Frankies Spuntino

BeanieBaby made the announcement. She had barely left us for Boston and she was already coming back to town for a long weekend. I guess she just couldn’t live without us. We were headed to dinner at Frankies Spuntino, and I was honored to be included in the small group of her closest college friends.

It took me a few trials on Google to figure out just where we were headed.

“Frank what?”

“Frank-EEZ Spun-TEE-no,” she said.

It initially sounded to me like a hot dog joint a la Swanky Franks in Norwalk, Conn. BeanieBaby’s a closet foodie, however, and I doubted her idea of a special dinner in New York involved hot weiners. I owe a few of my restaurant discoveries to BB, including one of my new favorites, Freemans. If it weren’t for her I would never have heard of the place. And now I can add the Frankies chain to my “been there, done that” list thanks to BeanieBaby.

The Frankies feast turned out to be one of the last dinners I consumed during the week with friends. R.I.P. week night dinners. I was bumped from my cushy 8a.m. to 5p.m. shift and thrown onto the later evening shift which ends at the bewitching hour of 11:30p.m. Every night I’m rushing out of work for fear of turning into a pumpkin if I’m there until midnight. For some reason, that half an hour makes all the difference.

I live for spending time with friends and family, and with these odd new hours I’m getting used to the overabundance of “alone time with Mona.” The worst part is I only have two nights a week to go out with friends. While as before I had seven. Whether I was going out for parties or a happy hour or a dinner, my weekdays were strategically booked to break up the Monday through Friday monotony. After a month and a half of being on this schedule, I have yet to go out after work.

A sympathetic co-worker told me Blue Ribbon is a popular late night hangout but I’m too inhibited to show up by myself. If you know people who know people who go out late on school nights, please tell them Mona’s always up for a good time. Most of my friends are tuckered out and/or cocktail-happy from their after-work libations by the time I make it onto the scene. If I was in their shoes, I would be too.

We arrived at Frankies at around seven o’clock. It reminded me of ‘ino, but it had about half the amount of table space and it was much darker inside. There is a single row of tables against the charming exposed brick holding shelves of wine. Past the tables are the bar/kitchen on the left and the bathrooms in the back. At the end of dinner I barely made it from the bathroom at the end of the hallway to our table– I was dodging waitresses and hungry Frankies fans waiting for their takeout food.

As we were leaving, there were loads of people lingering outside looking in the window like kids peering into a toy store before Christmas. The window table for two is definitely the best seat in the house as it sits a few feet away from the other tables, where as we were so jam-packed it felt like we were eating at communal tables. But the window table is like a fishbowl. Passers-by were constantly putting their noses and hands up to the window to glance inside. Had I been eating there I would have felt obligated to perform tricks for treats like I was a caged animal at the zoo.

Our waitress came over a few times before we had actually decided on what to eat. The menu was small, we were just catching up in quicktime. After some debating, we decided to share a trio of crostini. We tried the ricotta and aged provolone, avocado and pesto, and cremini mushroom and truffle oil. It was challenging to share. Each crostini serving was super-sized. It was more like toppings with a side of crostini. Most of the toppings fell off the bread and we were eating them with forks like a salad. Once this happened, all the flavors blended into one. The avocado and pesto tasted like flavorless guacamole. The mushroom was my second favorite, but was a bit heavy on the salt. The best by far was the ricotta and parmesan –simple but delicious.

For my main dish I ordered the house-made gnocchi marinara and fresh ricotta. The gnocchi was excellent–soft but not too doughy– while the marinara sauce was bland and watery, as you can see below. I already knew I loved the ricotta and would have preferred it without the marinara sauce all together. Gnocchi is so rich it’s tough to make a sauce that stands up to it and this definitely did not.

After trying my neighbor’s dish, I wished I had ordered the same. Dumb. Dumb. Cavatelli is my all-time favorite pasta, but I just wanted to order a variety of plates. Curses. She ordered the homemade cavatelli with hot sausage and browned sage butter. Once she was full I kept reaching over to share. If she had wanted leftovers, there was no chance of it now. The pasta was al dente and it had just the right amount of butter and well-cooked sausage.


We shared meatballs for the table and they lacked that umph I was hoping for. Meatballs have big mouths to fill as my Dad’s been making them homemade for as long as I can remember.

Last but not least J ordered sweet sausage, roasted red peppers and onions over pine nut polenta. I’m quite shocked Frankies serves something that looks like it came straight out of a mess hall. I didn’t even want to try it it looked so unappetizing. It was a big heap of veggies over a big puddle of watery sauce. Something seemed off and I wasn’t going to be the one to find out what. Poor J was surprised herself when the goulash was placed in front of her. I caught her dual-raised eyebrows. Judging by the amount she left on the plate, our first impressions were accurate.

Being half-Italian, my standards for eating out in Italian restaurants are perhaps higher than the average Jane. Spuntino means snack, or place for a snack. Maybe they should go the route of ‘ino and stick to snacks like sandwiches and bruschetta, rather than bland entrees. While I enjoyed the atmosphere and company at Frankies, I was uninspired by the food. I wanted to like it, for BeanieBaby’s sake and for the sake of adding another Italian restaurant to my repertoire, but nothing spoke “return” like tossing a coin into Rome’s Trevi Fountain.

17 Clinton St., near Stanton
212-253-2303