Big dinner for ‘Big Night’: Restaurants celebrate a cult favorite
To be certain, Christian Frangiadis makes it as clear as a fine Baccarat champagne flute: Every night in the restaurant industry is a Big Night.
Whether it’s slow or slammed, and the staff is serving the rich and famous or the rank and file, every night matters because you’re only as good as your last meal.
“I think that a lot of restaurants are great for a night,” said the chef/owner of Spork in Bloomfield. “But I think the very best restaurants, there is very little disparity between their best nights and their worst. So when the refrigerator goes down and the order doesn’t come in on time and the cook calls off sick — the best restaurants can handle that.
“That’s the difference between a really great restaurant and just a good one: Every night is a big night. And it doesn’t matter what you did last night, last month or five years ago. It’s completely irrelevant. The only thing that’s relevant is tonight. And the next one is tomorrow.”
But Sunday night, he’ll host a big night dedicated to “Big Night” — the critically acclaimed 1996 independent film that’s a cult favorite among those in the restaurant industry.
It features an ensemble cast led by Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci as Primo and Secondo, immigrant brothers from Abruzzi who respectively are the purist-perfectionist chef and slightly more malleable manager of a failing restaurant on the Jersey shore in the 1950s.
The brothers have a chance to salvage their business by hosting the famed singer Louis Prima and a newspaper reporter. Primo executes the meal of his life including a timpano — a baked sort of doughy-pasta pastry-pie, filled with more pasta, meatballs, meats, cheeses and other Italian delectables. It is Primo’s piece de resistance.
But, for myriad reasons — many beyond their control — the night goes completely sideways.
Mr. Frangiadis watched it first on a VHS tape in the late 1990s, and the movie hit home because, “It’s about a couple of guys who have passion in the restaurant business, but they’re struggling to make a living doing what they’re passionate about and not sell