Castronovo Frank - The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual

Merlin

THE FRANKIES SPUNTINO

Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual

An Illustrated Guide to Simply the Finest

FRANK FALCINELLI, FRANK CASTRONOVO, AND PETER MEEHAN

DESIGN BY TRAVIS LEE KAUFFMAN
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SARAH RUTHERFORD

ARTISAN NEW YORK

To our grandmothers

I didnt immediately recognize the number but I picked up anyway. It was a voice out of my past: Frank Falcinelli.

Wed met during my brief, unsatisfying, and unsuccessful turn in the public relations business. (I was twenty-two and didnt really understand what public relations was.) He was the chef at a place called Moomba, which scored two stars from Ruth Reichl in The New York Times. But by the time the PR firm I was working for got hired by the restaurant, the food had become an afterthought to the lounge upstairs, a fiercely guarded den of sin for models and celebrities.

We hung out a couple of times, had a couple of good nights. Frank eventually moved out west to open a Moomba in Los Angeles, and I thought that was the end of it. Then, boom, five or six years later a vaguely familiar 917 number pops up on my cell phone. Frank Falcinelli. He tells me he has opened a new place in Brooklyn.

I knew all that: my colleague, Dana Bowen, with whom I shared stewardship of The New York Times $25 & Under restaurant column for a spell, had written a glowing review of the restaurant Frankies Spuntino, which Falcinelli had opened with another guy named Frank, his partner and co-chef Frank Castronovo.

For me, it was halfway curious to see Falcinellis name, which I had vaguely associated with AsianNew American food, attached to a homey Italian-American spot in Brooklyn (though with a name like Falcinelli, it shouldnt have been a surprise). Come check it out, he said, and he added some bait: there was going to be a party, with a bonfire in the back garden and Chris Robinson from the Black Crowes spinning records. I hadnt been listening to a ton of Black Crowes at that point, but Sometimes Salvation was the first song I ever played onstage, back at a guitar showcase when I was fifteen, so that sounded like a good time. And who doesnt like a bonfire? Why not go see what Frank was up to?

It was a great night. Frank had mellowed in the intervening years and ditched the whole Moomba scene. He and Castronovo were trying to create a restaurant that was welcoming, unpretentious, and warm. And it was, genuinely so.

Soon after, I went back to the Spuntino for dinner. Falcinelli describes the food that he and Castronovo serve as the lighter side of Italian cooking, in the sardonically cornball way he likes to brand everything (like calling this book An Illustrated Guide to Simply the Finest; or proclaiming that Every day is Sunday at the Spuntino).

I was skeptical of the conceitmaybe of Italian-American restaurants in general, after too many lackluster meals. But there was a curious ingenuity to the Franks take on Italian-American cookinga lot of subtraction where other chefs would add, restraint where others would let loose.

Their avoidance of fried food seemed like a bad idea to me at first, but I realized that the more healthful approach made even the most indulgent classics that much more gentle. The Franks larded their menu with many of the nostalgic dishes that they had grown up with, including braciola, the cheese-stuffed braised pork shoulder thats a hallmark of every red-sauce joint in Brooklyn. But their versions were lighter, easier to eat, and impossible not to crave. They were not so much reimagined as reconsidered.

In the years since I first trekked out to Brooklyn to visit the Spuntino, Ive eaten an acres worth of the Franks Eggplant Marinara and probably made enough of their Caesar salad dressing to fill a claw-foot tub. I initially thought the white pepper they use, almost exclusively, was a strange affectation (a relic of their professional training in France), but now that Ive tested their recipes over and over again in my own kitchen, I find that its the pepper grinder I reach for most often no matter what Im making.

This cookbook was a slow and natural outgrowth of our developing friendship.

Over the years, I got to know both Franks better and their families, too: some of my favorite afternoons of the past few years were spent out at the beer garden with the gun range on Long Island with Falcinellis now 100-year-old grandfather, whos sharper than either his grandson or me, and with Castronovo and his wife, Heike, whos from the Black Forest of Germany, and their two kids, who are eternally tolerant and beatifically patient compared to what I was like at their ages.

Through the Spuntino, I also got to know Tony Durazzo, whos an architectural engineer by trade, and helped the guys design and build their restaurants, but who is more importantly a talismanic presence, a connection to the Italian-Americanness of Carroll Gardens (where Tony grew up and where the Spuntino is located), to all kinds of aspects of hippie life in the 1960s and 1970s (which Tony lived), and, most importantly, to some really good food (like Tonys recipe for Spuntino Meatballs, which is from his mom, on ). I also bonded with Travis Kauffman, the soft-spoken son of Michigan Mennonites, who designed books before getting mixed up (and eventually becoming a partner in) the restaurants.

It was Traviss idea to create an embossed, gilded, faux-leather cover for this cookbook, with hand-drawn illustrations of everything from can openers to ravioli. I was trying to figure out the angle to take on the text when I ran into Michael Klausman, who I met that first night I went out to Frankies, the evening of the bonfire and the hang. Michael was playing records that night, toohe and Chris always did the nights at the Spuntino togetherand we got to know each other over the next few months because he worked at Other Music, a record store where I spend a disproportionate amount of my income. Id routinely go in, and hed hip me to the latest reissues of folk records and other weird sounds, usually from the quiet, downer fringe.

One Saturday I was there to pick up some music, and he dropped a bomb on me: he and his girlfriend were unexpectedly pregnant. He asked me, as a food guy, about books to buy and what to cookhe and his girl had to start counting their pennies and he had to build up some dad skills. The Franks and I were already sketching out the recipes for this book, and I knew Michael liked their restaurant.