef and Rondeau, an architect by trade, is designer and general manager. But this time, they’re bringing in partners. A big project calls for big investment, after all, and they didn’t want to bring in just any investor but rather “a dream team of family and friends,” says Rondeau. One Rosa y Marigold partner, Jose Saravia, was Celeste’s very first employee, who started as a dishwasher and is now manager. And then there’s Lauren Harder, the landlord and general contractor of La Royal in Cambridge. Rondeau’s brother and sister-in-law, Rafael Rondeau and Dana Hale, are onboard as well; they’re no strangers to the food and hospitality world, as Hale is an Island Creek Oysters alum and the duo owns and operates the Vesper Inn in Vermont. Plus, Rafael Rondeau, a violinist, is a Berklee alum, “so he’s kind of our insider” on the music front, says Maria Rondeau. Berklee is conveniently steps away.
The menu at Rosa y Marigold will include some Peruvian classics showcased at Celeste and La Royal—ceviche and lomo saltado, for instance (“of course,” says Rondeau)—and some of Calderón’s newer explorations into his home country’s cuisine. “I’m watching new recipes, new chefs, and adapting it to my own style,” says Calderón.
La Royal’s scallop and blue cod ceviche. / Photo by Rachel Leah Blumenthal
There’ll be plenty of fish. “Boston is an amazing seafood town,” says Rondeau. Look for tiradito on the menu, for example—a Peruvian raw fish dish. Beyond seafood, antichuchos (street food-style skewered meats), steak frites with yuca fries, and a fair amount of chifa (Peruvian-Chinese) cuisine will be on the menu, too.
The duo has been wanting to serve lunch forever, too, but Celeste and La Royal’s Somerville and Cambridge locations lean more toward destination dining than lots of weekday lunchtime foot traffic. Back Bay feels like a better fit for busy lunch crowds, and Rosa y Marigold will serve a wide range of sánguches (Peruvian sandwiches) and more. “They have an incredible array of sandwiches in Peru,” says Rondeau. Weekend brunch is also in the plans.
One thing that’s not changing from the older restaurants to the new: an open kitchen, fueling that dinner-party feel. It will be visible from the large, airy dining room, which will take up about two thirds of the space, with a “more moody, more mysterious” bar area taking up the other third, says Rondeau. Overall, there will be about 100 seats, including some outdoor space.
With the proximity to Berklee, Calderón and Rondeau have dreams of bringing in musicians on a regular basis. Think jazz, bossa nova, salsa—“things that make one move,” says Rondeau. And they’ve learned that Berklee has a sizable Peruvian community, so they’re hoping to highlight Peruvian music as well.
Lyrik, photographed in February 2025 with under-construction restaurant and retail spaces. / Photo by Rachel Leah Blumenthal
Rosa y Marigold will be located on the ground level of Lyrik (as opposed to the elevated plaza that stretches over the Pike), one of several dining and drinking options at the development. On the casual side, there’ll be a George Howell Coffee, Pink Carrot (a juice-and-more shop based in the North End), and more; on the fancier side, a sprawling location of the upscale Greek restaurant Avra Estiatorio—which has locations in Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami—is in the works.
“We love the sense that [Lyrik] is a new space envisioned to bring everybody together,” says Rondeau. “It’s about the tourists that come, but it’s also the home of Berklee students, the Fenway, the Back Bay. It’s a crossroads of so many things coming together, which is really in the ethos of what we love to do: bring people together.”
Louise Glück. / Photo from Bollingen Prize for Poetry
The restaurant’s name is an ode to a late friend, the Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning poet and essayist Louise Glück, who exemplified that spirit of togetherness that weaves through Celeste, La Royal, Esmeralda, and, soon, Rosa y Marigold. Her final work, a 2022 novel, is titled Marigold and Rose. She dined at Celeste several times a week, always with different friends, says Rondeau. “We hosted her memorial at La Royal, and it was a very beautiful moment where her friends came together—friends who had never really met, who all had food and Louise in common with Celeste as the point of encounter.”
Glück actually named La Royal, convincing Calderón and Rondeau to abandon the Celeste and Esmeralda naming convention of woman’s name and color, which they had initially planned to continue. (“We couldn’t disagree with a Nobel poet about names,” says Calderón.) But in opening this new restaurant, “her absence is so great,” says Rondeau, “that thinking of that void of not having her to have these conversations—because she was very involved in everything that we did—we thought of references to things that she left behind.” Rosa y Marigold not only honors her but returns to the original naming convention. “And now instead of the name of one girl, we have two, so we’re even,” laughs Calderón.
The name also comes back around to the idea of bringing people together, says Rondeau. Glück’s novel, inspired by her grandchildren, is a fable-like exploration of the communication between infant twins “that are so different but complement each other and become one,” as Rondeau describes it. “It’s very moving; it’s about the duality of how things come together and co-exist and can still be one. In a way, our project is very much about that. The duality of the transformation of the space from daytime to nighttime; the excitement of crossing the river and being somewhere new.”
Opening fall 2025. 400 Newbury St. (Lyrik Back Bay), Back Bay, Boston.
