RESTAURANT NEWS | MARYLAND
Baltimore’s Seppia Is Not Another Red-Sauce Joint
Seppia turns a former five-and-dime into a coastal Italian restaurant with handmade pasta and five kinds of martinis.
SEPPIA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Maria Rodriguez
6:28 a.m. ET, July 12, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
A five-and-dime store built in 1901 now houses squid-ink pasta, five kinds of martinis, and one of Baltimore’s most ambitious new Italian restaurants.
Seppia occupies a historic building once home to the G.C. Murphy Five and Dime. The restaurant comes from Ben, Amy, and Jake Lefenfeld, the family behind La Cuchara, the Basque restaurant that landed on our list of the Michelin-worthy restaurants in Baltimore.
The Lefenfelds bought Seppia’s building in 2024 and found out how hard it can be to renovate a 125-year-old commercial property. They moved the staircase, removed part of the second floor, restored an original terra-cotta wall, and converted an old elevator into a dumbwaiter connecting the basement kitchen to the floors above. The finished restaurant has soaring ceilings, a long marble bar, sea-green walls, warm wood, and enough seats to accommodate roughly half of Hampden.
Getting Seppia open coincided with another unexpected renovation project for the Lefenfelds: La Cuchara has been closed since a January fire damaged its kitchen, with a reopening planned for later this year.
Seppia means cuttlefish in Italian, a useful clue that this isn’t another Italian restaurant built around chicken Parm and a red-checkered tablecloth. The menu follows the Italian coast, shifting south during warmer months and north when Baltimore gets cold. Ben and Amy Lefenfeld gathered ideas during trips through Venice, Abruzzo, Bologna, Genoa, and the Amalfi Coast, with Liguria providing much of the early inspiration.
Chef Daniel Evers leads a kitchen focused on fresh pasta and seafood. Mafalda al nero di seppia pairs ruffled squid-ink noodles with saffron mussels, shrimp, calamari, roasted peppers, and lemon. There’s crispy artichoke lasagna layered with spinach, béchamel, tomato sauce, and Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus whole poached artichokes meant to be peeled leaf by leaf and dragged through bagna cauda. The fritto misto brings together cuttlefish, calamari, shrimp, and zucchini.
General manager and sommelier Michael “Red” Farace oversees a roughly 300-bottle list reaching beyond Italy into Slovenia, Croatia, France, Spain, and Portugal. Sundays bring half-price bottles over $100. The bar also serves five classic martini variations.
It all conspires to be a restaurant that’s not a carbon copy of every other Italian restaurant out there: less red sauce, more seafood, more boozy, and a whole lot more just simply like nothing else.
Ming and Courtney Pu open TANA, a Taiwanese New American restaurant.
By ERIC BARTON
