Frevo

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Restaurant and a Gallery, Inseparable by Design

FREVO occupies a particular position in New York City's fine dining landscape: it is simultaneously a Michelin-starred restaurant and a working contemporary art gallery on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The two sides of the space are not decorative gestures toward each other — they are genuinely co-equal. The menu, the gallery exhibition, and the wine pairings all rotate on the same four-month cycle, so the experience shifts completely several times a year.

The project was co-founded by Chef Franco Sampogna and Bernardo Silva, two friends who met in the South of France in 2008, having arrived from Brazil and Portugal respectively. Their paths through some of Europe's most demanding kitchens — Franco at Guy Savoy and Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, Bernardo at the Shangri-La's two-starred L'Abeille — gave FREVO its backbone before the doors ever opened in May 2019.

The Cuisine: Sauces as the Organizing Principle

Chef Franco's cooking is described, in his own terms, as sauce-centered: classical French technique is the foundation, but South American and Asian influences pull the flavors in directions that are distinctly his own. The result is a tasting menu that reads as personal rather than categorical — contemporary fine dining that carries the weight of serious classical training without being imprisoned by it.

The beverage program matches that ambition. Quentin Vauléon, named Best Young Sommelier in France in 2017, leads the wine list and offers three distinct pairings — a Wine Pairing, a Premium Pairing, and a Non-Alcoholic Pairing — each calibrated to the textures and flavors of the current menu. Wine Spectator recognized the program with its Best of Award of Excellence in 2025, a distinction that reflects the depth and curation Vauléon brings to every rotation.

Art, Hospitality, and the Story Behind Both

Bernardo Silva oversees the hospitality experience and the art program. FREVO traditionally hosts three to four exhibitions per year, and the gallery's works are available for purchase. The inaugural show in 2019 was created by French artist Thomas Labarthe (TOMA-L), who had been invited to use the space as a temporary atelier while renovations were still underway — a detail that says something about how seriously the founders take the gallery side of things.

The dress code is elegant casual. Laptops and tablets are not permitted at the table. Dinner runs an average of two hours for parties of up to four. These are not arbitrary rules but choices that reflect a clear sense of what kind of place FREVO wants to be: attentive, focused, and worth the full attention of everyone in the room.