RESTAURANTS • First Person
F&F Restaurant and Bar opened its doors in Carroll Gardens in mid-December after a good run as Franks Wine Bar (and, before that, Germanic chophouse Prime Meats). With the flip to F&F, I expected to find an even more pizza-forward restaurant than the wine bar, which served personal-sized pies and a short menu of whatever amused the kitchen that day.
But when I sat down for an early dinner with my wife and two little girls last Friday, we discovered a larger, more interesting menu — with pizza, of course, but also offerings ranging from Rhode Island squid a la plancha, to spinach gnudi, to braised pork braciole.
Our server, catching our surprise, stepped up to explain. “We just moved the pies to the right side of the menu two days ago,” he said. “It’s a psychological shift.”
It worked! The best plates we experienced on this night weren’t pizzas. That spinach gnudi surprised us, each piece floating atop a gorgeous gorgonzola sauce. That braciole, a tender hunk of pork served atop mirepoix and polenta, and gone in a flash, decadent and delicious in the extreme. Rest assured, the pies are still great, including classics from their next door slice joint F&F Pizzeria, and a few restaurant-only numbers, such as guanciale and leek.
F&F’s namesakes, Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo, have been serving their trademark take on Italian-American cooking in this neighborhood for more than two decades. But whereas their pioneering Frankies Spuntino a few doors down traffics in (well earned) greatest hits, at F&F, the Franks are cooking a little more adventurously, and so far the kitchen is making the most of it.
Also making the most of it when we were there: Frank C. himself, who — when not popping magnums of a bewitching Spanish white and a premier cru Burgundy for by-the-glass consumption — dropped by our table and told us that he’s in the house every night, driving the offerings. He’s obviously having a blast.
The fundamentals of the space haven’t changed much since the Prime Meats days, and why should they? The restaurant remains neatly divided between its narrow bar room and sizable main dining room, now with some new lighting and art but still the same dark-wood Peter Luger-esque feel, the din growing as the dining room fills up with multi-generational families.
As our girls dug into arancini and the “Lil Franks & Beans Cassoulet,” I reflected on the fact that there’s no place they’ve dined out in NYC more often than the Franks’ Court Street complex (indeed, they’ve been eating here since before they were born, with both their baby showers taking place in the Spuntino’s backyard). They can move the pies, even play with our psyches, but we’ll keep coming back — for the old, and new. –Lockhart Steele
→ F&F Restaurant and Bar (Carroll Gardens) • 465 Court St • Mon-Thurs 11a-9p, Fri-Sat 11a-10p • Reserve.