STAMFORD — Puerto Vallarta, which operates several Mexican restaurants in the state, announced Friday that it plans to open a location early next spring in the downtown Stamford Restaurant Plaza.
The new restaurant located at 230 Tresser Blvd., will mark the eighth and largest Puerto Vallarta in the state, complementing locations in Avon, Danbury, Fairfield, Middletown, Newington, Orange and Southington.
“I am very excited to bring traditional Mexican cuisine and a distinct taste of Mexican culture to this new location in Stamford,” Puerto Vallarta founder and owner Esaul Rodriguez said in a statement.
Rodriguez established Puerto Vallarta 20 years ago in Hartford County. Since then, he’s added a new restaurant in Connecticut every few years. He is from Unión de Tula, Mexico, about 130 miles southeast of Puerto Vallarta, a city on the Pacific coast of Mexico.
“With the large number of businesses in the area, we expect our lunch and happy hour offerings to be very popular,” Rodriguez said. “At night, we expect the nearby residential community to come in and make Puerto Vallarta a regular dining destination.”
Puerto Vallarta will occupy 7,535 square feet in space that has been vacant for three years. A Rascal Flatts restaurant operated in this space from 2017 to 2018.
“We’ve seen this group of restaurants grow across Connecticut over the past few years, and we’re extremely excited to welcome them to the plaza,” Stamford Town Center General Manager Dan Stolzenbach said in a statement. communicated. “Esaul and the entire Puerto Vallarta team are consummate professionals. I’m confident that their winning combination of good food and drink, coupled with prompt and friendly service, will ensure their long-term success here at Stamford Town Center.
The mall also confirmed another upcoming arrival in the restaurant plaza: Brazilian steakhouse Terra Gaucha, which will open in an approximately 8,200-square-foot space vacant since the August 2020 closure of a cheesecake factory.
Next to the former Cheesecake Factory space is a Plan B Burger Bar. It hasn’t operated since March 2020 and it’s listed as “temporarily closed” on the Plan B website.
“At this time, we don’t believe Plan B will reopen,” Stolzenbach told Hearst Connecticut Media. “We have had a lot of interest in this space, so we are continuing conversations with these potential tenants.”
At the same time, the mall is still looking to fill the vacancy created by the 2019 closure of a Kona Grill.
“We have several interested parties for the remaining spaces in the plaza and expect to make another exciting announcement in the near future,” Stolzenbach said.
Other tenants in the restaurant square are pizza franchise Pieology, which opened in 2017; Peter Chang Restaurant, which serves Chinese dishes and arrived in 2018; and The Capital Grille, which opened in 2007, the same year the plaza debuted.
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