On not eating at Frank & Angie's

This was supposed to be a letter about the final visit Kat and I took to Frank & Angie’s. It’s a little pizza and pasta place in downtown Austin that had been there forever, until it announced this fall that it would be closing, because places like that are not what downtown Austin wants anymore. But we got there too late—we had planned to go last week, and then it turned out that they closed the week before, while Kat was still in L.A.

The food at Frank & Angie’s wasn’t special. Not to speak ill of the departed, but the pasta wasn’t even good, really—Austin has always had a problem getting basic red-sauce Italian right, and Frank & Angie’s was not an exception. The pizza was pretty good, in the way that pizza usually is, but Frank & Angie’s was important to us for reasons that had little to do with the food.

We didn’t start dating in a traditional way. We met as coworkers, we liked each other, and we became friends who had big mutual crushes on one another and good reasons (other relationships, wanderlust-as-lifestyle plans) for not pursuing them. We would spend time together, and neither of us made much money—but Frank & Angie’s had a 2-for-1 special on Tuesdays, buy one 10” pepperoni pizza and get another free. The pizzas were only like $7 to begin with, and they’d let you do substitutions, so Kat could swap the meat out for bell peppers. We’d use the savings to split dessert, a giant brownie smothered in ice cream and whipped cream and chocolate sauce. Her boyfriend at the time, trying to parse our friendship, asked, “So you and Dan just get together and go eat garbage?” Pretty much.

But it was always there. It was convenient—she lived south of downtown, I lived north, neither of us drove, it was easy to meet in the middle—and after I stopped working at the bookstore, we would still go. In the two years during which we were just friends, I’m pretty confident we ate at Frank & Angie’s more often than we ate anywhere else.

There are a lot of good memories of the place, both before and after we became a couple. After we started dating, and then got married, we still never bothered with Valentine’s Day—way too cool. But then we came back from living in London, which wasn’t a happy part of our relationship. We decided to start celebrating it, because we were doing better, and why not take an excuse to celebrate that? The first year we tried, there was a fancy Italian place that we’d decided to go to. They didn’t take reservations on Valentine’s Day, and the person who answered the phone told us that, if we wanted to avoid a long wait, to come either around 6 or after 9. We showed up at 9:30, and they told us they were far too busy to seat anyone else, sorry. We went up to Frank & Angie’s instead, which we hadn’t realized was a few minutes away from closing. We apologized and made our way back out—we both are very conscious of being those people—but the hostess recognized us and told us that, no, they’d be happy to have us, please stay. I’m pretty sure we went back most every year on Valentine’s Day after that, to say nothing of all of the other times.

A few years later, we were there on a Tuesday, and Kat requested a substitution on the 2-for-1 pizza, and they told her that, as of that night, that was no longer an option—it was too hectic to try to manage on a busy night, so the owner had nixed that part of the deal. We paid for two pizzas, but I emailed the owner a day or two later, asking about a compromise. Kat didn’t eat meat, but we understood that handling dozens of complicated substitutions on what had become a busy night for them was probably a hassle; might they allow the special to include either a pepperoni pizza or a cheese pizza? He wrote back quickly, saying that he didn’t want to exclude vegetarians, and that they’d modify the policy. A year or so later, they ended the special entirely, and we got used to paying for our pizzas like adults. But it was nice that they’d responded, and been thoughtful about it. It’s easy to invest a lot of emotional energy into a place you apply arbitrary meaning to—this was an Olive Garden newsletter until a couple of weeks ago!—so it’s a nice feeling when you can feel like that’s a two-way relationship. The Olive Garden doesn’t give a shit if I live or die.

Anyway. Time passes, colors fade, lights change, planes drop from the sky. Frank & Angie’s announced that it would be closing a few months ago.

The past year has been a weird one. Our marriage is strong, and our relationship is in a good place, but we’re suddenly living mostly long-distance. Kat’s went out to L.A. in September of 2017, came back for a few months over the winter, and then has mostly been so busy with work out there that, since March, her time in Austin is mostly relegated to the occasional visit. I spent a month out there in August, and she’s here right now—but when you learn that Frank & Angie’s will be closing, you can’t just rush off to cling to it tightly before it goes. You have to wait until you’re both there.

For Frank & Angie’s, it was too late. There’ve been harder things about spending the year apart, but realizing that we’d missed the last day was one of the sadder. There are other places to get pretty-good pizza, of course, and even that brownie lives on—they had a sister-restaurant next door, a burger place named Hut’s, that has it on the menu—but you just want the chance to say goodbye, you know?

And yet this would still be more or less the same entry if we’d gone. I’d still be writing about the memories we had of the place, and trying to avoid letting it feel like a metaphor for anything else. Instead of being sad that we’d missed it, I’d be sad that we said goodbye. There’d be more physical detail, I guess—but otherwise, I still got to write a remembrance of a pizza place now passed. But that’s kind of the point. None of it matters too much, but all of it matters a little.