New Restaurant, Bar Celebrating Grand Opening In West Haven

WEST HAVEN, CT — The Blue Horse, West Haven’s newest restaurant and bar, will celebrate its grand-opening on Friday, June 7 with a special performance by legendary local band Mean Carlene. The Blue Horse, which is owned by the husband and wife team of Robert and Tara Severino, is located at 703 Campbell Ave. The owners are inviting the public to the grand-opening event at the renovated space. The ribbon-cutting event will start at 4 p.m. with a free buffet.

For Robert and Tara Severino, The Blue Horse is the realization of a plan that began three years ago when the 28-year West Haven residents began looking for the right place to launch their new venture. They both had experience in the Greater New Haven restaurant and bar scene, Robert eventually became the co-owner of the Side Street Grille in Hamden for more than 20 years, and it was important for them to open their new business in West Haven near the University of New Haven.

“We saw that UNH students didn’t have their own place,” Tara Severino said. “We wanted to provide them with a place that was safe and where they could have fun – controlled chaos.”

Some of the small touches that makes the place fun for students, Severino said, are the couches around The Blue Horse’s bar and restaurant area and its tables. The students can lounge on the couches and draw on the tables. The Severinos painted each of the tables with a dozen coats of white eraser board paint and provide patrons with magic markers.

While it might sound like something young children would enjoy – and in fact parents are welcome to bring their children in for a meal – the Severinos say they recognized that the more sophisticated the mind, the greater the need for play, and simple pleasures, in everyday life.

“The college kids play all kinds of games on the tables,” Severino said. “They can unwind here. There’s no other place like this in West Haven.”

The Severinos said they also have more personal reasons for picking West Haven. They have raised their five children in the city since marrying and moving to Ocean Avenue in 1991. Tara Severino has coached West Haven youth soccer, basketball, baseball and softball at several levels over the last 16 years.

West Haven’s city soccer leagues also hosted a soccer-tournament fundraiser for Tara Severino that drew more than 500 people to West Haven High School in 2011, when she suffered second- and third-degree burns to more than 60 percent of her body in a gasoline-can explosion while tending a fire in her parents’ backyard in Ansonia.

The accident occurred on June 11, 2011 – the couple’s 20th wedding anniversary.

“We have met so many great people, parents and kids, and seen a few to grow up to graduate college,” Robert Severino said. “And when Tara was injured, the city was overwhelmingly supportive in doing things for her. It’s a very family-friendly community.”

That friendliness is among the reasons The Blue Horse offers smores cooked at the table and fried Oreo desserts– very important food with which to meet a child’s nutritional needs, Robert Severino said with a with a laugh.

The Severinos come into the restaurant business with a great deal of experience. An East Haven native, the 55-year-old Robert was 18 when he lost a deposit for $500 he put down to go to college to learn about computers that upcoming fall. With no money for school, Severino took a job at Toad’s Place as a bartender -- and stayed there for the next 10 years. He eventually became co-owner of Side Street Grille in Hamden for more than 20 years.

An Ansonia native, the former Tara Sambides, 53, met her future husband when she was bartending at Toad’s Place. She also worked at Viva Zapata’s and Humphrey’s in New Haven. Her mother, Loretta Sambides, worked as a waitress and hostess for more than 20 years in Milford, New Haven and West Haven.

They were married and moved to West Haven in 1991, where their children, ages 12 to 22, have attended West Haven public schools. Their eldest daughter, Alexis, helps manage Blue Horse and just graduated with honors from Quinnipiac University with a degree in medical management.

A former nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Tara Severino was forced to retire in 2018 due to a back injury. For years, she worked as a SWAT nurse at Yale, so named because they could be assigned, or assign themselves, to provide critical care to any patient anywhere in the hospital until a bed could be found in an intensive-care unit.

As such, Severino treated victims of all forms of accident or violence.

“I dealt with death day in and day out,” Severino said.

She misses nursing, but looks forward to returning to restaurant work. New kitchen freezers, a refinished bar top, countertops and tables and new couches give The Blue Horse a vastly different look from when it was Spectators, a sports bar. The Severinos – and all five of their children — did almost all of the renovations themselves.

For more information, visit The Blue Horse on Facebook here.