How Flow Saved a Chef

A few years back, I was screwing around Instagram and I stumbled across some cooking videos made by this dude called Frank. He had a strong New York accent, and maybe he was a little abrasive—but he could be funny as hell too—and it was pretty easy to tell he had a lot of heart.

So I gave him a follow. Why not?

Even on a tiny screen this guy was a magnetic presence, an explosion of kinetic energy. Extolling the virtues of arugula, Sicilian dried oregano, and cooking healthy food for your loved ones while chopping heaps of garlic one minute and cranking out ravioli the next.

I soon came to find that whenever this guy showed up in my kitchen—looking out from my iPhone through his big-ass glasses and telling me what to do and how to do it—good food seemed to appear in my pots and pans.

With his evangelical enthusiasm for good cooking, and for the Italian food that is his birthright, he soon had me using his methods to crank out some truly amazing dishes: scrumptious spaghetti limone, complex Neapolitan ragù, some wicked marinara, and his signature crispy eggs.

Here’s what really hooked me, though. The next time I was in New York, just for grins I dropped him a DM asking where I might buy some decent olive oil in the city. I was flabbergasted when he took time out of his busy day to chat back and forth (I later learned that he answers all his DMs) and he personally guided me to DiPalo’s on Grand in Little Italy.

That’s how Frank Prisinzano flowed into my life. And it turns out that ‘flow’ is something Frank has thought a lot about.

It was in the kitchen that a young teenage Frank discovered how to flow, and it was the power of flow that guided his evolution from a misfit outsider kid from Queens into a confident, ambitious chef and restaurateur. Frank’s flow is behind his three wildly successful restaurants, Frank, Lil’ Frankie’s, and Supper. They’ve become integral and beloved parts of the community landscape of New York’s East Village—and they serve the very food that Frank shows his followers how to flow with on Instagram.