A Welcome Return to Fancy (but Not Fussy) Dining, at Francie
The New York Times
This Italian-accented restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, makes a convincing, comforting argument for the pleasures of an indoor meal.
Most all of us, I suspect, will always remember our first real restaurant meal of the Covid era — not the time we sat in the street next to a potted palm, blinking at the sun like some cave-dwelling animal, but the time we stepped inside a dining room and took off the mask. After all we’d been through, the pleasure of an indoor meal mixed with our fear of airborne pathogens to create a very particular cocktail of giddiness and nervousness, just the kind of psychological state that tends to put down roots in our heads.
For me, it happened at Francie, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on the March day I got my first dose of vaccine.
Very few of a restaurant critic’s working meals have a sense of occasion, but this one did, and Francie fit the moment like a pair of Lululemon ABC pants. Eating indoors was the only option there; Francie’s sober neo-Renaissance building, designed as a bank in 1888, has no street or sidewalk frontage that can be used for outdoor tables. But having to wait until last December to open gave the contractors time to fit virus-zapping ultraviolet lights and filters into the air ducts.
