Frankies Spuntino

Issue: How to take the stress out of a small birthday dinner.

Rule: When planning a celebration dinner you dear blogger can go a little crazy. (Your dear blogger is also a bit of a worrier.) There is no perfect way to make it happen. The list of invitees has to be much smaller than the list of friends so I always fear making someone feel left out. I also worry that the expense will price people out of a delicious dinner. Finding a central location is always tricky. How can I take the stress out of the dining experience?

Application: Well, to help me explain I have re-enlisted former guest blogger Eric Mancini for his view on Frankies 457 on Court Street. Eric can attest to whether this group dining experience worked. Eric, take it away:
Planning a birthday dinner with ten guests is deceptively hard. Just pick a restaurant the birthday boy or girl likes, make invitations and send out the carrier pigeons, right? Well, it's more complicated than that. You've got ten different palettes, ten different income levels. Different social worlds (friends, colleague's, spouses) colliding. I realize I am not breaking new ground with these observations. What I'm trying to do here is explain that when we ended up at Frankies 457 on Court St. for a birthday dinner with friends, it was no accident. Frankies represented the best possible triangulation between great food, affordable prices, and festive (but classy) atmosphere. We had an amazing meal.
Frankies has apparently made a name for itself among the upper levels of Brooklyn dining establishments. Living outside of Brooklyn near one of its feeder cities (Providence – sort of a minor league baseball team version of Brooklyn), I came into Frankies unburdened by expectations. The street itself gave me hope, since I had had such a great meal at Buttermilk Channel during a past visit, and Prime Meats always intrigued me, though I could never physically get it (both times it was as packed as an Italian airport tram). The restaurant itself is intimidating at first: it's shaped like a bottle, narrow in front with a wider back dining area and a spacious (for the city) outdoor area. The first glance from the front door had me worried that we would be fighting with our elbows for every square inch, but seconds later we were standing outside, drink in hand with the elbow alert lowered to light green.
With a party of our size, family style eating is the de rigeur standard at Frankies. Family style as a restaurant mode brings up some unpleasant, button busting memories for me. With a subpar restaurant what it means is 'you pay a little more, and we add so much pasta to your chicken parm that it can feed your whole table twice over, with plenty of leftovers to slowly coagulate in Styrofoam containers in your fridge. This was ideal in college, but nowadays just give me a small, well prepared portion of something real and good.
Fortunately, Frankies does it right. First of all, there's no ordering. At some point in the night, the food starts coming, and at some point it stops. No input is required between these two sign posts. Lack of control might be a negative for some, but I welcome sitting down at a good restaurant and submitting to the will of the chef, knowing I'm in good hands. And the portions were calculated with scientific accuracy. Everyone left full, but no worse for the wear, with some very small boxes of leftovers that were just too delicious to leave behind.
Speaking of which – the food! The plates of meat, cheese and vegetables came out first – high quality products heaped on the plate along with baskets of spongy, salty focaccia bread. All of the plates differed in some basic way, leading to many family style moments of passing, grabbing, and ladling and secret snacking before the real eating began. The main courses came next, and they revealed the real strength of Frankies: unbelievably fresh, delectably springy house made pasta. Our two main courses were cavatelli in brown butter sage sauce and gnocchi in a sweet red. Now, being Italian myself, I'm fairly critical of this kind of food. So much of the food I enjoy in Brooklyn has no reference point in my past (ahh...crispy pork belly, just like my mom used to make). But I grew up with one of those grandmothers your Italian friends are always boring you with stories about, and I'd like to think I know a thing or two about home made pasta. And I can tell you that Frankies has the perfect gnocchi: soft, cottony on the outside with an elastic center that gives the perfect amount of resistance before splitting between your teeth. Not pasty; no trace of mealiness. Meanwhile, if forced to choose I would say the brown butter sage sauce won the night. It is classic Italian: four ingredients, sage, butter, cheese and lemon, achingly fresh and surprisingly complex. The giant meatballs may have been the only miss of the night, and that is just my opinion. The waiter slid them onto the table like a rack of pool balls, and their raw size, along with the odd mixing in of raisins that caused them to not hold their shape just didn't work for me. Hardly cause for concern.
Application: After a few dessert plates and some unwanted happy birthday singing we were back out on the street and off to Abilene, another hip star in the natty constellation that is Court street, full of potato pasta but not feeling overstuffed, in fact, feeling like a family. If you get to Frankies 457, and I suggest that you do, don't skip the gnocchi.

Your blogger would like to take the reigns back to first thank Eric for his lovely post but also to defend with full force the famous Frankies meatballs. I LOVE the raisins for their unexpected sweetness and for the depth they lend to the dish. The meatballs were indeed huge pool ball sized (all the more to enjoy!), moist, and yummy. One of the best things about the meatballs is how easily they can be adapted to home cooking. Some of my favorite dishes to make at home are meals that I previously ate at a restaurant. With the assistance of Frankies cookbook we have been able to replicate these meatballs at home to a cheering audience.
And while I loved the cavatelli with brown butter and sage, the gnocchi in red sauce with amazingly fresh and delicious ricotta stole the entree show for me. I still contend that the best part of the whole meal is always the veggies in the antipasti. Carrots, cauliflower, mushrooms, and other vegetables are slicked with delicious olive oil and roasted up. There is no better way to celebrate a new year.