Sempre Oggi – a menu rewritten daily on the Upper West Side

Sempre Oggi sits at 164 West 75th Street on the Upper West Side, one block from the Beacon Theatre and a short walk south of Lincoln Center, in the address that for years belonged to Tom Valenti's 'Cesca. It opened in March 2024, backed by restaurateur Robert Guarino — the name behind Marseille, Nizza, Playa Betty's and 5 Napkin Burger — in partnership with Simon Oren of Chef Driven Hospitality. Sempre Oggi means "always today", a philosophy that plays out as a menu rewritten most days around whatever the city's farmers' markets deliver that morning, with pasta rolled fresh each morning rather than held overnight. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, and its own guide listing marks the price scale as "Spare no expense." Executive chef Nick Griffo, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who trained at Maialino before taking his first top job here in 2024, runs the kitchen behind a dining room built around the geometric spirit of Gio Ponti.

01The room and the setting

Architect Eamon Roche of Roche Modern split the address into a 15-seat bar lined with handmade ceramic tiles and a dining room built for around 150 covers. The scheme leans on Gio Ponti throughout: the bar's tiles echo the Milanese architect's long-running collaboration with the ceramics house Ceramica D'Agostino, and a custom floating chandelier picks up his fondness for geometric form, light and colour. Gold busts stand around the dining room, giving the large space a theatrical note that keeps it from reading as a standard trattoria.

02The chef

Griffo grew up in Syracuse, New York, with a Louisiana-born mother who taught him to cook and made him gumbo on request every birthday. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 2011 and began his career with an internship at Maialino, then spent nearly six years with Union Square Hospitality Group across Blue Smoke and the opening team at Porchlight. Four years in Nashville, at Rolf and Daughters and its sister restaurant Folk, pushed him toward seasonal, market-driven and wood-fired cooking. Back in New York from 2020, he held leadership posts as executive sous chef at La Pecora Bianca and chef de cuisine at Lupetto before joining Sempre Oggi as executive chef in 2024 — his first run as the chef in charge. The MICHELIN Guide added the restaurant to its New York selection the following spring.

Insider tip

Selected in the MICHELIN Guide; dinner nightly from 4:30pm, weekend brunch 11am–2pm.

03The cooking

The kitchen writes a new menu most days around whatever is at its peak, rather than holding to a fixed repertoire. Pasta and bread are both made in-house, with semolina flour giving the noodles a nutty flavour and the dense, al dente chew purists look for. A large oven at the centre of the room turns out roast chicken and porchetta with properly crackled skin, alongside vegetable-forward dishes that change with the market. Even the familiar plates get unusually careful sourcing rather than reinvention — Rhode Island calamari finished with herb crème fraîche rather than the standard marinara, or rigatoni all'amatriciana built on crisped guanciale rather than the softer version found elsewhere in the neighbourhood.

04What to order

Start with the Sempre Oggi Focaccia, served with Quinta Luna Umbrian olive oil, or the housemade stracciatella with peperonata and Jimmy Nardello peppers. For pasta, the rigatoni all'amatriciana, built on guanciale and pecorino, or the bucatini alle vongole with New Zealand cockles and white wine, both show the kitchen's daily-made dough at its best. From the grill, there's the costoletta di vitello alla Milanese — a veal chop dressed simply with little gems and lemon — or grilled branzino with pistachio pesto and charred broccoli rabe. The tomato basil arancini, finished with a parmigiano fonduta, is worth ordering at the bar before any of it.

05Wine and drinks

Aperitivo Hour runs daily from 4 to 6pm, with $10 cocktails and Italian bar snacks from $7 — timed, deliberately, for anyone heading to a 7pm curtain at Lincoln Center or the Beacon. The house pour is the Oggi Martini, a seasonal dirty martini made with gin and the brine from the kitchen's own giardiniera. On the second and last Thursday of each month, the bar and dining room turn over to Vinyl Night, when David Kastin plays from his own collection between 8 and 11pm, with no cover charge. Outside reviewers put the wine list at around 145 selections with genuine depth across Italy's regions.

06The neighbourhood

The restaurant trades on its address: the Beacon Theatre is one block away, Lincoln Center a short walk south, and the American Museum of Natural History about ten minutes north, with Central Park just past Columbus Avenue. It's the kind of corner of the Upper West Side where a pre-theatre crowd and a weekend brunch crowd overlap, and Sempre Oggi plays to both — Aperitivo Hour before a show, hand-made pasta and weekend brunch before a day at the museum.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.