A mannish-looking woman in a white blouse buttoned to the collar and a straight black skirt kneels in the foreground of an undistinguished tract house, clutching a three-year-old girl about the waist so that her rigid crinoline skirt tips up on one side. They both look pained and the shot isn’t particularly well composed – a telegraph pole rises up out of the woman’s head.
Some years ago Nicholson Baker wrote a fine essay for the New Yorker on the books used as props in the Ralph Lauren mail order catalogue. Baker’s point – in analysing the disjunction between these bought-by-theyard volumes and the off-the-peg shmatte draped around them – was that the book had become a symbol of a form of leisured cultivation aspired to by the sort of people content to be accessories to the brand; in short, these were books that did even less than furnish a room – they furnished the idea of a room that one might have, were one to stop spending all one’s money on tacky designer clothing.
The same could be said of the photographs framed and stuck up on the walls of the Little Frankie’s that we ate in the other evening. These are emphatically not meant to be looked at, let alone analysed – these are images that should be merely glanced at, and so subliminally assimilated to the desired commercial gestalt.
In a way, to examine the photographs in Little Frankie’s with attention – with sympathy and reverence, even – would be to rescue all these lived lives from the great shingly erosions of late capitalism; as someone might pick up small pieces of smoothed bottle glass from the beach, take them home, put them in jars filled with water and, placing these on the windowsill, observe how the sunlight transforms such undistinguished lumps into glowing jewels. But, hell, everyone’s life is too short, eh? So let’s just eat junk food at low prices instead.
Little Frankie’s is the cadet arm of the mighty Frankie & Benny’s chain, which has over 200 outlets in the UK. The only thing that distinguishes them is their piccolo size, otherwise they offer up the same shtick: a cod version of the cultural miscegenation that on their website is styled variously “New York Italian” or “Italian American”, but which at the branch where we found ourselves was detailed – as one of my sharp-eyed sons pointed out – “American Italian”.
I’d like to think that this was because someone high up in The Restaurant Group (the plc that owns the chain, along with Garfunkel’s and Chiquito) had come to the conclusion either that: a) such now is the degree of assimilation that it should be reflected in their terminology, or b) they need to dissociate themselves from all the usual Italian- American clichés – DiMaggio, Sinatra, The Sopranos, blah, blah, yech.
But the reality is almost certainly that a middle-ranking marketer had focus-grouped the reversed couplet and found out it played better with punters, such – as I believe I’ve already pointed out – is life. In Little Frankie’s, the bubblegum Fifties pop played nonstop and I wondered what our waitress – who admitted to me she came from Pisa – made of it all. The marketing department long ago (1995, when the first branch opened in Leicester) concocted a backstory: the eponymous Frankie, aged ten, moved from Sicily to Little Italy in New York in 1924 and a year later his parents opened a restaurant . . . blah, blah, yech. I can’t believe anyone devotes any more headspace to this than they do to the flash-bulbed revenants they see on their way down to the chequerboard-tiled toilets. There may be dark wood floors and bentwood chairs and “granite-effect” tabletops at Little Frankie’s, but so far as I could see, the only evidence of a sense the clientele were involved with was taste.
The same sharp-eyed boy said his margherita pizza “thinks it’s better than it is”; a strange remark that I think was occasioned by it being covered with slices of actual tomato rather than just the purée he favours. The other son said that his burger was shit and his onion rings were shit, and the extra hot dog we ordered was also shit, but that he’d eaten them all because he was so hungry. For myself, I didn’t mind my tough little steak – and when I complained about the cold chips, the waitress obligingly brought me a dish of chips so hot that, had we been in an Italian-American restaurant, I’d have suspected the chef of trying to whack me. Bravissimo!
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