Finding Frankie’s
A few years ago there was a guy named Nathan who lived among the warehouses just below Butler Street in Lower Lawrenceville. Nathan was blind, and he didn’t make a point of venturing outside the neighborhood very often, but nearly every day a curious aroma of onions, and grease wafting through the neighborhood would lead Nathan toward Frankie’s Extra Long. All he had to do was follow the smell.
“He’d come up here almost daily for a six pack and hot sausage,” explains current owner of Frankie’s, Rick Zenk. “And he’d find his way up here from the alley back there and up to the door here at the bar.”
Nathan’s sense of smell may have gotten him to Frankie’s, but sometimes finding his way home was a bit more difficult.
“A couple of times, if he had a couple beers, he’d get a little disoriented and he’d wander out into the middle of the street,” says Zenk. “I’d have to come out and point him in the right direction.”
Even though he had a hard time finding his way out, his friends at Frankie’s could rest assured that he’d have no trouble finding his way back tomorrow afternoon.
On the 35th block of Butler Street, situated next to a neat little antique shop, you’ll find the unassuming yellow brick building whose blue-collar appeal is almost as strong as the smell that led you to it in the first place.
Frankie’s has been drawing people in for over 60 years now. Zenk and his family have run the show for the past 21 years. And while the neighborhood has evolved over the years, the business has changed hands only twice.
“It was started,” Zenk explains, “by a gentleman who lived up the street, Lou Nease. And he had a partner; his name was Frank Dalicandro.
“I heard one story where it opened on New Years Day of 1950… Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not.
“When they opened up they were actually across the street. And they had four more locations too. There was one in Garfield, and there was one out in the east end. I’m not sure where the others were. I’m not sure what happened, but the partnership ended and this is the only remaining one. [After that] it was run by a gentleman up the street and his family; that was until about 1986. Then we purchased it in October of 1989.”
Zenk, like virtually all of the employees at Frankie’s, first came to know the place as a customer.
“I grew up in Stanton Heights. I used to come in here when I was in high school cause one of my friends used to go to St. Augustine’s. And we’d come down and eat here.”
Some years and gray hairs later, while he was browsing through the newspaper one morning, he came across a listing that would change his relationship with Frankie’s. “Me and my buddy saw an article in the classifieds. It said ‘Lawrenceville fast food for sale.’
“It started out like as a joke about purchasing it. So I started to talk about it with my brother and my wife… and it started out, we said, ‘hey, take a look at this place…’
“So we came down to take a look at the place…and we showed interest in buying it, and my wife and I actually decided to come in to work here for a couple days without pay just to see what it was like. The volume was there and the business was there. The place is a landmark.”
As Zenk and I are talking at the weathered wood-top bar, his son, who helps out with odds and ends around the restaurant, shouts over, “Did you tell him it’s like Cheers?”
Zenk cracks a smile and motions toward two middle-aged guys sitting at the end of he bar near the door. “These guys over here come in and they have the same seats, the same spots… They come in at the same time and leave at the same time.
“It would be unnatural to see these guys up here,” Zenk explains as he points toward the other end of the bar. “This is where they sit.”
Frankie’s feels like Cheers in the way that Cheers really was Cheers. This isn’t the kind of place that got a reputation as a landmark because it was featured on a TV special, or because someone arbitrarily named it the home of the best hot sausage in all of Pittsburgh, or even because they name their food after local sports heroes. They don’t need to. The hot dog is called a hot dog, and the sausage, a sausage; and both are delicious. You’ll smell like onions when you leave, but like a traveler with a sticker on your suitcase, everyone will know where you were.
Generally, smelling like onions would be undesirable, but when you work at Frankie’s it’s more like a badge of honor. As you might imagine, the workers have developed a kind of immunity to the smell after working there for so long. Nikki, a relative rookie at Frankie’s, has been around for only 6 months now, but the place has already made its impression.
“No matter what, we always smell like onions.” She laughs to herself as she packs up a customer’s order. “The bed, the sheets, the pillow - no matter how many times you wash them – you always smell like onions. It comes out of our pores!” She hustles behind the counter, taking orders, filling orders. She shouts to the other cook, Melanie, “I need two hotdogs and a sausage.”
Melanie’s been around a little longer – well, a lot longer if you count her days as a customer. “I’ve been coming here for probably 26 years,” she says. After coming to Frankie’s for so long, the transition into working there was natural. “One day my aunt asked if I wanted a job, so I started working here!”
Melanie looks over about half a dozen burners and a couple fryers, all of them continuously cooking the big three items at Frankie’s – hotdogs, hot sausage, and of course, onions. If you look above the relatively small cooking area, you’ll see the grease stained ceiling tiles. They’re the kind of stains that are strangely comforting; they let you know that what’s being prepared there has some kind of life of its own. It is a mark of the first steps of the smell from its origin on the old silver burners that eventually floats up through the vents, down the streets, and weaves its way in-between the houses of Lower Lawrenceville.
The neighborhood is changing, and with trendy restaurant’s like Tamari and Piccolo Forno popping up all around, you might think that the crowds have gravitated toward the kind of places you’d more closely associate with Lawrenceville’s recent renaissance.
But it hasn’t really played out that way. In fact, Zenk is excited about the recent changes. “When we bought this business here that was towards the end of the 80s when all the mills around here were starting to go. There was no problem getting a parking space. Now we’re getting a new influx. There’s Tamari up the street. There are other upscale restaurants coming in here. It seems to be a popular area!”
While the other restaurants in the area really come alive in the evening - after the young professionals are done doing whatever it is they purport to do, and hipsters are, well, just starting their day – Frankie’s concentrates on another crowd, the lunch crowd.
For those working in the warehouses along the Allegheny and the boutiques along Butler, lunch at Frankie’s has become a staple. And for those unlucky enough to actually crave the cruel and teasing grin of the half-hour lunch break, Frankie’s gives you a damn good meal at a price you can manage with the kind of job that only gives you a half-hour for lunch.
Those in a hurry use the door on the right, and those with a little more time – some who might use Frankie’s as an alternate address – use the bar entrance on the left.
“There are city workers who can come in here with mud all over them, and be in line with businessmen with suits on,” Zenk explains. “There’s nothing fancy about it. The food’s good and it’s cheap.” Fancy isn’t usually a word you’ll find in the same sentence as Frankie’s.
In the bar, the walls are painted a thick bright green, and the dropped ceiling tiles have all the charm of a high school cafeteria. But when you get your hot sausage with an intimidating pile of caramelized onions that’s slowly seeping into the bun, you’re not looking at the walls or the ceiling; you’re trying to figure out how to get that sandwich in your mouth as quickly as you can. And after you unsuccessfully try to contain the sandwich, you may even find yourself contemplating licking the spilled remains off the weathered wood counter. But at these prices, why not just order another?
A young couple, both clad in skinny designer jeans and the kind of ironic t-shirts that will flood The New Amsterdam later that evening, step out of one of the new brightly painted, freshly renovated boutiques of Lower Lawrenceville. They reveal themselves as tourists when the man pulls a folded up map from his back pocket. They’ve undoubtedly heard about Lawrenceville from either some hip local friends or one of the numerous New York Times articles singing the neighborhood’s praises.
But before they have time to investigate the map’s contents any further, they’re hit with an oniony smell that’s caught in a westward wind sweeping down Butler Street. Like all good tourists they decide to follow their instincts, or more accurately, their stomachs, and figure out the source. They arrive outside of the humble brick building, turn to each other, and the girl asks, “Which door should we use?”
