by Naomi Marcus
When his mother, Lucrezia, was diagnosed with cancer, then 25-year-old Frankie Gaetano Balistreri cared for her at home. She craved her favorite Sicilian dishes, and she called out her wishes from her bed: FRANKIE, PASTA CON SARDE! (Pasta with sardines), FRANKIE, SFINGI! (Sicilian donuts with ricotta filling, powdered sugar). “I was running back and forth, up and down the hallway from the bedroom to the kitchen, and she’d say, YOU FORGOT TO ROAST THE PIGNOLI ! (Pine nuts for the sardines). She’d taught me to cook, and I knew the dishes, but she was particular: ‘Frankie! Pine nuts and currants!’”
She passed away “in my arms” in 1986.
Frankie is short, barrel-chested, with powerful forearms and a charming, lopsided grin. He talks fast, his deep brown eyes glint with humor, and he often cracks himself up. Under his big apron, his t-shirt reads: When You See Frankie, Call the Cops.
The 64-year-old chef, fisherman, husband, and father, jewel of North Beach, proprietor (with his wife, Evelyn) of the popular Portofino’s Restaurant on Grant Avenue, is beloved in his North Beach community— where everyone assumes he was born.
But he was born and raised till age six in Rosarito Beach, Tijuana, Mexico, where his Sicilian father fled after getting into trouble over contraband at the port of Palermo.
“Dad left Sicily in the dead of the night,” Frankie recalls, “leaving his wife and month-old daughter, my sister. Mom found him 13 years later in Mexico City selling suits on the streets, hiding, just surviving. She forgave a lot! They moved to Rosarito Beach where they opened a tourist shop on Third and Revolution, near the strip clubs, and dad fished for octopus, mussels, clams, lobsters. I was born there in 1960.“
The family tried crossing the border illegally many times but never succeeded. “We’d meet our California Sicilian relatives at the border, exchanging fresh fish we brought ’em for the olive oil, cheese, and panettone they brought us.” Finally, his San Francisco uncles sponsored them for citizenship and young Frankie arrived here, almost seven, fluent in Sicilian and Spanish. No English. Frankie’s Spanish is still fluent, as he jokes with his Latino cooks and waiters at Portofino’s. “Hey Gordo,” he calls to his cook, who, he says, “dances when he cooks, all body parts moving at the stove.” “Slow down!”
Talking to Frankie at the parklet in front of his narrow, cozy restaurant, one is constantly interrupted by a stream of locals: high fiving him, fake wrestling him, buying fresh fish from him. (“I went to school with that guy.” “This guy is my dentist; he is fixing me a grill.” “That’s my brother’s wife’s kid.” “That’s my lawyer.”)
Arriving in San Francisco in 1966, Frankie’s dad Gaetano “Tom” Balistreri fished on a 70-foot trawler and worked with his brothers who were running breweries. (“They had the Hamm’s.”)
The family—including big sister Rosa and younger brother Vincent— settled in at 866 Lombard Street, “right below the crooked part.”
The block was all Sicilians, he recalls, and “No one spoke English at home. My neighbor Mario Bugatto raised pigeons in his aviary, and I helped feed ’em and track ’em. We kids played stickball and soldiers and ambushed each other in the bushes all over the SF Art Institute.”
He hung out at the bird shop at Mason and Lombard, “That’s where the wild parrots came from, those cherry-headed conures were brought here illegally and the owner let ’em go.”
Around 1972, his dad quit fishing and opened the original Portofino Cafe at Columbus Avenue and Green Street, where young Frankie worked from age 12, prepping, busing, cooking. “I even was bartending—at a very tender age.”
Frankie’s speech is peppered with recipes; you can’t get far into a conversation without him reciting a recent dish he made. Recalling his mom’s baking, he digresses, “I make the best vegetarian Sfincione (Sicilian Square Pizza): Let the dough rise to its fullest, then layer saffron cauliflower, anchovy, and oregano, sprinkle toasted breadcrumbs and pecorino cheese on top, just put in the oven with lots of olive oil, OH MY GOD, I gotta go home and make one!”
From ages nine to 16, he spent summers fishing with his grandparents and uncles, while living in his dad’s home village, Porticello, Sicily (near Palermo).
“We fished for swordfish, tuna, and mackerel in the shipping lanes across from Libya. Then I’d go into town, to Bagheria, and get my dad’s favorite whiskey, crown royal, in the cafe.”
He graduated from San Francisco’s Downtown High School (“after being kicked out of Sacred Heart”) and married a few years later. (“My first wife was Chinese; she lived up the hill from me.”) They had a son, Gaetano, now 35.
Frankie worked at Portofino’s and spent summers fishing in Alaska, often with his brother Vince. “I could make 30 grand in five weeks, as a deckhand in Alaska.”
By the ’90s, Portofino’s was serving up more than fine Sicilian food. “There was gambling all night long in Portofino’s basement, poker machines, slot machines,” he relates, and in early 1994, the police raided them. His dad was arrested for running a gambling operation. Though his father entered a diversion program and performed community service, a year later the café was raided again for illegal video poker game payoffs.
Frankie, his dad, and brother were indicted for conspiracy to distribute drugs. He doesn’t dwell on the details, just refers to google. “You can look it up.” (.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/drug-ring-dismantled-fbi-says-north-beach-club-3033308.php)
His first marriage ended in 1994 when he was sentenced to prison.
“I was looking at 25 to life for racketeering.” He got three years.
His lawyers delayed his sentence, but, finally, he had to serve his time: 1999-2002. His first six months were at Taft Federal Prison (Kern County) and the rest of his sentence at Sheridan Federal Detention Center in Oregon. “I was in with congressmen, senators, judges, all the white-collar
guys, no rapists or druggies!”
Frankie’s resourceful, irrepressible nature and cooking skills came in handy. First, he washed dishes. But his talents were quickly discovered.
“You know how many pans I had to clean, for 1500 inmates? I said, ‘Let me be the baker boss; baking is where you can steal everything.’” He smiles broadly. “This old Jewish bookie from Florida was the baker, and I took over from him. All day I baked, from pancakes in the morning to pizza for dinner. Had to follow federal guidelines on the recipes and learn how to make Kwanza dishes and kosher dishes for the Jewish prisoners. I even made pan dulce and empanadas for the Mexican holidays. The bookie showed me how to make booze: Yeast with grapefruit peel makes fine grapefruit vodka if you ferment it. And prunes make wine!”
Cooking wasn’t enough “to pass my time away” so when another inmate suggested he place a personal ad in a few newspapers, “I had nobody to talk to cause I was getting divorced, so why not?” For a pack of cigarettes,
“This Mexican coyote I was in prison with sent my photo to some Asian papers.”
Frankie had himself photographed in his khakis up against the perimeter prison yard fence—where you could see the oil derricks rising high into the sky, there off Interstate 5.
“I wrote that I was an oil rig worker and surveyor.”
And the letters gushed in, like oil.
Mail Call!
“My prisoner number was 90949011, but everyone, even the custody officers, called me ‘Joe Pesci:’ ‘Hey Joe Pesci, you got mail.’”
Letters began arriving from the Philippines, and a few from Thailand.
“Forty a day, 50 a day. There were too many letters to read, so we sat around and traded them, my cellmate was a counterfeiter, and he sifted through the letters: ‘She looks good. Not this one. Hey, maybe this one’s for you.’”
Frankie whittled it down to 10 to 12 faithful correspondents, among whom was Evelyn, the Filipina who became his beloved wife.
She saw his ad in the back of a Philippine comic book. “We were pen pals for seven years.”
When Frankie finally confessed that he was in prison, all but two stopped writing.
“Evelyn wrote she’d wait for me because she admired my honesty.”
Frankie got out on December 13, 2002 and landed in Manila on March 3rd, 2005. Those dates are indelible; they roll off his tongue.
“I got out with nothing, and no credit, but jobs waiting for me at the wharf at local restaurants: Pompei’s, Alioto’s, later at U.S. Restaurant (all since closed). As soon as I got off parole, after three years, I flew to meet her!
We stayed at the Manila Shangri-La, a top luxury hotel. Gloria Arroyo was staying down the hall.”
Evelyn watches her husband describe their courtship with an inscrutable expression, as she unloads restaurant supplies from their Toyota TRD.
“When I came here in 2005, I started running with the tears and fire. It was hectic, overwhelming; I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t speak good English, and my first job was McDonald’s. I thought America was: If you work hard, you find dollars on the street and get rich. But you need 100 jobs to be ok. “
She shakes her head, ruefully, “It’s a round circle, up and down.”
They were married at City Hall in 2005, and Frankie opened Palermo’s Deli on Vallejo Street, training Evelyn in the family business, but then “taxes bit me in the ass” so he sold it in 2008. (It’s now run by his brother Vincent and his niece as Palermo’s Deli II.)
After losing the deli, there were hard years.
Evelyn, by now the mother of a toddler and pregnant with their second son, worked as a janitor at a North Beach bakery and at a beauty salon.
Frankie drove delivery trucks for Lettieri. And they worked on the Red and White fleet as servers for party cruises.
But they still couldn’t make rent, ending up couch surfing with extended family, which created too much tension. They moved into an SRO in the Tenderloin, “My youngest was a month old, and the bed bugs were eating him alive.”
Eleven months they were homeless. “My kids grew up real fast.” Finally, they got into a family shelter.
Then Frankie was in a bad accident in the rain near the airport, while delivering for Lettieri. His shoulder required five surgeries.
Ironically, the insurance settlement he received got them back on their feet and back to North Beach, where they raise their three sons, Giocino, now 18, Anthony, now 16, and Frankie Jr., now 10.
And finally, in March 2020, 24 hours before San Francisco went into lockdown, Frankie’s dream of opening a fine seafood restaurant, where his recipes could be showcased, came true.
Portofino’s had its long planned grand opening party literally on the eve of the Pandemic.
Hard times, but they survived.
Evelyn smiles, when asked how things are now, as they prep on an August afternoon. “I got three kids growing up, our lives are exciting and surprising, one day we’re good, one day is not.”
Frankie adds, “The last time I took a vacation was when I was locked up! I came out, and I started opening places, who has time for vacation?”
As they unload supplies, another North Beach denizen walks by,
“Hey Frankie, whatcha got there? Whatcha selling now, shark fins?”
“No, of course not, cause that’s illegal!”
