Walk down Post Road past the old Town Hall building this month and you'll see workers still finishing out a bakery counter at 33 Jesup Road, a few doors from where Massi Co. just quietly passed its first anniversary. Both spots trace back to the same two names, and neither story makes sense without the other. What looks like Westport's latest wave of restaurant news is actually the last chapter of something that started well over a year ago, when two of the town's most recognizable restaurateurs stopped being partners.
If you've eaten at The Whelk, Don Memo, Jesup Hall, or Kawa Ni over the past decade, you've eaten Massimo Tullio and Bill Taibe's food. The two built a run of Westport restaurants together starting with The Whelk in 2012, then Kawa Ni in 2014, Jesup Hall in 2016, and Don Memo in 2020. Somewhere in that stretch, 90 Post Road East, the town's original Town Hall building, became one of the more restless addresses downtown: Jesup Hall's farm-to-table American menu gave way to Don Memo's tacos and tequila, and now Massi Co.'s Neapolitan pizza and handmade pasta, three concepts in under a decade, same walls the whole time.
What the Split Actually Divided
Earlier in 2025, Tullio and Taibe announced they were going separate ways. The terms of the split are more specific than most local restaurant news gets, and they explain everything that's happened downtown since:
- Tullio kept The Whelk and the Don Memo space, which he rebuilt into Massi Co., an Italian-American concept named after himself.
- Taibe sold his interests in The Whelk, Don Memo, and LeFarm, his original 2009 restaurant that's now operating as The Cottage under different ownership.
- Taibe kept both Kawa Ni locations, in Westport and Denver, along with the Norwalk Art Space Cafe he opened in 2021.
That's three restaurants Taibe walked away from and two he held onto, which left him with a gap where a new solo project would eventually go. Filling that gap took him the better part of a year.
The Last Piece: hi'Amba
That project is hi'Amba, opening this fall at 33 Jesup Road, an address you might also see listed as 76 Post Road East. It's the space that spent nineteen years as Basso Restaurant & Wine Bar before Basso closed this past December, and the town's Historic District Commission and Architectural Review Board only signed off on hi'Amba's exterior signage a couple of weeks ago, which tells you how recently this one has moved from rumor to reality.
The concept is a working bakery on the ground floor, a grab-and-go market stocked with house-made dips and pantry staples, and a dining room upstairs built for sharing, all built around the flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and Southwest Asia. Expect Jerusalem bagels, fresh pita, Lebanese man'oushe, and shakshuka to start, with the menu shifting toward bigger sandwiches and salads as the day goes on. Taibe has described it as "the kind of place you want in your neighborhood and can rely on every day," which is a lower bar than his previous restaurants set for themselves, and probably the point.
The kitchen is in the hands of Executive Chef Karen Nicolas, a Food & Wine Best New Chef honoree who trained under Tom Colicchio at Gramercy Tavern and Charlie Palmer at Aureole. GM Branden Hahn, who worked the floor at Don Memo, Kawa Ni, and Jesup Hall before stints at The NoMad and Augusta National, is running the front of house. Between the two of them, hi'Amba is staffed like a restaurant expecting to matter beyond its first few months.
Massi Co., One Year In
It's worth being clear that Massi Co. isn't new news. It opened to the public on September 9, 2025, after a friends-and-family preview that pulled in a guest list heavy on media and sports executives, a reflection of who backed it: Massi Co.'s investors include TKO Group Holdings president Mark Shapiro, Roku Media president Charlie Collier, and Newmark executive Matt Leon, alongside Tullio himself. Executive Chef Zach Hinman, who cooked at both The Whelk and Don Memo before the split, runs a kitchen that's already produced a dish with a small following of its own: a radiatore tossed in spicy vodka sauce with 'nduja and whipped ricotta that keeps showing up in local write-ups. The restaurant also donates excess food to the Gillespie Center, the senior and community services nonprofit a few yards away on Jesup Road, and has swapped its plastic to-go lids for paper ones as part of a local sustainability program.
None of that makes Massi Co. a fall 2026 story. It makes it the first domino, already a year settled, while hi'Amba is the one still landing.
The Parallel Story: A Hotel Group Betting on the Same Blocks
Downtown's other big kitchen change this year didn't come out of the Taibe-Tullio split at all, which is worth separating out even though the timing overlaps. Greenwich Hospitality Group opened its third Connecticut hotel, the 86-room Delamar Westport, in the building that was once the Westport Inn, and its restaurant Dandelion opened alongside it. Corporate chef Frederic Kieffer and corporate director Hicham Amaaou, who've worked together since Delamar Southport's Artisan restaurant, built Dandelion around Mediterranean seafood and shareable plates and designed the restaurant's look themselves, a separate effort from designer Christian Siriano's work on the hotel's own interiors.
The same hospitality group has more in motion. Its long-running renovation of the town-owned Inn at Longshore, including two new suites designed with Serena & Lily and a new ballroom, is slated to reopen this fall, though the property's restaurant, La Plage, remains closed for now. If you've been wondering why Longshore has felt quieter than usual this season, that's why, and it's a property worth watching over the next couple of months.
Between Massi Co. and hi'Amba on one hand and Dandelion on the other, Westport is testing two different models of downtown renewal at the same time: familiar local chefs recombining into new concepts inside old buildings, and an established regional hospitality brand importing a fresh one into new construction. Both are happening within a few blocks of each other.
The Piece Still Missing
There's one more name attached to this stretch of Post Road that hasn't shown up yet. Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, the century-old New Haven chain, signed a lease last December for 361 Post Road West in the White Birch Center, taking over the space long occupied by The Naan. The plan called for construction to begin in early 2026 with a summer opening to follow, which would make it the chain's ninth Connecticut location. As of this writing, no opening date has been announced, so if you've been checking that storefront on your way to Stop & Shop, you're not missing anything yet. It's worth keeping an eye on before the weather turns.
What This Means If You Live Here
The easy read on all of this is that Westport is having an unusually busy restaurant year. The more accurate read is that a handful of prime addresses on Post Road and Jesup Road haven't actually multiplied, they've just changed hands within a tight circle of people who already knew each other, on a timeline that started with one partnership ending and is only now closing with one chef's solo project. That's a different kind of downtown health than a simple count of new openings would suggest: it means these storefronts don't sit empty long enough to become a problem, and the people filling them tend to already have a track record in town.
If you want an excuse to see the current lineup for yourself, the Westport Downtown Association's Craft Beer & Family Fall Festival returns to Elm Street on October 3, which is as good a reason as any to walk the length of Post Road and see who's cooking where this season.
Downtown's rhythm, the way its restaurants turn over without the town ever feeling like it's lost momentum, is part of what makes Westport worth paying attention to beyond just where to eat next. If you're curious about what that kind of steady local energy means for the neighborhoods around it, the C T Luxe Team can walk you through it.
