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Franco’s Pizzeria & Trattoria *****
Parkview Centre, 54 Tyrone Avenue Parkview, Johannesburg
Tel: 011-788-4111
Thuli Madonsela *****
Excellent ****
Good ***
Poor **
Bathabile Dlamini *
— food for thought
You may have heard that this column, in its current form anyway, comes to an end at the end of the month. No, the editor doesn’t think I am rubbish, or jaded, or that I like Cyril Ramaphosa a tad too much even when he comes up with something so daft as playing at being a mini-Julius Malema.
No, really, they love me here. I know. The editor told me so.
Or was I hallucinating, the way the EFF does when it holds up Venezuela as an economic success?
My plan is to try the US for a bit.
I have been a bit dishonest with readers of this column since I started back in 2005. Those were the Mbeki years. Oh, those fat years. We fought over how to make the good times even better by breaking through 6% GDP growth. Big cars, big steaks and fabulous sunsets were the order of the day.
I was supposed to write about restaurants. There was a catch, though: there were places I could write about and there were places I couldn’t. There were places I went to with my children that my lovely wife and I did not want the FM readers to know about. "What if they arrive wearing a suit, straight from a bankers’ meeting? No, they can’t come to Franco’s!" my wife thundered.
And that is why you haven’t read a review of Franco’s Pizzeria in Parkview on these pages.
I first went there in 1999 with newsman Ray Hartley (his Ramaphosa book is very illuminating) and his lovely wife, Sylvia. When my young ones were just weeks old, we would trundle to Franco’s, park the kids under a table and have a bit of pasta, pizza or fish and a glass of wine. Or two.
The restaurant is a Parkview institution. There isn’t a child in the neighbourhood who hasn’t tasted a Franco’s pizza. They are condemned for life: every pizza after that is tested against the Franco’s baseline.
Franco’s is very popular. You might be able to get a late booking on a Wednesday or Thursday, maybe, but Fridays are pretty booked up.
Why is Franco’s so popular and so precious to its customers? It’s a standard pizzeria in the Italian style. The wine list used to be atrocious, but that has improved somewhat.
Franco’s has become a suburban favourite because it does what a restaurant in an Italian village does: Franco and his family, who run the restaurant, seem to know every single customer and welcome them with an extraordinary friendliness. The staff is amazing: after nearly 20 years I can’t think of a single day of bad service.
When my kids were small, we would go virtually every second Friday. We started having family movie nights and stopped going, but would order in pizzas and pastas. I always have exactly the same thing — the pizza salsiccia with extra chilli and extra shavings of Italian sausage. It is not for those who don’t like chilli.
Mamma Mia! I am sitting here, typing this, and all I want to do is get on the phone and order myself one.
One of my daughters always orders the classic spaghetti aglio e olio with a green salad on the side. I am not big on greens, but I love that salad.
Franco’s serves pizzas, pastas, fish, beef — a classic trattoria menu. You can go to a thousand places like this in Italy and get the same fare. But at Franco’s you get it served with a joy, love, commitment and happiness you don’t often see in establishments in SA.
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