Frankie & Benny’s: Why this failing chain still holds a place in my heart
My salad days did not involve much salad. They were instead filled with molten-hot dishes preceded by the disclaimer: “Please be careful, it’s really hot,” or ice-cold glasses piled vertiginously high with sugary things that towered above my gelled-up hair. And, almost always, I would devour these saucy and sweet extremities of temperature at Frankie & Benny’s, the Italian-American restaurant chain.
“Family: they’re the ones you can depend on,” Tony Soprano once said. But our family also depended on Frankie & Benny’s: for birthdays, celebration dinners and after-school surprises. My memories of it are tinted in a familiar shade of red: the crayons, the napkins, the sauces, the booths. And every visit ended with a cookie-and-ice-cream concoction so ludicrously sickly and diabolically fudgy that a dentist would rather pull their own teeth out with a sundae spoon than take on the challenge themselves.
TS Eliot’s Alfred Prufock said that he measured his life out in coffee spoons. I measured mine in sundae spoons
Frankie’s wasn’t the only franchise in which I spent my childhood — Nando’s, TGI Fridays and Prezzo were all family favourites — but Frankie & Benny’s topped the lot. There’s something reassuring about the consistency of a chain restaurant, with an equally reassuring consistency to its gloopy sauces. We stuck to what we knew. But it turns out I knew a lot less about the duo behind Frankie & Benny’s than I imagined.
Frankie & Benny’s: The men, the myth, the legend
The story of Frankie & Benny’s, as it goes, begins exactly 100 years ago in 1924, when Frankie Giuliani left Sicily and moved to Little Italy in New York. After his parents built and opened their own restaurant, Frankie became friends with Benny at school. In 1953, the pair took over the family firm and the rest is history. Or fiction, actually. For years, I believed this tale, one that’s immortalised in every franchise of Frankie’s, through framed family photos and sepia-stained newspaper clippings.
But F&B’s didn’t begin in Little Italy; it was launched in Leicester. And it wasn’t opened by the slick, suited-and-booted, rat-pack-styled duo of Frankie and Benny. Instead, it was founded in 1995 by The Restaurant Group (TRG), the earnestly-named conglomerate that has owned chains including Garfunkel’s, Chiquitos and Wagamama. I tried to speak to someone from TRG to find out how they happened upon this incredibly specific pair of fake Italians but nobody got back to me. Quickly expanding across the UK, the company opened its 100th restaurant in 2005 and became the kingpin of retail parks, dominating the spaces beside cinemas, bowling alleys and furniture stores.
The fall of Frankie & Benny’s
But by the mid 2010s, the Italian-American dream of Frankie’s began to fade and profits began to spiral. After first blaming a rise in competition, TRG conceded that it was probably down to high prices and poor service. TRG threw spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck. Breakfast was positioned as the Big New Thing, rebranding efforts were attempted and the menu was changed again and again, featuring a revolving door of spin-off dishes. The chicken parmigiana, the new CEO noted with a sense of horror, had been replaced by chicken saltimbocca. An angry mob was forming. In a surreal twist of fate, a toddler was accidentally served alcohol not once but twice in the space of a few years. Perhaps they needed to block out the saltimbocca.
In a surreal twist of fate, a toddler was accidentally served alcohol not once but twice in the space of a few years
In 2016, 33 branches were shuttered. In 2019, 18 more flailing franchises were closed for good. Then, at the start of the pandemic, scores more were whacked. The conglomerate even opened a short-lived version of the chain called Frankie’s, stripped of the original’s charming decor and, most devastatingly, any mention of Benny.
Today the writing is very much on the wall. Late last year, following the closure of dozens more F&B’s, TRG announced it would sell the franchise to The Big Table, owners of Cafe Rouge and Bella Italia. TRG didn’t make a penny from the sale, instead paying The Big Table £7.5m to take the loss-making business off its hands. With just a few dozen restaurants left, it’s possible that Frankie & Benny’s will soon disappear forever, melting away, like tears in ice cream.
To rub salt in the wounds, the fall from grace coincides with an Italian-American renaissance in the British food scene. Over the last few years, the likes of The Dover, Alley Cat and Grasso in London have created a new gang of grown-up meatball-and-spaghetti restaurants with far slicker decor and fancier food than Frankie or Benny could ever whip up. In wider culture, too, the rise of the Mob Wife aesthetic and mass rewatching of The Sopranos would seem to be a golden opportunity. But Frankie & Benny’s – the commercial Godfather to these new Italian-American restaurants – is being left in the parmesan dust.
Back to Benny
One of the remaining franchises is in Manchester’s Printworks centre. I head there on a weekday evening with my housemate, keen to try to relive the glory days of Italicised knickerbocker glories and Anglicised spaghetti bolognese. Taking a seat at one of its booths and slurping-up a syrupy, slightly-flat coke, I instantly feel at ease, nodding along to its playlist of crooners. Miles Davis and Sinatra are interspersed with Miley Cyrus, in an apparent effort to be a little more relevant. Regrettably, I don’t have the meatballs to ask for a crayon box. Just two other tables around us are populated, tucking into hefty burgers and a bottle of wine.
Time doesn’t pass here, in this liminal space somewhere between Leicester and Little Italy; the sundaes are permanently frozen; Frankie and Benny are stuck in stasis on the walls
The service is excellent and the decor is as fun as I remember, a kind of watered-down Scorsese film set. But when our food arrives, I realise my memories of eating here may be slightly warped. Either that, or it’s changed; because Frankie’s food, to be frank, is not great. This will, of course, come as absolutely no surprise to most people; Frankie & Benny’s had never threatened to land itself a mention in the Michelin Guide. But, once upon a time, I did love the food. Did I have no taste?
Perhaps, it’s partly because I have changed. I’m now a bit vegan, so my housemate is entrusted with eating the dairy. Either way, my sugary and vinegary penne arrabbiata is less angry, more a little irritated, mopped up with sad garlic bread. When the sundae comes, I do briefly consider giving up years of veganism to dive into its billowing, pillowy cloud of ice-cream and whipped-cream, a godly combination. But the bronzed busts of Benny that decorate the restaurant stare me down. According to my housemate its sweetness is migraine-inducing. When the bill arrives I realise that, while cheerful, it’s not even cheap: two pasta dishes, a side, two cokes and a sundae comes to well over £50.
Yet, for all its flaws, I leave with a full heart. For years, I have sneered at restaurant chains: tacky, bland outlets drained of any personality. There are, obviously, countless reasons to support independent restaurants and true Italian foodies would understandably see Frankie & Benny as the devil and the antichrist manifest. But there is a snobbiness at play, too. The last time I went to Frankie & Benny’s, on my first day at uni, I remember feeling embarrassed to be in one of its booths, like I had outgrown it.
The nostalgia trap
But what they can do is take you back to – as Frankie & Benny’s current slogan goes – The Home of Real Good Comfort Food. Sitting here in this ersatz gangster’s paradise, I realise I could be in the Frankie & Benny’s in Croydon where I celebrated my sister’s thirteenth birthday, or the one in Glasgow I went to for a package holiday kids club reunion decades ago. It’s true that, like the Frankie & Benny’s origin story, some of my own memories might be fiction. Was I really as happy as I remember? Did I really finish that sharing sundae by myself? Am I seeing this all through rosso-tinted glasses?
Either way, there is something irresistibly romantic about it. TS Eliot’s Alfred Prufock measured his life in coffee spoons. I measured mine in sundae spoons. Time doesn’t pass here, in this liminal space somewhere between Leicester and Little Italy; the sundaes are permanently frozen; Frankie and Benny are stuck in stasis on the walls; my childhood self remains sitting in one of those booths, smile stained red.