The VIG Park West
Genuine Concepts/Submitted

The VIG, a neighborhood hangout favorite of the Valley’s, is expanding its footprint to the Park West in Peoria.

Cesar Cramton, president of Genuine Concepts, the restaurant group that owns The VIG, says the feedback to expand to the West Valley was overwhelmingly positive. It was the driving force behind opening the new location.

“We’ve got quite a bit of feedback to go to the West Valley, and the opportunity presented itself,” Cramton says. “Park West is a center that seems to be going under a pretty big revamp, and like-minded restaurants and independent restaurants are going in there as well, so it seemed like a perfect fit.”

Set to open in March, The VIG Park West will pair upscale tavern fare, including a first-ever pizza oven, with “Vignature” cocktails, craft beer and wine. It also boasts four unique dining and seating areas: the spacious, street-side patio; a sunlight-filled Arizona room; a semi-private den; and the bar and lounge.

A light, airy design also features a semi-private 20-person den with a stone-clad fireplace and bookcase that can be curtained off, plus a traditional Arizona sunroom that connects the patio with the dining room thanks to living indoor trees under soaring skylights.

“It’s not a sports bar,” says Artie Virgil, architect for AV3 Design Studio, the firm that helped design The VIG Park West. “But because it’s near the arenas, it will have a chameleon-like ability to transform into the perfect space to hang out on game days thanks to extensive TVs and the flexible indoor-outdoor spaces.”

The Park West location will be the brand’s sixth location and first in the West Valley. As such, the new location will feature nods to the area’s deep farming roots and Luke Air Force Base. This includes the horseshoe-shaped central bar clad in aluminum panels with metal rivets reminiscent of an airplane and the oversized terra cotta pots planted with olive trees and succulents lining the outdoor patios and entryway like hedgerows in a field.

Cramton says paying homage to the area that a location sits at is something The VIG tends to do.

“We pride ourselves on being hyper-local and community driven,” he says. “That translates to our menu as well. We try to use as many local purveyors as we can. We use Noble Bread as our bread purveyor; they helped us also create our mixture for pizza dough for our locations that serve pizza. We try to get local produce if we can; we deal with local farms for our meats and our cheeses. So, we’re very local centric.”

The location, Cramton says, is perfect. The growth in and around the area is something that really attracted Genuine Concepts to Park West.

“We’re always in that forward trajectory of growing the business and the brand,” Cramton says. “Obviously, we paused for a bit due to COVID-19 and navigating that situation and coming out of that and looking at expansion and seeing what’s available and what are some hot pockets, and we decided to do Park West.

“It borders Peoria and Glendale. Obviously with Westgate expanding drastically and hotels that are going up and there seems to be a lot of multi-unit apartment complexes or condo complexes, so the development out there is pretty expansive and we’re excited to finally come in and be a part of it.”

That said, with the changes being made to Park West coupled with the local support The VIG already has, Cramton sees the new location as something that can be profitable immediately.

“There is some brand recognition there already with our locals,” he says. “We feel that we will have that support because of the brand recognition when we open there. It seems like people are eager to have us and excited to have us open in the West Valley.”

The VIG Park West

9824 W. Northern Avenue, Suite 1840, Peoria