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,” Frankie said, in 1986.
Frankie is short and 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 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 in Rosarito Beach, Tijuana, Mexico, where his Sicilian father fled after getting in trouble over contraband at the port of Palermo. Frankie’s mother found his father 13 years later on the streets in Mexico City, he said. “She forgave a lot!”
The pair moved to Rosarito Beach, where they opened a tourist shop near the strip clubs. His dad fished for octopus, mussels, clams, and lobsters, and Frankie Gaetano Balistreri was born there in 1960.
The family tried crossing the border illegally many times, but never succeeded.
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 Latinx cooks and waiters at Portofino’s. Talking to Frankie in the parklet in front of Portofino’s, 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,” he notes. “This guy is my dentist, that’s my brother’s wife’s kid, that’s my lawyer.”
Frankie’s speech is peppered with recipes; you can’t get far into a conversation without his reciting a recent dish he made. “I make the best vegetarian Sfincione,” he says — 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!”
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.
The family settled in at 866 Lombard St., “right below the crooked part.”
The block was all Sicilians, he recalls, and no one spoke English at home. He helped a neighbor raise pigeons in his aviary. “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 streets. “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.”
As a boy, he spent summers fishing with his grandparents and uncles, living in his dad’s home village of Porticello, Sicily, (near Palermo). Back home in San Francisco, he worked as a deckhand on fishing boats in Alaska, got married, had a son, Gaetano, now 35, and worked at Portofino.
But by the 90s, Portofino’s was serving up more than hearty Sicilian food.
In 1994, his dad was arrested for running a gambling operation. A year later, Frankie, his father and brother were indicted as part of a drug ring that distributed cocaine. Frankie won’t discuss the details. “You can look it up” on Google, he says.
He served three years, mostly at Sheridan Federal Detention Center in Oregon, a relatively cushy prison where his cooking skills were soon appreciated. “This old Jewish bookie from Florida was the baker, and I took over from him,” Frankie recalls. “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 Kwanzaa 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!”
Then another inmate suggested he place a personal ad in some newspapers overseas. “I had nobody to talk to, ’cause I was getting divorced, so why not?” Frankie had himself photographed in his khakis against the perimeter prison yard fence, with oil derricks in the background 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 arrived from the Philippines, and a few from Thailand.
Evelyn saw his ad in the back of a Filipino comic book.
When Frankie finally confessed that he was in prison, most of his correspondents stopped writing. “Evelyn wrote she’d wait for me, because she admired my honesty.”
Frankie got out in 2002, worked in restaurants and flew to Manila in 2005, when his parole ended. “We stayed at the Manila Shangri-La, a top luxury hotel. Gloria Arroyo [then the president of the Phillipines] 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 she arrived in 2005, she says, she spoke no English and worked at McDonald’s. “I thought if you work hard, you find dollars on the street and get rich,” she says. “But you need a hundred jobs to be OK. “
They were married at City Hall in 2005, and Frankie opened Palermo’s Deli on Vallejo Street, 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. Hard years followed. They scrambled to find jobs and housing, ultimately moving into a bedbug-infested SRO in the Tenderloin.
Then Frankie was in a bad accident, driving a delivery truck in the rain. 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 on the eve of the pandemic.
More hard times, but they survived.
Asked how things are now, Evelyn smiles. “I got three kids growing up,” she says. “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?” he says. “Whatcha selling now, shark fins?”
“No, of course not, ’cause that’s illegal!”
About the author
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