The Frankies Partners Will Open a Slice Shop

Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, who own two well-established Italian restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan, have been planning to open a slice shop since last September.

This September, they say, the pizzeria will finally open in a space between Frankies 457 Spuntino and Franks Wine Bar on Court Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. They are tentatively calling it F & F Pizzeria.

What took them so long?

“You need an expert. We’re not pizzaiolos,” Mr. Castronovo, 51, said with a shrug, in his office over Frankies 457 Spuntino, the restaurant he has owned with Mr. Falcinelli, 53, since 2004. “It wasn’t until we actually decided that we would do pizza that we realized that we needed to work with somebody, collaborate with somebody.”

After a few false starts, the Franks, as they are collectively known, have found worthy co-conspirators. They are working with Chad Robertson, whose California bakery, Tartine, heavily influenced the starter- and whole-grain approach to dough, and the pizza maker Chris Bianco, of the celebrated Pizza Bianco in Phoenix. Mr. Robertson and Mr. Bianco have worked together at the Los Angeles incarnation of Tartine’s the Manufactory.

In a phone interview, Mr. Robertson said that he and Mr. Bianco “always say, really, at this stage in our careers, we want to be in the best band with the people we like the most.”

The Franks have been close friends since childhood. They finish each other’s sentences, and set each other up for punch lines in well-worn anecdotes. They’ve got stories about just about everything, and everyone.

“The thing is, you know, everybody is a pizza expert in Brooklyn. We want to do something that is sustainable, delicious, healthy,” Mr. Falcinelli said, ticking qualifications off on his fingers.

“Something that you can hold with your hands,” Mr. Castronovo added.

“Yeah,” Mr. Falcinelli said. “No puddle pies. Not like, blah, wet in the middle.”

The new shop, on what they refer to as “the campus,” will be connected to the restaurant and wine bar by a single kitchen whose warrens full of olives, wine and dough weave behind and under the restaurants.

“The pizza project is the pizza project: You’re in and you’re out,” Mr. Castronovo said. “You’re not getting wined and dined. We have a restaurant for that, and we have a wine bar for that.” (Their Frankies Spuntino Group also includes Frankies 570 restaurant in the West Village.)

When they started talking about opening a slice shop last year, around the same time they opened their wine bar, they turned to the acclaimed pizzaiolo Umberto Corteo, who has owned his Long Island shop, Umberto’s, in New Hyde Park, N.Y., since 1965. That deal fell through, but both Mr. Corteo and the Franks say they are still friends.

“We grew up eating his pizza as kids,” Mr. Falcinelli said. “He’s kind of like the pizza king.”

All the same, the Franks bought the small building on Court Street where they will open their pizza shop. They had originally planned to open it in Cobble Hill, where they ran a coffee shop, Cafe Pedlar, until it closed in 2017. But when the building between their two restaurants became available, they couldn’t pass it up. They also knew they didn’t want to use the machine-made commercial ingredients common to most New York slice shops.

“They put bromine in the flour,” Mr. Falcinelli said. “It preserves it, it gives it that New York texture, but it burns. It’s basically fake dough conditioner.”

The new shop will use Mr. Robertson’s approach to making dough, with grain freshly milled every two weeks, well-hydrated dough, gentle mixing and a long rise with a natural sourdough leaven.

“When you eat Chad or Chris’s pizza, it’s delicious, it’s digestible and it’s sustainable,” Mr. Falcinelli said. “If you’re under 25, you don’t really care. If you’re over 30, over 40, over 50? It makes a massive difference. The dough is broken down bacterially. In essence, you’re eating bread yogurt.”

This is not, the four men stressed, a financial partnership, although they do have what Mr. Castronovo called “a reciprocal relationship.”

“They’re sharing with us their intellectual property, because they’re friends,” he said. “We try to help them out whenever we can help them out, they try to help us out whenever they can help us out.”

Over the 15 years the Franks have been in business, Carroll Gardens has changed from an everybody-knows-everybody Italian neighborhood to a younger, yuppier community, but the partners have kept that feeling alive. They know the regulars. The regulars know one another. Jimmy Kimmel, whom they met in 2014 after the Franks crashed a speech given by the Dalai Lama, is a regular when he is in town. Mr. Kimmel even bought them the “Franks” neon sign that hangs over the wine bar.

At the slice shop, they’ll have their own regalia. On the exterior wall, they’ll hang a heavy wrought-iron crest that they bought, while a little stoned they said, at an antiques fair in rural Massachusetts more than a decade ago.

“We started off looking at the thing and really being enamored by it,” Mr. Castronovo said, gesturing to the lions rearing on either side of the shield.

“And then we said,” Mr. Falcinelli cut in. “‘Do we have $7,000 in $20s? On us?’”

They did. The crest, which used to sit atop a European gate, will now grace the front of the slice shop.

“We want to create an institution,” Mr. Castronovo said. “We’ve become businessmen by necessity, but what we are is cooks.”

F & F Pizzeria, 459 Court St., frankiesspuntino.com. (Opens September)