Inside the Fellini Coffee on the Upper West Side. Photo by Jessica Sherif.
Franco Noriega has exactly one more café to open before the year runs out, and he’s giving the Upper East Side a second one. His Italian coffee-shop-by-day, cocktail-bar-by-night brand arrived in the neighborhood for the first time in April. The follow-up is already signed, sitting more than a mile south of it in a stretch of the neighborhood Fellini hasn’t touched, and it’s outgrowing the format the chain built its name on.
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It’s headed to 135 East 63rd Street in Lenox Hill, between Park and Lexington avenues, according to What Now. How big it’ll be depends on who’s counting. The space is listed at 600 square feet, according to @TradedNY, while Noriega put it at roughly 850, well above the 500 or so a typical Fellini occupies. Either way he says it’ll have outdoor seating, which the brand’s smaller storefronts generally don’t.The pitch for the block, as Noriega described it, is “three different worlds colliding”: luxury retail along East 63rd Street, high-end residential buildings on Park Avenue, and an office population that turns over at lunch. He said location is the brand’s primary consideration when it picks a neighborhood.
Anyone who wants a preview doesn’t have to wait. Fellini’s other Upper East Side café opened on Lexington Avenue at 1335 Lexington near East 89th Street, and Noriega said the 63rd Street menu will be identical: the same coffee program, the same food. That means signature espresso drinks like the salted honey latte finished with pollen and the tiramisu latte, a night menu of spritzes, espresso martinis and wine, and a kitchen that runs from Benedicts and bottomless mimosas at brunch to pasta, pizza and steak at dinner.
The 63rd Street space is still under construction and no opening date has been set. The brand also has cafés in SoHo, the West Village, Chelsea, the Upper West Side, the Meatpacking District and East Hampton.
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Noriega told What Now that Fellini Coffee has four more locations planned for next year on top of this one, and that he’s separately launching a French brasserie-inspired spinoff called Saint at Seventh Avenue and West 22nd Street in Chelsea in early September. The Upper East Side café is the last thing opening under the Fellini name in 2026.Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
