Franny's, Visited 2/14/10, 2.75 Forks

Franny's 295 Flatbush Ave
(between Prospect Pl & St Marks Ave) Brooklyn, NY 11217

I had heard and read about Franny's for a long time as being one of the better restaurants in the 'hood, but never been. It took about 15-20 minutes to walk there from our apt but it was a really interesting walk since there were tons of great looking places to eat on Flatbush. It's definitely a street worth checking out when the weather gets nicer.

The wait was about 15 minutes, which wasn't bad considering it was Valentine's Day. I appreciated that they didn't have a prix-fixe menu like many restaurants. We all started with a round of drinks ($10-13 for cocktails, $7 for beer). I had a ketel one and fresh grapefruit juice, aarti had a bloody mary, will a glass of red wine and dan had a pint of kelso pilsner. My drink was pretty good and a decent size.

The menu at Franny's is mostly wood-oven thin crust pizza and they have a real focus on using seasonal ingredients. The seasonal ingredients were mainly used on the appetizers. We ordered the beet salad with peccorino cheese, roast fennel and a cristino with proccuito and egg and bean. You could definitely tell that they used fresh ingredients and took care in preparing the food. I was a bit disappointed that the cristino was only 1 piece...for $9, I would expect at least 2 pieces, but the 1 piece was pretty tasty. The egg was used as a spread on the bottom. Dan and I ordered the tomato, buff mozz and sausage pizza ($17) and aarti and will ordered the same thing with no sausage ($16). I was a bit annoyed that the waitress was trying to up sell us by saying "well, you ordered kind of light for 4 people. The pizzas are really for 1." I had seen the pizzas before ordering and they are definitely enough for 2 if you had apps before hand.

In general, I'm not a huge pizza lover. I mean, I like pizza and would never be adverse to eating it but to me, it's really hard to make a bad pizza if you use the right ingredients. Our pizza was good, light and fluffy. I even ate the crust, which I normally don't do. We had left room for dessert but when we looked at the dessert menu, it was pretty disappointing. There was nothing any of us really wanted, which is pretty hard to do and I think a bad sign for a restaurant when people actually left room in their stomach for dessert. The total bill for the 4 of us was $132. While I don't think there was anything wrong with the food, I think it's a bit expensive for what you get.