Dining Review: Frank & Laurie’s in Providence

Market salad. Photography by Angel Tucker

Providence had barely more than a year-and-a-half to get to know Eric Brown before he shuttered Thick Neck, a short-lived, hard-hitting repository of contemporary cuisine housed in the Dean Hotel. Everything about the restaurant existed in the realm between audacity and irreverence, so it was something of a shock when Brown announced he was giving up the nightlife to open a brunch spot with his partner, Sarah Watts, a mile-and-a-half away. 

Quiche with marinated zucchini, celery gremolata and hash browns. Photography by Angel Tucker

Brunch — that nebulous slice of time between early morning and evening — has always been the most benign meal of the day, offering a greatest hits album of dishes. True, things started to evolve last year when Oberlin began serving brunch, expanding the lexicon to include oysters every which way, all things mortadella, and a very European outlook. But the decision to give up dinner service for a five-hour window of eggs and pancakes seems like a step backward in the realm of creative vision. Like I said, though: Brown is a man who thrives on revising the culinary canon.

Unlike Thick Neck, there is a streak of sentimentality to Frank & Laurie’s. It’s named after Brown’s grandparents and there’s something distinctly precious about its homegrown aesthetic. The former bagel shop has been transformed into a dining room paneled in warm woods and rattan seats, crowned by a teal blue ceiling. Wildflowers and plants cascade off counters and a sixteen-seat communal table sits atop a Persian-style rug in the center along with a swath of smaller, more intimate tables. 

It’s weathered in the most inviting way, asserting itself as a fixture in the neighborhood for what seems like decades. Even the tchotchkes — including a 1960s “Oscar Orange” figurine that predates Mr. Potato Head, a fifty-year-old quadraphonic receiver, and slightly unnerving ceramic baby and bisque Kewpie dolls that overlook the dining room — are a tangible homage to generations past. 

The restaurant is also a full-throated endorsement of community, not only in the benches, pendants and tilework put in by locals, but by way of its eclectic and increasingly regular crowd. There are plenty of twenty-something diners but they vibe easily with a much older crowd, all of whom wait patiently for a table to come their way. (A Joan Didion look-alike was quick to tell every waiting stranger what they had to order and gave a few hugs before departing.) As for the staff, they’re young and full of praise for Brown’s work (“Possibly the best thing I’ve eaten.”) as well as his quest for equitable work wages (“Gratuity is included so no one gets screwed.”). So if family was the inspiration for Frank & Laurie’s, it’s also the aspiration for the daily mechanics. 

Lamb sausage with corn polenta. Photography by Angel Tucker

You can get as kumbaya as you want, though — a restaurant is only as good as it tastes, and a daytime menu has a heavily drawn blueprint that it must embrace or reject. Brown, expectedly, does both. The ingredients are de rigueur: eggs, cheese, bread, syrup. But, like Thick Neck, it’s the syntax and translation that matters when you’re dealing with a finite language. 

Whipped ricotta beach rose doughnut. Photography by Angel Tucker

The most surprising dish in a series of innovations, for instance, is a quivering quiche with the texture of custard. There’s no cheese or vegetables for the sake of drama — and no place to hide if the seasoning is off. It’s one of the simplest and best iterations of an egg out in the world and its crust — a whole wheat version with so much butter that it resembles puff pastry — is an epiphany. Inquiries about its origin were met with what I’ve come to expect: “trade secrets” and “The chef was messing around with it.” (If there’s one thing that Thick Neck and Frank & Laurie’s have in common, it’s the staff’s nonchalant acceptance that kitchens regularly get everything right.)

Even dishes that stick closer to the prototypes — pancakes and sandwiches — distill the experience of eating to its essence. A steamed egg sandwich with cheese and caramelized onion on a classic Thomas’ English muffin may look like an Egg McMuffin but it’s the insistently porky sausage that conducts the symphony. It spills out of the bread haphazardly and has such a pronounced crunch that I started to confuse meat for muffin. 

A patty melt on rye conjures up both a diner and a deli Reuben. Roasted cabbage takes out the sour of sauerkraut but none of the texture, and there’s something about the sandwich that suggests a Big Mac might have just been elevated to fine dining. (This seems like a good time to call attention to the hash browns, which also manage to mic drop on fast food. They’re cubes of salty crust served with a smoked oyster aioli, which one eager woman ate with a spoon and loudly debated asking for extras.)

Like his old menu, Brown uses this one to play around with the concept of salads — he showers herbs in such liberal fashion that they become main ingredients. Shredded carrots are matched with mint, a market salad (featuring almost every offering from the eponymous market) is dressed in a coriander vinaigrette, and a cool plate of cucumbers is covered in fish bits and handfuls of enough dill to squint and see pickles approving of this welcome madness. Even black bass crudo is hiding under a mound of shaved celery and a neon green lovage oil, all of which turns a light seafood dish into a poem about produce.   

There are plenty of savory dishes as well that almost meander into dinner territory: fish in roasted onion broth, sausage and polenta, lamb meatballs with stewed beans. (They’re a sign of things to come as the restaurant expands into Friday dinner and beyond.) The only reason not to order them for brunch is that it’s a challenge to eat six large plates and it’s impossible not to want to eat everything. Don’t opt out of the fresh spaghetti, though, which is served simply with anchovy butter or preserved fennel seeds and sweet clam confit, each version waiting to be adopted into the Italian vernacular. 

Chef Eric Brown and Sarah Watts, owners of Frank & Lauries’s. Photography by Angel Tucker

All of this should be enough. But Brown is aware that an afternoon meal almost always fixates on bread and here he complies with custom. Large biscuits with shards of sea salt are served with fresh jam and soft whipped butter, and if you had only a single bite of food at F&L’s, this might be the one. But the griddled pound cake is utterly pristine, an archetype of the highest caliber served with thick whipped cream that sits just to the left of sweet. Think ahead and order it as your closing dish, a worthy dessert even if you’re approaching overload. 

Like his baked goods, Brown himself has settled into a groove that manages to marry modernity and comfort in equal measure, never asking diners to lose their footing entirely but consistently upending a meal that thrives on tradition. And while this small city has a great many culinary accomplishments under its belt, the fact that Providence convinced Eric Brown to settle here long-term might be its most notable coup of the year.