For weeks, the storefront downtown has had papered-over windows and a name nobody could quite confirm. People slowed down walking past it. Regulars at Kawa Ni asked their server what Bill Taibe was building this time. The guessing settled on the obvious answer: another dinner spot from the chef who has spent seventeen years training this town to go out at night.
That guess is wrong. What Taibe is opening is a bakery.
Seventeen Years of Dinner Reservations
To understand why that matters, it helps to know what Taibe has actually built since he arrived downtown. He opened Le Farm in 2009, a farm-to-table restaurant that put him on the radar of national food writers. The Whelk followed in 2012, a seafood and oyster bar around the corner on Riverside Avenue. Kawa Ni came in 2014, a Japanese-inspired pub at Bridge Square that turned Saugatuck into a destination in its own right. Jesup Hall arrived in 2019 inside the historic Westport Town Hall building, then became Don Memo in 2020 when Taibe got restless and pivoted the space to elevated Mexican with chef Anthony Kostelis. Every one of those was built for evening service. Reservations, cocktail programs, a kitchen that hits its stride after dark.
In February 2025, that portfolio split. Taibe and his longtime business partner Massimo Tullio divided the restaurants they had built together, with Tullio keeping The Whelk and Don Memo and Taibe retaining Kawa Ni in both Westport and Denver. It was described at the time as a natural evolution of a twelve-year partnership, and both men said as much publicly. What it also did, whether either framed it this way or not, was hand Taibe a clean slate for the first time since 2009. His next move was entirely his own to make.
He didn't make another dinner reservation.
The Bakery Nobody Saw Coming
hi'Amba is described by Taibe as an all-day bakery, café and restaurant built around Eastern Mediterranean, North African and Southwest Asian flavors, and at launch it is focused on breakfast and lunch rather than dinner. The menu includes Jerusalem bagels, pita straight from the oven, and man'oushe, the Lebanese flatbread, alongside shakshuka and a coffee program built with Ilse Coffee. CT Bites, which broke the story in early September, put it plainly: after weeks of speculation about "papered garage door windows," the answer turned out to be a working bakery, not a sixth dinner concept.
That is a genuinely different bet for Taibe. Every previous opening asked people to plan an evening around him. hi'Amba is asking them to start their morning there instead.
Why Mornings, Why Now
This is not actually Taibe's first investment in the daytime economy. He has served on the board of the Westport Farmers' Market for years, and Lori Cochran-Dougall, the market's executive director, has credited him directly with its growth, saying that without his involvement "the Westport Farmers' Market would not be where it is today." The market runs Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 50 Imperial Avenue, built entirely around the hours before lunch. Taibe has already been in the business of getting people downtown before noon, one morning a week. hi'Amba is the first time he's built a permanent building around it.
Put those two facts together and the bakery reads less like a departure and more like a bet he has already been placing informally for years, now made permanent and open seven days a week instead of one morning.
Main Street Isn't Giving Up Dinner
None of this means downtown is trading its evening identity for a morning one. Felice, the Manhattan-born Italian restaurant known for its Tuscan-inspired menu and curated wine list, opened its first Connecticut location at 38 Main Street earlier this year, and it is unambiguously a dinner destination, the kind of room built for a bottle of wine and a long table. Downtown Westport can support both a chef teaching people to show up for breakfast and a new arrival betting on the dinner crowd that's been coming for decades. The two aren't in competition. They're evidence that the same few blocks are being asked to do more hours of work than they used to.
Two Saturdays to Plan Around
The fall calendar happens to bracket hi'Amba's opening with two events that make the same point in a different register. Both are daytime, both are outdoors, and both treat downtown as a place to walk rather than drive through.
- Sunday, September 27, noon to 4 p.m. The Bridge at Saugatuck's annual Oktoberfest takes over the riverfront with a full Bavarian menu from executive chef Stephen Lewandowski, including fresh pretzels with ale mustard and bratwurst, alongside local craft beer from Norbrook Farms and other Connecticut brewers. The lot closes for the event, so plan to arrive by train or rideshare.
- Saturday, October 3, 1 to 5 p.m. Westoberfest returns downtown for its ninth year, closing Elm Street, Church Lane and part of Main Street to car traffic for the afternoon so the district functions as a pure walking zone, with more than fifty local and regional beers poured along the way.
Neither event needed a nighttime slot to draw a crowd. Both are betting on the same daylight hours Taibe is betting on with hi'Amba.
What This Adds Up To
None of this is a story about a single restaurant opening. It's a pattern. The chef most responsible for turning Westport into an evening dining destination has spent the past several years quietly building a second reputation around mornings, first through a weekly farmers market, now through a bakery he's opening under his own name for the first time since the Tullio split. Read against the two Saturday festivals bookending its launch, hi'Amba looks less like a curiosity and more like the clearest signal yet that downtown's daytime hours are worth showing up for, not just its dinner tables.
If you already live here, that's a reason to rearrange a Saturday morning around Main Street instead of saving the walk for after 6 p.m. If you're the kind of person who tracks how a town's daily rhythm shifts over time, and what that shift tends to mean for the neighborhoods around it, that's exactly the sort of local read Susan Vanech Properties builds into every conversation about buying or selling here. If you're weighing what a move in or around Westport might look like, reach out for a confidential valuation and a conversation grounded in the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet.
