Tarantino: The Creative Mind Behind RoVino is Finally Doing It His Way
After building one of San Diego’s most celebrated Italian restaurants, Tom Tarantino is stepping out on his own — with a century of Sicilian heritage, 30 years of mastery, and zero compromises.
Some stories begin with a grand vision. This one begins with a net.
In the early 1900s, two men from the tiny fishing village of Porticello, Sicily — Pietro Tarantino and Gaetano D’Acquisto — crossed an ocean and landed in San Diego with almost nothing. No restaurant empire. No business plan. Just calloused hands, fishing nets, and the recipes their mothers pressed into their memories before they left.
They settled in what the world would come to know as Little Italy, and they became part of something extraordinary: a community of more than 6,000 Italian families who turned San Diego’s waterfront into the tuna capital of the West Coast. They fished. They cooked. They fed their families the way their families had always been fed — with ingredients that mattered, meals that took time, and tables where nobody sat alone.
Their grandson, Tom Tarantino, grew up in the middle of all of it.
Tarantino’s childhood was Little Italy at its most alive. His father was a fisherman who worked the same San Diego waters his grandfathers had. His mother came from Sicily. The kitchen was the center of everything — and in that kitchen, between the smell of simmering sauce and the sound of family voices overlapping in Sicilian, Tom learned something that no culinary school could teach: that food is not what you make. It’s how you make people feel.
In 1984, the Tarantino family moved to Scripps Ranch. Tom has lived there ever since — more than 40 years in the same community, raising his family in the same neighborhood where he would eventually decide to build the most personal project of his life.
But that chapter was still decades away. First, there was work to do.
Thirty Years of Learning What Most People Never Will
Tarantino didn’t rush into the restaurant business. He immersed himself in it — slowly, deeply, and from every angle. Over three decades, he moved between restaurant kitchens and the grocery industry, studying not just how to cook, but where the ingredients came from, why certain olive oils tasted different from others, what made one cut of salumi extraordinary and another forgettable. He learned produce, sourcing, wine, operations, catering, and the invisible art of making someone feel welcome the moment they walk through a door.
Most people pick a lane. Tarantino mastered the entire road.
Then He Proved It
In 2016, Tarantino channeled everything — the heritage, the decades of knowledge, the creative vision he’d been building in his mind for years — into a restaurant on a quiet stretch of Kettner Boulevard in Little Italy. RoVino Rotisserie + Wine.
What happened next was not subtle.
Under Tarantino’s creative direction, RoVino was named Best New Restaurant by San Diego Magazine in 2017. It earned Best Italian Restaurant from both San Diego Magazine and Ranch & Coast Magazine in 2018 and 2019. It won Best Wine Bar. And by 2019, a profile in SDVoyager noted that RoVino was the only restaurant in Little Italy to hold an overall 5-star Yelp rating — a remarkable distinction in one of the most competitive dining neighborhoods in Southern California. Tarantino also built a catering operation that carried that same standard beyond the restaurant’s walls and into homes, events, and private gatherings across the city.
People who were there during that era know exactly what it felt like. The food. The wine. The warmth. The feeling that someone who truly loved this craft was behind every detail. That kind of experience doesn’t come from a recipe. It comes from a person.
The Moment Everything Changed
In 2019, Tarantino expanded the vision with Rovino The Foodery — an Italian deli and market in San Diego’s East Village. It was a concept ahead of its time: bringing the quality of an Italian kitchen into a market format that people could access every day. The idea was right. The location wasn’t. The Foodery closed in 2023, but the concept only became clearer in Tarantino’s mind. He didn’t abandon the vision. He sharpened it — and he knew exactly where it belonged.
And then came the decision that changed everything.
Tarantino stepped away from his former ventures. No more partnerships. No more shared visions. For the first time in a career that spans three decades, he would build something that was 100% his — his standards, his creativity, his heritage, his name on the door, and nobody else’s hand on the wheel.
“I finally have the independence to do exactly what I’ve always envisioned,” Tarantino says. “Excellence and quality across the board — from the wine to the bakery to every single thing we serve. This is the standard I’ve always held. Now there’s nothing holding it back.”
Buon Cibo: The Place He Was Always Building Toward
Buon Cibo Italian Specialties — “good food” in Italian — opens February 2026 at 10380 Spring Canyon Road, inside the new Livia community in Scripps Ranch. It is an Italian deli, specialty market, wine boutique, and eatery, and it is, in every sense, the culmination of one man’s lifetime in food.
The offerings carry everything Tarantino has spent 30 years perfecting: authentic Italian sandwiches, Roman-style pinsa, Sicilian pastries including handmade cannoli, a curated grocery selection of premium Italian imports, and chef-prepared ready-to-heat meals and family-style feasts — made in-house, sold cold, and designed to be finished with love at home.
Then there’s the wine. Tarantino and his cousin, Thomas D’Acquisto spent nearly a year building Buon Cibo’s wine program from scratch — hand-selecting 100 bottles, every one of them restaurant quality, offered without the restaurant markup. For a man who already won Best Wine Bar in San Diego, this is not a side offering. It’s a statement.
The motto is simple: Eat Like an Italian.
And the location is no accident. Tarantino has called Scripps Ranch home since 1984. He’s not arriving in this neighborhood. He’s been here for over 40 years. He’s building for the community that raised his family, in the place where his kids grew up, on the same streets he drives every day.
As for the awards? Tarantino isn’t looking back. He’s coming for every one of them all over again — and this time, with nothing between his vision and the plate, he intends to set the bar even higher.
A Century in the Making
There is a straight line from Pietro Tarantino’s fishing nets to Tom Tarantino’s kitchen. It runs through the docks of Little Italy, through the canneries and the kitchens and the family tables where recipes were passed down without ever being written down. It runs through 30 years of learning every corner of the food business, through the awards and the accolades and the thousands of guests who sat down at RoVino and knew they were experiencing something real. And it runs right into the heart of Scripps Ranch, to a place called Buon Cibo.
This is not just another market or deli, this is Buon Cibo Italian Specialties..
This is Tarantino, unfiltered. A lifetime of heritage, craft, and creative fire — finally, completely, on his own terms.
Buon Cibo Italian Specialties
10380 Spring Canyon Road, San Diego, CA 92131 | buoncibosd.com | (858) 293-8815
Opening February 2026 | Mon–Thu 8am–8pm | Fri–Sat 8am–9pm | Sun 9am–8pm