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Illustration by Jean Jullien
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There is an upper echelon of international chefs, a group of mostly male, mostly modernist superstars who meet up regularly at wonky food conferences from Cook It Raw in Japan to Mistura in Peru. Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo are not that kind of chef: They are partners in the delicious though not especially innovative restaurants Frankies Spuntino and Prime Meats. But over the past few years they have become two of New York’s most ubiquitous attendees on the circuit.
It began four years ago, with an introduction to the Danish chef René Redzepi, who was just about to launch the first MAD (Danish for �food�) symposium and invited the Franks to join. �He was creating the ultimate forum for chefs to communicate to each other,� says Castronovo.
Over the years, presentations at MAD have ranged from a carbon-footprint comparison between various restaurants to a Brazilian jiu-jitsu teacher discussing his diet. Falcinelli and Castronovo quickly made new friends. �Ultimately, it is a pretty tight group: René, Alex Atala, David Chang, Massimo Bottura, Ferran Adrià, Michel Bras, Gastón Acurio, Sean Brock, Daniel Patterson, Wylie Dufresne, Magnus Nilsson, Matt Orlando,� says Castronovo. �We represent the non-starred chefs of the alliance.�
For New York restaurateurs cooking simple Italian food, gatherings like MAD sometimes surface helpful ideas to bring home. (At an event at Meadowood in Napa Valley, the partners took pictures of how the brooms were hung, as inspiration.) But the larger point of all this activity is to extend the Franks’ brand beyond running a local business. �We designed our restaurants specifically so we didn’t have to be chained to the kitchen every day for 12 hours,� says Castronovo. In a sense, they figured out how to scale their empire without opening a Frankies Spuntino in Vegas or Abu Dhabi. Earlier this year, Vice debuted a web series, Being Frank, that tags along on their globe-trotting. And all of this with minimal investment. �We pretty much figured out a way to get everything paid for,� says Castronovo. �My mom works for British Airways, so Frank and I just pay the taxes. And then eating is like a chef’s courtesy. You always comp your friends.�