The garage doors on Jesup Road have been papered over for weeks now, the kind of blacked-out windows that make a person slow their walk and wonder what's coming. Right down the street, the lawn at Levitt Pavilion went quiet for the year on August 24, the last of roughly sixty free summer nights folded up until next June. That's the actual marker of fall in downtown Westport this year. It isn't the leaves. It's what closes on one block just as the ovens start warming up on the next.
The restaurant opening on Jesup Road this fall, and the one that quietly opened a few hundred feet away on Main Street about a year ago, turn out to be one story rather than two. If you've lived in Westport long enough to remember Basso, or Don Memo, or the string of restaurants that came before them, you're going to recognize more names on these menus than you'd expect.
One Address, a Very Long Résumé
The space at 33 Jesup Road, also carried on some permits as 76 Post Road East, spent nineteen years as Basso Restaurant & Wine Bar before it closed this past December. What's moving in is hi'Amba, an all-day bakery, café and restaurant from chef Bill Taibe built around the flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and Southwest Asia. Shakshuka, hummus, man'oushe, Jerusalem bagels and pita coming out of a working ground-floor bakery, with a full dinner room upstairs and a coffee program built around Ilse Coffee.
Taibe isn't new to any of this. He opened LeFarm in Westport in 2009, then The Whelk in 2012, Kawa Ni in 2014, Jesup Hall in 2016 and Don Memo in 2020, a run that's made him a fixture of the town's food scene for close to two decades. hi'Amba's 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, with general manager Branden Hahn, who has run the floor at Don Memo, Kawa Ni and Jesup Hall, overseeing service. The town's Historic District Commission and Architectural Review Board signed off on the signage this summer, green lettering painted onto the building's stucco face and lit by gooseneck fixtures, according to Westport Journal's coverage of the approval meeting.
A Year Earlier, Two Doors Down
Walk a few minutes toward Main Street and you land in the space that used to hold Don Memo itself, Taibe's own 2020 concept. What replaced it, opening quietly last fall, is Massi Co., an Italian-American restaurant described by its own team as coming from the creators of The Whelk and Don Memo. The founder is Massimo Tullio, a longtime Westport resident, with executive chef Zach Hinman, who built menus at both The Whelk and Don Memo, running the kitchen and general manager Ingrid Paronich, whose résumé includes Le Bernardin and Gramercy Tavern, overseeing the room.
Massi Co. leans into hand-tossed Neapolitan-style pizza from a brick oven, housemade pastas built around seasonal ingredients, and a curated vinyl collection spinning nightly, a different mood entirely from hi'Amba's bakery-and-café setup a few blocks away. A year into service, it's become enough of a fixture that local guides now list it alongside downtown standbys like Il Pastaficio and Emmy Squared Pizza rather than in any "new and buzzy" category.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're just scanning a list of openings: this isn't two unconnected restaurateurs launching a year apart by coincidence. It's the same small hospitality family that closed one of its own restaurants and reopened the identical footprint under a new name last fall, and is now opening a second, unrelated concept in a completely different building a short walk away. The turnover downtown isn't outside money discovering Westport. It's insiders redeploying inside their own real estate, twice in two years.
A quick look at what's actually changed hands on this stretch:
- 33 Jesup Road (formerly Basso Restaurant & Wine Bar, 19 years in business) → hi'Amba, an all-day bakery and café from Bill Taibe, opening this fall
- The former Don Memo space (Taibe's own 2020 concept) → Massi Co., Italian-American, from founder Massimo Tullio and the Whelk/Don Memo team, open since last fall
- 40 Jesup Road, one block from hi'Amba → Levitt Pavilion, whose free summer concert season just wrapped for the year
The Actual Newcomer Is a Few Blocks West
If you want to see what an outside brand entering Westport actually looks like, drive out to White Birch Center on Post Road West. Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, the New Haven coal-fired pizza institution that's been slinging pies on Wooster Street since 1925, finalized a lease for a 3,529-square-foot space there, with roughly 90 seats and a dedicated takeout counter, marking its 18th location on the East Coast and its first in Westport. The lease was reported in December 2025 with an opening targeted for summer 2026, which puts it right at the edge of arriving as the season turns.
That's the real contrast worth noticing. Downtown's Main Street and Jesup Road corridor is filling back up through people who already had a stake in the neighborhood. Post Road is where a genuinely external, decades-old brand is planting its first Westport flag. Two different kinds of change, happening at the same time, for different reasons.
The Market That Doesn't Take a Fall Break
Not everything downtown is about who's opening a kitchen. The Westport Farmers' Market keeps its Thursday hours, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 50 Imperial Ave, running from May 7 all the way through November 5 this year, a stretch that pushes well past the point most people assume a farmers market has folded for the season. It's worth remembering the market didn't start as a seasonal amenity tacked onto the town. Paul Newman and Michel Nischan founded it back in June 2006, and it's been run since 2010 by executive director Lori Cochran-Dougall.
If your Thursday routine already includes a stop there, you've got roughly two more months of it before the calendar forces a real pause.
One Saturday Worth Circling
The other date worth putting somewhere visible is Saturday, October 3, from 1 to 5 p.m., when the Westport Downtown Association hosts its Craft Beer & Family Fall Festival on Elm Street. The WDA is the nonprofit behind most of downtown's community programming and beautification work, and this is its clearest fall marker, an afternoon built for exactly the kind of in-between weekend that shows up once Levitt's lawn has gone dark but the outdoor season hasn't fully surrendered to indoor plans yet.
What This Actually Tells You
None of this is really about restaurant count. It's about how small the group of people shaping downtown Westport's food scene actually is. The same names keep showing up under different signage, on Jesup Road, on Main Street, sometimes in the exact building they used to run under a different concept. If you've eaten at Don Memo or The Whelk over the past several years, you already know the people behind Massi Co. and hi'Amba, even if you've never heard those two names before this month.
That's the texture that doesn't show up in a list of grand openings. Downtown Westport isn't being remade by outsiders. It's being reshuffled by the people who were already running it, block by block, one closed sign at a time.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you live here and this is simply what daily life in town looks like right now, that's exactly the audience this was written for. And if a season like this ever gets you thinking about what your own corner of Westport is worth, or what it might take to make a move within it, Linna Yuen is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
