In Westport, Restaurants Come And Go. The Chefs Rarely Leave.

For weeks, people walking past the old Matsu Sushi space on Jesup Road have been doing the same thing: pressing close to the papered-over garage door windows, trying to see what's being built behind them. What they'll find this fall is hi'Amba, a bakery, café and full restaurant from chef Bill Taibe built around Eastern Mediterranean, North African and Southwest Asian flavors, Jerusalem bagels and shakshuka downstairs, a shared-plates dining room upstairs. It has nothing to do with the address he just walked away from, and that's the more interesting story.

That address, 90 Post Road East, is worth pausing on, because it tells you something about how this town actually works. Over the past eight years, that single space has held three different identities. It opened as Jesup Hall, Taibe's farm-to-table American concept inside Westport's old Town Hall. He later reworked it into Don Memo, a Mexican cantina. Now it's Massi Co., a Napoletano-style restaurant. Same walls, same corner, three restaurants with three different personalities in eight years.

If you've lived in Westport for a while, you've probably experienced this as a kind of low-grade whiplash: a favorite spot closes, something unfamiliar moves in, and you wonder whether the street is losing its character. The more useful way to read it is the opposite. The address changes hands constantly. The people who know how to run a good restaurant here do not.

The Chef Who Keeps Starting Over

Taibe's résumé in this town reads like a small history of Westport dining. Le Farm in 2009. Then The Whelk. Then Kawa Ni. Then Jesup Hall, which he later reworked into Don Memo. Now hi'Amba, his fifth concept and the first one built from scratch rather than adapted from whatever came before it in the same room.

What's notable is what he didn't do when Don Memo ended. He didn't fight to hold the corner. He didn't try to retrofit 90 Post Road East into a sixth concept. He found a different building entirely, on a different street, and started over with a cuisine he'd never served in Westport before. At launch, hi'Amba will lean into breakfast and lunch: house bread and pastries coming out of the ovens through the day, a coffee program built around Ilse Coffee, pita straight from the oven, man'oushe, a dip program built on hummus, baba ghanoush and muhammara. Dinner follows a few weeks after opening, with whole roasted fish and chicken. Downstairs is counter service and a grab-and-go market; upstairs is a full dining room with beer, wine and spritzes.

That's a real bet, not a renovation. It's also, by Taibe's own account, the point. He's described the new spot as the kind of place meant to be relied on every day, for coffee in the morning or dinner on the way home, which is a different ambition than running a destination restaurant. It reads less like a chef expanding a brand and more like someone rebuilding trust with a neighborhood one counter order at a time.

What's Actually New, And What Just Moved In

Not everything opening on Post Road this year has local roots, and the contrast is instructive.

Frank Pepe's, the coal-fired pizza institution that started on Wooster Street in New Haven a century ago, signed a lease for a 3,529-square-foot space in the White Birch Center back in December 2025 and opened on June 1. It's the chain's 18th location on the East Coast, with roughly 90 dine-in seats and a dedicated takeout counter. As of late summer, it had been open nearly four months and was, by most local accounts, thriving. That's a chain landing well: recognizable name, proven format, a town with an appetite for it.

Wonder took a different route into the same stretch of road. It's a mix-and-match concept, more than twenty different kitchens under one roof, offering everything from steaks to poke bowls to pizza. It opened on March 5 with a ribbon cutting attended by Matthew Mandell, executive director of the Westport-Weston Chamber of Commerce, which is its own small tell: a national chain reaching for local institutional credibility on day one, the way an outsider does when it wants to be read as an insider.

Then there's SoHo Pizza, announced back in December with a sign promising pies "Made in New York City." Months later, it's still working out basic execution. One local reader's complaint, still circulating this August, was simply that the crew was taking a very long time to make a slice. Same wave of arrivals as Pepe's and Wonder, same stretch of road, a much rockier landing.

The pattern across all four is not about chains versus independents. It's about what happens when a business has to earn a place here versus assuming one. Pepe's brought a hundred years of muscle memory to a straightforward format and it worked immediately. SoHo Pizza brought a slogan and is still finding its footing months later. Taibe, who has no national footprint at all, keeps succeeding by doing the opposite of both: building something new from scratch every few years and trusting that people who liked his last restaurant will follow him to the next one.

Where This Leaves You If You're Deciding Where To Eat

If you want a read on which openings are worth your attention this fall, the local track record is the best guide, more useful than a grand-opening banner.

hi'Amba is worth watching closely once the doors open, both because Taibe has never missed with a new concept in this town and because the format itself, a working bakery paired with a full dinner menu, is new for Westport. Massi Co. inherits a location with real history behind it. Whether it can hold that corner the way Jesup Hall and Don Memo did for years each remains to be seen. Frank Pepe's has already answered the question: it's a safe, proven addition, four months in and running well.

There's a quieter version of this same pattern worth knowing about too. Fatto a Mano, the Italian bakery known for its panettone, spent two years selling at the Westport Farmers Market before opening its own storefront at 971 Post Road East, next to Pop-Up Bagels. Founder Pierluigi Mazzella was named Baker of the Year by the Connecticut Restaurant Association back in 2022, and Forbes has called him the "Prince of Panettone." That's the same slow-build, prove-it-first path Taibe has taken with every one of his restaurants, just from a market stall instead of a previous storefront. The Westport Farmers Market itself, running twenty years now at its Imperial Avenue lot and moving indoors to Gilbertie's Herb Gardens each winter, has become something like a proving ground for exactly this kind of local operator.

None of this means the chains don't belong here. It means the ones that land well tend to bring something genuinely proven, the way Pepe's brought a century of coal-fired ovens, rather than a slogan and a sign. And it means that when a Westport restaurant you loved disappears, the better question isn't what's replacing the address. It's where the person who made it good went next.

If you're the kind of Westport resident who tracks these things the way we do, that's not a coincidence. M & D Properties has spent years watching this town's storefronts and street corners change hands, because understanding a neighborhood's rhythm is part of understanding its real estate too. If you're ever curious how any of that plays into the value of your own address, Request a Home Valuation and let's talk about it.