With their new restaurant on the corner of 36th Street and Elm Avenue in Hampden, Ben, Amy, and Jake Lefenfeld have headed east of their beloved Basque region to the Italian coast.
Starting on April 2, Seppia will be open for daily dinner service. The new 250-seat restaurant has been several years in the making and is one of the most eagerly anticipated openings of the year, especially since a January fire temporarily closed the Lefenfeld’s Basque-based La Cuchara in Hampden-Woodberry.
Seppia (pronounced sep-e-a), named for the cuttlefish commonly found in the Mediterranean Sea, is set inside the G.C. Murphy Five and Dime building. The historic 1901 structure was at one time a stable and last home to the Five & Dime Ale House.
“We decided to purchase the building after looking at it,” says Ben. “We love the neighborhood and have been right down the street for 11 years now at La Cuchara. We thought it was a great opportunity to expand and put down very long-term roots within the community.”
With the help of Charles Patterson, director of design at SM+P Architects, the space underwent a full renovation that included moving the staircase, demolishing a portion of the second floor to create a 50-foot high ceiling, and refurbishing an old elevator that will now serve as a dumbwaiter to ferry various items from the restaurant’s basement kitchen and a wine cave, which will double as a private dining space.
An original terra cotta wall has been restored and is now showcased behind the bar. And the restaurant’s interior is all aglow with its sea green, gold, and caramel color palette, plus warm chestnut wood and brass finishes.
The driving force for a second spot, says Ben, was to provide new opportunities for their team.
“We were losing talent, because they were outgrowing us,” says the chef. “We needed a place to allow for people to rise up in the company.”
“Pasta is something special—it’s not the kind of thing you bring home and reheat. It’s in the moment of the technique and the freshness of it—there’s something a little mystical about that.”
The bulk of the menu will focus predominantly on pasta, both hand-rolled and extruded.
“I’ve always loved Italian food and fresh pasta,” says Ben. “Pasta is something special—it’s not the kind of thing you bring home and reheat. It’s in the moment of the technique and the freshness of it—there’s something a little mystical about that.”
To that end, Ben is currently hard at work in the kitchen refining his recipes for crispy artichoke lasagna with spinach, béchamel, and sugo di Pomodoro; ruffled-edge mafaldine with squid ink; and casarecce pasta (short noodles with curled edges) with venison ragù.
Seafood dishes also abound, including acciughe al verde (that’s Spanish-cured anchovies soaked in a green sauce of lemon, toasted garlic, olive oil, and parsley); frito misto (a variety of fried shellfish including cuttlefish, calamari, shrimp, and zucchini); and tuna crudo with chile crunch, fermented chiles, and tangerines.
A clever Buffalo milk ricotta “palette” starter is a canvas for a variety of accompaniments such as pistachio pesto, confit tomato, roasted garlic, and roasted shallots.
For the chef, culinary inspiration comes from research, experimentation, and especially travel. In 2024 and 2025, Ben and his wife, Amy, taste-tested their way all over the Boot Country.
“We started in Venice, we went to Abruzzo all along the Amalfi coast, stopped in Genoa and Vernona,” he says. “We went to Bologna. So many of the ideas for this menu came from the Ligurian coast.”
The menu will also change with the seasons. “We’ll be focusing on dishes and inspirations from Northern Italy in the wintertime and going to the south in the summertime,” says Ben, “but we want to utilize the best ingredients possible, so we’re going to see where that takes us from the starting point that we have right now.”
Ben sees the cuttlefish as an apt symbol for Seppia. “It just evokes a feeling of freshness, of salinity, of the ocean. It defines what we are going after.”
The cocktail program will be equally innovative with some 330 wines, predominantly from Italy but also other Mediterranean countries including Spain, France, Portugal, and Croatia. (On Sundays, wines $100 or more will be half-priced, with featured wines 25 percent off Monday through Thursday.) A quintet of martinis, from dirty to dry, will round out the beverage side of the menu.
The restaurant is named after the cuttlefish—a cross between a squid and octopus hybrid—because of Ben’s fascination with the mystical marine animal.
“I’ve been snorkeling before in the Caribbean and seen them,” he says. “They change color so they can camouflage with the rocks and if you’re swimming with them, all the other fish will be swaying with the waves and moving with the current, but the cuttlefish stays in one spot. It’s extremely intelligent and has a vision spectral color range, that is more than any other species on Earth.”
Ben sees the cuttlefish as an apt symbol for Seppia. “It just evokes a feeling of freshness, of salinity, of the ocean. It defines what we are going after,” he says.
After the opening, Ben is looking forward to getting back to the kitchen at La Cuchara, as well, though there’s no timeline just yet for reopening.
“We’ve been cleared by the powers that be to start rebuilding,” he says. “We’ve cleaned up all the fire debris except for the hood [where the fire is believed to have started] that the insurance company wants to take another look at. And then we are waiting on quotes to put a new duct run in for the wood grill. Once we have that quote and get an okay from the landlord to do it, we’ll have a much better timeline in terms of reopening.”