Your favorite restaurant
The New York City restaurants FOUND subscribers love the most
RESTAURANTS • First Person
Enduring love
On a blustery afternoon earlier this month, Lock and I had lunch at Frankies. We were there to catch up on FOUND business over shared sandwiches, but also because I was on a special mission.
It was my wife’s birthday (a big round one), and Frankies is her favorite restaurant. She and I have been going there since the restaurant opened in 2004 and we lived around the corner on the third floor of a Carroll St. brownstone.
We only lived in that bright floor-through for two years, but they were formative, and Frankies was a revelation. We sat at the bar and in the backyard and in the corner of the twinkling dining room, incredulously peering over at the tiny kitchen (really, a nook) producing those meatballs, cavatelli, roasted sunchokes, and prunes in red wine.
After we moved away (to Ann Arbor and then the UWS and finally to the suburbs), Frankies became a place for our celebrations, first just the two of us and later with the kids, who adopted the restaurant as their own. (Our youngest once wrote about Frankies in response to a fourth grade prompt, Review your favorite restaurant. “The meatballs aren’t like any meatball...”)
We were all going to make the trip for the big birthday celebration this month, but life got in the way and we had to be on the sidelines rooting on one of the kids at the appointed time. So I made this special lunchtime mission, and placed a to-go order between our sandwiches and coffee.
Back home that evening, we sat around our dining room table and ate the pastas and meatballs and salads and prunes. We put a candle in a slice of chocolate tart. Two decades on, it was like we were tasting this food for the first time. To favorite restaurants, and many happy returns. –Josh Albertson
→ Frankies Spuntino (Carroll Gardens) • 457 Court St • Sun-Thu 11a-10p, Fri-Sat 11a-11p • Reserve.
SUBSCRIBER FAVORITES • The Nines
FOUND 9: NYC Restaurants
We’ve been asking new subscribers to tell us their favorite restaurant right now since we launched in April 2023. Almost three years in, these conclusions hold true: 1) FOUND subscribers have good taste and 2) NYC has a lot of favorite-worthy restaurants (79% of named spots have been named only once). But the repeats have piled up, too. Here, the most-named favorite spots: