South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Fifty years of food, friends
Iconic Franco & Vinny’s restaurant to close for good after owner announces retirement
Vinny Esposito got a request the other day from an old customer asking for the large neon sign that reads “Franco & Vinny’s Pizza Shack” on the side of the soon-to-close Fort Lauderdale restaurant.
“What he’s gonna do with it? I don’t know. It’s a sign,” Vinny says, incredulously.
Yes, Vinny, it’s a sign. Of appreciation, gratitude, love.
Fifty years of pizza, pasta, camaraderie and community have come down to a couple of weeks for Franco & Vinny’s, the iconic eatery, a few hundred feet from Fort Lauderdale beach, that is set to close on April 25.
Since Vinny, 79, announced last month that he would retire and shut the doors one final time, the East Sunrise Boulevard restaurant has been the toughest table in town.
Lines form each night, the end of a pilgrimage for fans, some in their fifth decade of adoration, seeking one last supper and a chance to tell Vinny how much he and his restaurant have meant to them.
These evenings — populated by locals, out-of-towners, East Fort Lauderdale gentry, politicos and regular Joes — are filled with laughs, tears, hugs, impromptu songs and intimate stories about the personal warmth and kindness of its proprietor. Vinny frequently enters the dining room to applause.
One of the cruelties of COVID is that Vinny is making his diningroom swan song behind a mask, so as his eyes are rimmed in tears, his smile is obscured, and he often greets guests looking like a regretful surgeon with bad news.
Make no mistake, Vinny is happy with the prospect of starting a new life, spending more time with wife Caterina and daughter Erica, and traveling, especially to his beloved Capri.
But sometimes the tears are just tears.
“I didn’t know what to expect. I don’t know what to do,” he says, eyes moistened, out on the sidewalk. “These are my friends. I feel like I am doing something bad to them, I am disappointing them.”
To the end, the consummate host.
“He’s a class act,” says fellow restaurateur Elliot Wolf, a frequent visitor to Franco & Vinny’s for a late-night pickup on the way home from his own waterfront restaurant, Coconuts, or with his kids to enjoy “the best pizza in town.”
“He’s a true restaurateur. He always remembers you, gives you enough time, acknowledges you, and knows when to walk away to enjoy your meal. It is a skill. He just knows what he’s doing, loves it, is passionate about it and he’s gotten what comes with that. He has earned it,” Wolf says.
“It’s going to be an empty space for a lot of people,” says Mike Satz, longtime customer and former Broward State Attorney.
But Vinny is running out of energy and says he’s finally at peace with his decision.
He cites the cautionary tale of older brother Franco, his partner since the duo, recent arrivals from Italy, moved from New York to Fort Lauderdale beach, opening the Pizza Shack on the east side of the Intracoastal bridge in 1971. The eatery, where they would spin 600-700 pizzas a day, would become Franco & Vinny’s as the restaurant and the menu expanded.
The collaboration between the business-minded Franco and people-oriented Vinny ended when Franco died in 2014 at age 76 of a heart attack his brother attributes to stress. The brothers at one point owned five South Florida restaurants and two hotels.
Vinny says he has sold all the properties the brothers parceled together on East Sunrise Boulevard between the Intracoastal and North Birch Road. He’s not sure what will become of it and doesn’t seem to care.
“I want to enjoy, a little bit, my life,” he says.
A few years after Franco & Vinny’s opened, Billy Joel captured the personal relationship people feel for such places with the word “our” in the lyric, “I’ll meet you any time you want, in our Italian restaurant.”
The song was an appreciation of time and reflection, reunion and communion over shared memories (plus “a bottle of white, a bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rose instead”). Its title: “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.”
As admirers from all over South Florida meet to say farewell to Franco & Vinny’s, here are some scenes from one of the last nights at their Italian restaurant.
Scene I: Vinny & Caterina
At a table in a corner of the bustling restaurant, Vinny and his wife are the kind of couple that sit close to each other. Their favorite memories of the restaurant are the friendships made. All of it has become more acute with the response to its closing.
“It’s incredible,” Vinny says. “I always said to my wife, ‘One day I would like to die in Fort Lauderdale and then open my eyes and see how many people come to my funeral.’ But I see it without [having to] die. We have 300-400 diners every single night since. … Everybody comes in and they make me cry, and they cry.”
Caterina recalls the birth of their daughter 27 years ago: “The nurses used to come from other wings of the hospital to see my room, full of flowers from people from Fort Lauderdale. Hundreds of flowers. … We have a lot of beautiful memories. We want to say thank you to everybody, but it’s so overwhelming, we cannot do it.”
Scene II: ‘End of an era’
Former Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler, partial to “the best eggplant parmesan in town,” has been coming to Franco & Vinny’s — first as a kid, then with his own kids — for more than 40 years. At a table with his parents, Nancy and Pete, and wife Susan, Seiler says the closure is bittersweet.
“I’m extremely happy for Vinny. He’s the hardest working guy in Fort Lauderdale. He has been one of the great treasures in this town,” Seiler says. “But as for all of us, it’s kind of a sad day, because we’re losing one of the great restaurants. … We’ve been coming here for as long as I can remember, and now you’re seeing the end of an era. … But, look, if anybody has earned his retirement, and deserves his retirement, it’s Vinny and his family.”
“A restaurant is a place where you get food, but this is a place where you build community, build memories. Every time you’re in here you run into somebody. You catch up on life, you catch up on things happening around town. And, you know, they’re the perfect hosts. … They just have an amazing way of making you feel at home.”
Scene III: A hero’s ballad
Midway through dinner hour, Ramona Palmer stood up and delivered a passage from the Bette Midler ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings,” facing Vinny as she sang, “Did you ever know that you’re my hero?” Other diners soon joined in. As applause reverberated across the dining room, Palmer was embraced by a teary Vinny. A native of Jamaica who lives in Sunrise, Palmer met Vinny 12 years ago while working at a nearby hotel. Palmer spoke about Vinny while seated at a table with a half-dozen women, a tissue in her hand.
“I knew I could not leave here tonight without doing something special, that would be memorable to him. And that’s what I could do,” she says. “I love Vinny. He’s more than just a friend, he’s family. He’s just one of those people, when you first meet him the connection is just automatic. … We’ve had our Christmas parties here, birthday parties. I said I wasn’t going to cry, but … It’s not just a restaurant. This is like the soul of the neighborhood.”
Scene IV: Mike Satz’s ‘comfort place’
Franco & Vinny’s has been a long-running family favorite and twice-a-week dinner spot for Mike Satz, recently retired as one of the longest-serving elected prosecutors in U.S. history after 44 years as Broward State Attorney.
“I can’t remember not coming here. It’s gotta be, I don’t know, 40 years? … Vinny treats everybody like he opened up just for you. I brought significant others here on our first dates, you know? Because I knew that it’s just a great atmosphere, good food and Vinny would come over, and Caterina. It’s like going to your friend’s house for dinner. … I can’t tell you how much I’m going to miss this place. You know everybody has a comfort food? I have a comfort place. … I’m really sad that he’s closing — for me, not for him and Caterina. They’re going to enjoy their life.”
Scene V: The cops’ table
On May 30, 1991, a picture was taken at Franco & Vinny’s that
showed a group of Fort Lauderdale police officers who had been dining there since the 1970s. Some years later the tables were refurbished, with old pictures and postcards placed under a tabletop layer of lacquer, including the shot of the officers. The group has considered that table “theirs” ever since. One of them, Mike O’Connor, now retired in West Palm Beach, was sitting next to his picture this week when he was told Vinny was getting inquiries about the table.
“I’ll get it. I haven’t talked to him about it. Where’s he at? He knows I’ll get it. … I have a place on my back porch where I would set it up and we would dine on it,” O’Connor says over his favorite dish, the Vinny Special (chicken piccata, shrimp scampi and pasta Alfredo on one plate).
[Seated next to him, O’Connor’s wife, Bonnie, agreed to find a home for the old table: “Absolutely. This is a legend. All my kids grew up here, since they were infants. My oldest is 37 now. They want to come and say goodbye to Vinny.”]
“Vinny’s been a friend since 1976. We’d come in here once, or twice, sometimes more a week’“O’Connor says. “They were good friends, and I mean that, friends. It’s not just, ‘Hey, we know the guy who owns the restaurant.’ He’s been a true friend.”
Scene VI: ‘A good man’
Attorney Dominick Miniaci stepped away from his Chicken Scarpariello to share a few thoughts about Vinny, his friend since 1975:
“He’s one of the best men I know. Besides being a great restaurateur, he’s a good man. He’s helped so many people that have come here … from overseas. I’m an immigration lawyer, so when he calls me and says, ‘Can you help them? Can we do something with them?’ he really cares about them. He cares if they’re ill. He takes care of them, finds housing for them. He’s one of the best men I know in this business.”
Of Franco, Miniaci says, “They were different personalities. Vinny has a more winning personality, Franco was much more businesslike, but they were great people, both of them.”
Scene VII: Pizza Vinny
Vinny Polistena answered a newspaper want ad for a pizza chef nearly 50 years ago and has been Vinny Esposito’s right-hand man at Franco & Vinny’s ever since. The man known as Pizza Vinny, to avoid confusion, calls the restaurant a second home to him, maybe a first home.
“I’ve spent almost all my life in here. I started here when I was 21 years old, in 1973. In 1974, ‘75, ‘76, we used to make 600, 700 pizzas a night, the three of us. I spent more time in here than in my home,” he says. “So this is very emotional tonight for me. Very emotional. It’s like a farewell to a good friend.”
“[Vinny] is a great guy. A great guy. He works his ass off, excuse me. So he deserves what he has and I wish him lots of luck in his retirement.”
Of his own future, he says: “Honestly, I don’t know yet. If something comes my way, a couple of days a week, I take it. If not, I retire, too.”
Scene VIII: Widow from Vero
For 20 years Fran Giacofuzzi, a 87-year-old Vero Beach resident, has been stopping at Franco & Vinny’s with her son, Fort Lauderdale resident Jim Giacofuzzi.
“The food is excellent, and we just fell in love with Vinny. He’s just a wonderful, wonderful human being,” Giacofuzzi says. At which point Jim says he thinks his widowed mother has “got a little crush” on Vinny. She does not dispute the statement.
The Giacofuzzis are part of the gallery of pictures of Vinny with celebrities and longtime customers that cover the walls at Franco & Vinny’s, with a prime location by a light switch near the front door. Jim says that all Fran had to do was ask.
“He told her, ‘Why don’t you bring a picture in?’ So we took a picture that night and the next time we came, we brought it in a frame, and by the time we left the restaurant, he had it hung up there,” Jim says.
With the restaurant closing, they wonder what will become of it.
“We don’t know if we should take it or leave it,” Jim says, laughing. “I asked him for the Mariah Carey, but he said no.”
Scene IX: A daughter’s appreciation
Vinny and Caterina’s daughter Erica, 27, lives in London, and shared thoughts on her parents and the restaurant via email. Erica says she can see the influence of her time at Franco & Vinny’s in her current job, managing a mental-health advocacy campaign in 19 countries.
“Reflecting on this now, I think some of my relationship-building skills definitely come from my dad and how easily he’s able to develop friendships,” she says. “The fact that my dad came to Fort Lauderdale as a young immigrant in pursuit of the American dream and was able to build a community and a legacy that will last for generations means the world to me.
“The outpouring love and affection that we’ve been receiving since the announcement of the closure has been absolutely incredible. … I have always been so proud of the restaurant, so proud to be able to say ‘I’m Vinny and Caterina’s daughter’ when introducing myself to customers. That was because I could really tell how much customers cared about Franco & Vinny’s, and about my parents.”