The month of September has been marked by our Name Our Restaurant contest, and our hearts have been full ever since! The support we received from our Oxford County community (and beyond) has been overwhelming, and has warmed our hearts. We received over 500 name ideas for our restaurant, and would like to thank all of those who submitted a suggestion, as well as those who helped us spread the word on our behalf.

We are thankful for all the support and couldn’t be more excited to share the name we’ve chosen. While it took some time, discussion, late-night back and forth emailing, restarting from scratch, and Googling, we are very happy to announce the team has collectively decided on:

KALOS

Read on to learn a bit more about the how, what, and why of picking the name, as well as the contest winner:

How We Picked The Name

Similar to our “Name Your Course contest”, we started by categorizing the submissions into broad themes to be able to make sense of all the suggestions. The categories ranged from animals to business names (references to The Oxford Hills or Theo’s), from food and restaurant specific names to geography, from golfing to views, and more.

With multiple people involved in picking the name, all reviewing the list of suggestions repeatedly, settling on a name liked by all wasn’t an easy task! It turned out none of the submitted names fully captured the essence of what we envision our restaurant to be. After exploring the options at hand and thinking outside the box, the team came to realize that the name should not only be unique, and a single word, it should also have a story and meaning behind it. And that’s how KALOS came about…

What Does It Mean?

KALOS not only represents the owner’s family (using the first letters of the immediate Bohner family names), it also means beautiful in Greek, and encompasses meanings equivalent to the English “good” and “noble”. Our restaurant is dedicated to good food, staff and atmosphere, and will without a doubt live up to its name!

We hope you’re as excited as we are to call KALOS your new favourite restaurant.

So Who Won The Contest?

But the $1,000 dining certificate question is… who won the contest if we didn’t select a name from the submissions? Invigorated by the support received, we entered all name ideas in a random drawing as a token of our appreciation.

Steve Bohner, owner of The Oxford Hills and KALOS, did the honours of blindly drawing the winner, using an online contest winner tool. As a result, we’d like to congratulate Geoff Scott for winning the $1,000 dining certificate to be used at our brand-new restaurant KALOS. We look forward to serving you soon!

In closing, we want to say thank you, once again, to all of those who took part in our contest. Stay tuned are we push towards the official opening of KALOS!