The Marchetti-Tarantino family's southern Italian kitchen — handmade pasta, Pugliese heritage, and forty years of Westport birthday dinners done exactly right.
The Marchetti-Tarantino family has been bringing the flavours of Gravina in Puglia — a small city in southern Italy's agricultural heartland — to Fairfield County since 1983. Forty-two years is a long time to sustain a restaurant anywhere; in Westport, where the dining landscape changes continuously and the competition for the best tables is genuine, it represents an achievement that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Tarantino is not the flashiest restaurant in town, and it has never tried to be. It is simply one of the most consistently satisfying, built on the conviction that good ingredients, family recipes, and the kind of hospitality that comes from cooking for people you are genuinely pleased to see are enough to build something that lasts.
The pasta is made by hand. That fact, in 2026, is less common than it should be, and at Tarantino it means something specific: the texture of the pasta — the orecchiette that the Pugliese tradition demands, the pappardelle that opens the menu's broader possibilities — is the kind that only handwork produces, and the sauces are built to complement that texture rather than to compensate for its absence. Handmade orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage is the kitchen's most direct statement of its heritage. The tiramisu, made in-house to a family recipe, is the correct way to conclude the meal.
For a birthday dinner in Westport, Tarantino offers something that newer restaurants cannot: the warmth of a room that has been making people feel welcome for forty years and that treats a birthday as the occasion it is. Ranked #13 in Westport, it is the top Italian birthday option in Fairfield County.
Address
30 Railroad Pl, Westport, CT 06880
Neighbourhood
Downtown, near train station
Price Per Person
$60–$95 with wine
Cuisine
Southern Italian, Handmade Pasta
Dress Code
Smart casual
Reservations
OpenTable — recommended
Hours
Mon–Fri lunch and dinner; Sat dinner only; closed Sun
Phone
+1 (203) 454-3188
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