Tom Caldarera Jr. and Jim Cadelli opened Taliano's at 14th and B streets in Fort Smith in 1970. For fifty-five years, the restaurant occupied the J.M. Sparks Mansion, a two-story brick Victorian home built in 1887 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building's bones — original woodwork, marble fireplaces, period light fixtures — created an atmosphere that no interior designer with a budget could have replicated. You could not build what Taliano's had; you could only inherit it, and they honored it.
The dining room's fleur de lis carpeting, velvet drapes, and candlelight made it one of the most genuinely romantic rooms in all of Arkansas. Fort Smith came to Taliano's for proposals and anniversaries, for the birthdays that crossed a round number, for the farewell dinners that everyone knew were coming. The food — classical Italian execution, made with the consistency that comes only from decades of repetition — was the constant. The building was the magic.
When Taliano's announced its closure in April 2025, citing the end of an era after fifty-five rewarding years, the response from Fort Smith was what it always is when a city loses something genuinely irreplaceable: grief, then gratitude, then the particular kind of memory that only good restaurants create. The historic Sparks mansion building has since been acquired by Fort Smith attorney Kevin Hickey. Whatever follows in those rooms will inherit extraordinary architectural bones. Nothing will replace what happened inside them for five and a half decades.
