I’ve never eaten there.

I’m a pizza guy and have been my whole life. I have no memory of life without pizza. What’s more, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, which means I have opinions, and the opinions are strong, but, also, crucially, correct. Deep dish is awesome. It is definitely, absolutely, indisputably not a fucking casserole. The people who say so are wrong, not just about pizza but, frankly, about casseroles, too. I’ll die on that hill.

When I moved to Massachusetts in 2021 and started learning the geography of the 495 corridor, the Dunkin’s, the rotaries, the towns that are somehow both their own thing and completely indistinguishable from each other, I noticed something.

Every town had one. Bellingham House of Pizza. Milford House of Pizza. Plainville House of Pizza. Franklin House of Pizza. Wrentham House of Pizza.

On and on, like someone had gone down a list of every Norfolk County municipality and stamped the same sign in each one.

It annoyed me immediately.

“House of Pizza” tells you absolutely nothing. It is the pizza-joint equivalent of calling your kid “Child.” It’s a name that has decided naming is not its problem. Which, the more you think about it, is itself a kind of strategy.

And the pizza. God, the pizza. Look, I’ll say this delicately because I have neighbors and I’m looking to grow my subscribers here: it’s fine. It’s adequate. It will fill the hole. I’ve never truly had “bad” pizza, just pizza that will suffice. But if you love pizza, I mean really love it, the way some people love wine or cheese or gardening, “House of Pizza” pizza is the kind of thing that makes you a little sad.

Thick, oily, indistinct. The cheese is gummy in a specific way. The crust is soft when it should be crisp. It tastes like pizza the way a stock photo tastes like photography.

My two spots are Blackhawk Pizza in Bellingham, best of a genuinely mediocre local bunch, and Bar, which recently opened a second location (the other one is in Mansfield in the shopping center with the L.L. Bean) on Main Street in Franklin and does south shore bar pizza, the regional style that I think is 1:1 and should earn more international recognition.

It’s thin, crispy, a little charred, the kind of slice you fold and eat in two bites. The GOAT of this style, arguably, is Town Spa, but it’s not close enough to make it a regular thing. When Bar opened, I felt something I hadn’t felt about a restaurant in a while.

Relief.

So, I’ve been driving past Franklin House of Pizza for four years, filing it under “not for me,” and that would have been the end of it.

Except.

I started counting

A few months ago, I caught myself counting. Bellingham. Franklin. Plainville. Milford. Medway. Wrentham. Millis. I pulled up a map. Boston.com ran a piece last year that quantified what I’d been sensing: roughly 106 restaurants in Massachusetts have some version of “House of Pizza” or “Pizza House” in their name. One hundred and six. That’s not a coincidence. It can’t be.

So, I went looking. Fair warning: I used AI research tools to go down this rabbit hole, and I’ve tried to verify what I found against primary sources. Some of this history is well-documented. Some of it rests on a thin scholarly literature. I’ll flag the difference. If I’m wrong about something, say so in the comments. If I’m right, also let me know how awesome I am in the comments.

The guy named Charlie

The best-documented version: a Greek immigrant named Costas Kitsatis, also known as Constantinos Kombouzis, also known as “Charlie,” opened a restaurant called Pizza House at 86 Truman Street in New London, Connecticut, around 1955. Not 1952, which is the date in most write-ups. A food historian named Colin Caplan told Boston.com 1952, and everybody copy-pasted it. But a hobbyist food site called Eat This CT actually pulled the city directories and the White Pages and contacted the New London City Clerk’s office. The documentary record points to 1955. The 1952 date is vibes. So, and this is important, if you’re at a party or the grocery store or standing in line at Arby’s, and someone strikes up this exact topic and tries to tell you 1952, just know that person is wrong, and it is your full right as an American to aggressively correct them. Also, what are you doing at Arby’s when there’s north shore roast beef sandwiches just up the road?

Anyway, 86 Truman Street is now a church. Specifically, Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal Tercera Casa de Oración, a Spanish-language Pentecostal congregation. The site where Greek-Albanian immigrants invented a regional cuisine that now defines a 106-restaurant cluster in another state is a Latino Pentecostal church on a side street in a Connecticut port town. Because of course.

Charlie didn’t invent pizza so much as he adapted a style. The Greek flatbread most likely in his lineage is lagana, a lenten bread, baked with olive oil across Greece for Clean Monday. He pressed it into an oiled pan, put tomatoes and cheese on it, and sold it to people who didn’t have a lot of money and were very hungry. Then he taught other Greek immigrants how to do the same thing. They taught others, and the others spread north.

Why it exploded

This is the part that cuts through my annoyance a little, even though I don’t entirely want it to.

These weren’t random guys opening pizza joints. They were Greek immigrants in postwar America, cut off from the first big wave of Greek immigration by the 1924 National Origins Act, which capped Greek arrivals at about 100 people per year. That quota held for decades. The second wave started after World War II, somewhere around 200,000 Greek immigrants between 1945 and 1982, many of them fleeing the economic wreckage of the war and a brutal civil conflict. They came here with no capital, limited English, and a need to work. The food service pipeline was open. Italian-American pizzeria owners were aging out. Their kids had moved into white-collar work and didn’t want the hours. Greek immigrants stepped into the equipment, the ovens, the leases.

Then they built a network. You learned the trade from a cousin or a neighbor. You got the financing from within the community. You opened your own shop. You named it after the town you were in, because that was the brand, because the brand traveled with the recipe, because that’s how apprenticeship models work.

Bellingham. Franklin. Plainville. Milford.

There’s a guy named George Zisopoulos who supposedly went by “The Professor” and taught a generation of Greek immigrants that college towns were the best markets, students who couldn’t cook, steady foot traffic, low rent. I say “supposedly” because this story lives exclusively in a single trade magazine essay tracing back to one academic paper I couldn’t verify directly. Multiple research passes have turned up no obituary, no business filing, no contemporaneous news mention of the man. He may be real, and he may be a legend. The Greek-pizza origin literature is thinner than you’d think.

What I can say with more confidence: before many of these guys opened pizzerias, they ran ice cream trucks. Multiple named Connecticut operators have confirmed this on the record, including Chris Skarbandonis of Pizza Castle in Waterbury and the late Spiros Velezis of Four Brothers. The truck was how you learned the neighborhood, built the cash flow, figured out where people lived and what they’d spend. Then you went indoors. I find this detail unreasonably charming.

The name, “[Town] House of Pizza,” probably isn’t a language-barrier accident, but a branding convention that traveled with the network. The name was the signal. If you saw “House of Pizza,” you knew what you were getting: the pan, the oil, the blend, the gyro on the menu next to the Italian sub. And by naming the shop after the town, these operators did something calmly brilliant: they made an immigrant business feel like a civic institution.

Franklin House of Pizza isn’t somebody’s restaurant. It’s Franklin’s restaurant.

The Greeks have made several significant contributions to society, namely democracy and feta cheese. Although I appreciate my Greek neighbors, I do not necessarily prefer their twist on pizza. I will be, however, aggressively and unapologetically evangelizing most other Greek cuisine, because it genuinely is divine and sublime, and there may be a fuller, exclusive article in the future on this.

Back to the pizza, though: the cheddar in the cheese blend. (Yes, cheddar. That’s why it tastes like that.) The mozzarella is there for stretch. The cheddar is there for sharpness and because it doesn’t burn the way straight mozzarella does in a long pan bake. Probably an economic choice first, a culinary signature second. It explains everything about why this pizza tastes the way it does and why people who grew up on it can identify it without being told what they’re tasting.

Back to the sign

Four, almost five, years of driving past Franklin House of Pizza, muttering about the name, writing it off as generic, and it turns out the genericness is the whole story. The indistinguishability is the point. One guy in New London in 1955 with a recipe and a network, and 70 years later there are 106 versions of the same sign across one state alone. They spread north into Massachusetts the way any good idea spreads: person to person, cousin to cousin, town to town, exit 17 off 495 to exit 16.

The site where it started is now a Latino Pentecostal church. The guy who started it was Greek-Albanian, making a bread he adapted from a lenten tradition, selling it to people who needed to eat. His apprentices ran ice cream trucks. His apprentices’ apprentices named their shops after the towns they were in and made those towns feel like they had an official pizza. A hundred and six of those signs exist in Massachusetts alone, and there are parallel versions of this exact story playing out in Saskatchewan, where, allegedly, four Kolitsas brothers took the same recipe to Regina in the late 1960s and built a regional chain called Houston Pizza.

I’m still not going to eat at Franklin House of Pizza. Mostly because I’ve eaten at Bellingham House of Pizza, and, once you’ve eaten at one, you’ve basically eaten at all of them. Plus, I have Bar now, and I have opinions, and the opinions are strong and passionate and, critically, correct.

But I drive past that sign differently now. I appreciate the history, the story, the human endeavor to make pizza, which I acknowledge is noble and respectable and enterprising and arguably morally the highest honor in Western Civilization. Right in front of the Hippocratic oath and love thy neighbor.

Still, as a Chicago guy, as a proud human of Italian-American heritage, as a man of dignity and principles and scrupulousness, please come up with a different name. Because I can’t stand it anymore.

And neither should you, frankly.

Frank Kalman lives in Franklin, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kelly, daughter Madison (4), son Benny (7 months), and Lola, a German shepherd-husky mix who runs the household. He’s a Northwestern-trained journalist who pays the bills writing content marketing for a construction tech company. Amateur guitarist, pro guitar collector, music lover, Chicago sports fan, which is to say a glutton for sustained heartbreak. Indiana University and Northwestern alum.

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I was on my way to my weekly guitar lesson, the one I’ve had every Tuesday with my teacher Matt Zajac for going on two years now, and I’m driving past Acapulco’s on Union Street and I look over and there is, I kid you not, a full-sized horse tied up outside a Mexican restaurant on Cinco de Mayo. Not a pony. A horse. I did a double take, kept driving, and filed it away in the part of my brain that stores bad omens alongside superstitions I don’t technically believe in but also wouldn’t dare test.

I should have taken it as a sign. I know that now. I probably knew it then. But I had a plan, and when you have a plan and a 4-year-old who’s been promised dinner out, the horse is just a horse. You keep driving.

The plan was Sol de Mexico in Bellingham, which is an excellent Mexican restaurant about five minutes from our house in Franklin, and on Cinco de Mayo it is exactly as packed as you would expect an excellent Mexican restaurant to be. This is information I had. I was aware of it. I chose to be an optimist anyway, which is my right as an American, and also clearly my fatal flaw, and the evening was going to reveal this about me in real time in front of my wife and children, which is kind of what Cinco de Mayo is for in our household at this point.

The full party: my wife Kelly, who is a reasonable person and had probably already done the math on Sol de Mexico and kept it to herself out of love. My daughter Madison, who is 4 and had no idea it was Cinco de Mayo and no use for the information, because to Madison every night is mac and cheese night and the world is either cooperating with this or it isn’t. My son Benny, who is 7 months old and whose entire agenda for the evening was a bottle and sleep and who was, of the four of us, the only one operating with any clarity about what he needed. And me, the optimist, the planner, the guy who drove past the horse.

We got in the car. We drove to Sol de Mexico. We pulled into the parking lot at around 5:30 on a Tuesday evening and I will tell you that we did not make it out of the car, because you don’t need to get out of the car to understand what’s happening when there are people waiting outside on the sidewalk and the parking lot looks like a Bruins playoff game let out. You know. It takes about four seconds and then you know. We knew.

We engaged the backup plan.

PJ’s Bar and Grill is right across the parking lot from Sol de Mexico, which on a normal night is a fun piece of local geography and on Cinco de Mayo is a full-on triage operation, because every family that pulled into that lot, looked at that crowd, did that four-second calculation, and made the same pivot we did is now also at PJ’s, and the place is humming in a way it was probably not expecting for a Tuesday in early May.

I’ve been to PJ’s a handful of times over the years we’ve lived in Franklin. The first time was maybe three years ago, a date night, our first since having Madison, and we had a babysitter on the clock and had struck out at three other restaurants that were all slammed and PJ’s was right there, across the parking lot from wherever we’d just been rejected, and we walked in and sat down.

I remember the server telling us, midway through our meal, that he was going to step out back for a cigarette, which is the kind of thing that has never happened to me before in a restaurant and which I found, honestly, kind of refreshing. It’s a very specific kind of honesty. The place is what it is, the guy is who he is, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. I respected it more than I probably should have.

What PJ’s is, specifically, is a bar and grill in the fullest and most literal sense of that phrase. There are like 13 TVs, all of them on sports, which is the correct number of TVs and the correct thing to have them on. There’s a big bar. The beer is cold. The prices are not particularly cheap, which the vibe will lead you to expect and the bill will gently correct you on, but that’s fine, that’s just the gap between atmosphere and economics. The menu is smash burgers, wings, big salads that present as healthy options while almost certainly being the most caloric things on it, quesadillas, steak tips, a short rib that I have never ordered and will not speculate about. It’s bar food, executed with genuine competence, and if you arrive expecting it to be something other than that, the miscalibration is yours, not theirs.

PJ’s knows what it is. More importantly, it knows what it isn’t.

There are two types of people at PJ’s on any given night, and you can tell them apart the second you walk in. The regulars are easy: they’re not looking at the menu, they’re not on their phones, there is a Miller Lite in front of them because there was always going to be a Miller Lite in front of them, and going to PJ’s for these people is not a choice so much as a gravitational pull, the same category of automatic behavior as brushing your teeth or locking the door behind you. They are at home in a way that is specific to bars and to regulars of bars, and I mean that as a genuine compliment, because there is something to be said for a person who has found their place and simply goes there. Then there’s everyone else, which on this particular Tuesday includes my family and probably 40 percent of the other tables, all of us slightly displaced, all of us recalibrating, all of us people who had better plans that the evening dissolved.

We sat outside, which was nice, actually. Madison got her mac and cheese and was immediately and completely at peace with the world in the way that only a 4-year-old who has just been told she’s getting mac and cheese can be. Kelly ordered a margarita, because she was going to honor Cinco de Mayo in whatever form was available to her, and a chicken quesadilla. I ordered a large Miller Lite on draft, because there was no Mexican beer on tap and they had Corona in bottles but I wanted the draft and there is a difference between draft beer and bottled beer that I am not going to explain but that I feel very strongly about, and the buffalo chicken quesadilla, which I’d been going back and forth on versus wings for a few minutes before deciding the quesadilla was more in keeping with the spirit of the occasion.

Kelly had been planning to split the buffalo chicken quesadilla with me, which I had agreed to in good faith, but it came out heavy on the blue cheese and she made a unilateral executive decision to remain exclusively loyal to her traditional chicken quesadilla, which I completely understood and did not hold against her. I ate the whole buffalo chicken quesadilla myself. It was fine. It was maybe a little aggressive on the blue cheese, yes, but I’ve never in my life looked at a quesadilla and decided not to finish it, and I wasn’t about to start on Cinco de Mayo at PJ’s Bar and Grill in Bellingham.

The service was stretched a little thin for the crowd, two bartenders and one server working a floor that had clearly gotten busier than a Tuesday night usually calls for, and there were some gaps, but nothing that derailed the evening or even really registered while it was happening. I noticed it the way I notice these things, which is to say reflexively and without being asked to, a leftover habit from years of working at newspapers where noticing things that are slightly off is basically the whole job. It has never made me more fun at dinner. I’m working on it.

PJ’s Bar and Grill, Bellingham. B-minus, maybe a C-plus on a rough night, a solid and reliable backup plan with genuine dive-bar energy and cold beer and 13 TVs and a menu that will not surprise you and will not disappoint you and will feed your family on a Tuesday when the thing you actually wanted didn’t work out.

For the regulars, none of this applies and I hope it’s clear I mean that with full respect. You have found something and you go to it and you don’t overthink it and honestly that’s a kind of wisdom I’m still working toward. Keep going. God bless.

For everyone else: the horse is always out there somewhere, tied up in front of the thing you were counting on, and the parking lot of your plan A is always one Cinco de Mayo away from being completely unusable, and when that happens PJ’s is right there across the lot, lit up and open and not asking any questions about what you were originally hoping for. It will not be what you wanted. It will be fine.

And Benny, for what it’s worth, was asleep before we got home, which means the evening was, on balance, a success.

Frank Kalman lives in Franklin, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kelly, daughter Madison (4), son Benny (7 months), and Lola, a German shepherd-husky mix who runs the household. He’s a Northwestern-trained journalist who pays the bills writing content marketing for a construction tech company. Amateur guitarist, pro guitar collector, music lover, Chicago sports fan, which is to say a glutton for sustained heartbreak. Indiana University and Northwestern alum.

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Some of you went deep. Some of you went wide. One of you wrote what I’m pretty sure was a full audit of the local food scene, bullet points and editorial asides included. Two of you, unprompted, mounted a defense of Irish food. We’ll get to that.

I read all of it. I’m going to be on this for a while.

Here’s the situation. I now have, by my count, north of 25 recommendations from people whose taste I take seriously, because they took the time to write down where they eat. The list will take me months to work through. I’m not going to publish a piece on every spot. But I’m going to visit them — or try to, given that I am a dad of two kids under age 4 and … well ... you get it, right?

In any event, the good ones get a post. The great ones get a love letter. The genuinely disappointing ones get the nachos treatment, which means a complete sentence about what went wrong followed by a clipped “Be better.”

Here’s the list, in rough geography.

Franklin proper

• Kojo’s. Aileen Kehoe and Shay A. D’Angelo, the latter delivering only a fire emoji and a hundred-points emoji, which is the kind of criticism I respect.

• The Rome Restaurant. Lindsay Stahl, who calls it a Franklin staple. I’ve been there; I agree.

• La Cantina. Aileen Kehoe, who calls it the best food in Franklin. That’s a confident take. It’s also the correct one, since I, too, have been there, and I’m going to either confirm it or contest it in print.

• The Tavern on Central and The Shed. Pam Cosgrove Vickery.

• GlenPharmer. Leigh Tanis Clark.

• Paradise BBQ. Ellen Stein Moran. Veteran-owned food truck, lives at Fairmount Fruit Farm.

• The Curry House. Aileen Kehoe, who has surgically positioned it as “OK and better than Mirchi,” a sentence I find both useful and devastating.

• Elizabeth’s, the Miami bagel specifically. Leigh Tanis Clark, who informs me it’s the closest thing to a Jersey bagel around. I’ve had it. I’ve never stepped foot in New Jersey, but I watched The Jersey Shore, so that means I’m well informed on all things New Jersey.

Neighboring towns

• Arturo’s (Westborough). Leigh Tanis Clark, who promises meatballs and the best espresso martinis.

• Maya Noodle and Rice (Bellingham). Leigh Tanis Clark.

• Doragon Eatery (Ashland). Leigh Tanis Clark.

• Blooming Hearts Roastery & Cafe (Milford), with the donut place next door. Leigh Tanis Clark, who appears to have done more reconnaissance than the U.S. Army.

• Nirvana Tea House (Millis). Leigh Tanis Clark.

• B Town Diner (Bellingham). Johnny Barraco, recommending it specifically as a Pam’s replacement, which is the most poignant compliment a diner can receive.

• The Feisty Greek (Norwood). Terri Miller.

• Ravens Nest and Kosmos (both Walpole). Aileen Kehoe.

• Tangerini’s (Millis). Leigh Tanis Clark, whose son is a line cook there. The chicken sandwich, per her, is worth it.

• Takara (Medfield). Leigh Tanis Clark, who insists it’s the best sushi in the area unless you drive into Boston for 311.

Worth the drive

• The Village Haven (Forestdale, Rhode Island). Rick Gil de Rubio, for family-style chicken.

• Garden Grille (Pawtucket, Rhode Island). Sandra Flor Frongillo, specifically for vegan nachos worth investigating, which is the kind of phrase that makes me pay attention.

• Culinary Delights (Natick). Jane Ann Fulton, a fellow Chicagoan, for the actual genuine article Chicago hot dogs and Italian beef. I haven’t had a real Chicago hot dog east of the Hudson. This is now urgent.

On the Irish food situation

Two of you wrote in to defend Irish food. You’re correct, and I owe you a correction. The line in the bona fides post was sloppy.

Real Irish food, eaten in Ireland, is excellent. The thing I don’t love is American Irish food, the corned beef and cabbage we all choke down on St. Patrick’s Day and pretend is good — which is, I admit, a different cuisine entirely, and one I’ll continue to hold a position on.

The Guinness, in either country, remains a food. And elite.

On what’s missing

A few of you also told me what Franklin doesn’t have. Pizza, mostly (believe me, as a Chicago native, we’ll get to the pizza situation here). A great steakhouse. A real Chinese restaurant.

These are the scene pieces I’ll write between the reviews. Each absence is its own essay.

Closing

To all of you who took the time to leave a comment: Thank you. The comment is the algorithm in this newsletter. You write what you eat. I make the list. The list becomes the work.

I’ll be on this for a while.

Frank Kalman lives in Franklin, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kelly, daughter Madison (4), son Benny (7 months), and Lola, a German shepherd-husky mix who runs the household. He’s a Northwestern-trained journalist who pays the bills writing content marketing for a construction tech company. Amateur guitarist, pro guitar collector, music lover, Chicago sports fan, which is to say a glutton for sustained heartbreak. Indiana University and Northwestern alum.

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Case in point. I did not buy my first car until I was north of 30, and not until it was absolutely, unequivocally necessary, which was when I moved to Los Angeles in 2018. LA is a city where car ownership is required. There is public transportation, which was my main means of getting around during the decade I spent in Chicago, but the LA system is, to put it diplomatically, not efficient.

I bought a used 2017 Honda Civic. I still own it.

I will turn 40 later this year, and my tastes are aligned more closely with a 17-year-old than with most men in my age and income bracket. My closet is mostly t-shirts, jeans, hoodies and various sports jerseys. I am a big sneaker guy. I own far too many baseball hats. I still wear workout clothes from high school, which I graduated more than 20 years ago. My favorite band of all time, to this day, is Blink-182.

I will spend premium dollars on certain things. The kind of things that earn it by lasting. Guitars. The house. Shoes, to some extent. Kitchen appliances. A Peloton that can get a little lonely.

Most of the day-to-day luxuries other people splurge on, I don’t. I do not have a daily Starbucks habit, partly because I make better coffee at home and partly because, honestly, fuck that chain. I do not frequent steakhouses. I do not own a suit, and besides, I do not have many occasions to wear one if I did.

The closest thing in my regular life to an actual luxury, and I am being precise about the word, is the salmon bagel at Birchwood Bakery in downtown Franklin.

At $17.95, the salmon bagel at Birchwood is an enigma. It is easily the most expensive thing on the menu. No reasonable person should be spending $18 on a breakfast sandwich, at least not daily or even weekly. And yet, somehow, the sandwich is simultaneously overpriced and undervalued.

First, it takes a lot of balls to order it. Sesame bagel. Maine smoked salmon. Scallion cream cheese. Pickled red onion. Maybe a dash of microgreens.

That’s it.

You read this standing up, in line, not sitting down with time to think it over. The instinct is to obviously not order that, and to hit up one of the more reasonably priced breakfast sandwiches or pastries Birchwood has on offer.

But sometimes. Sometimes you work up the courage.

If it’s your birthday and you’re thinking, “you know what? I deserve this.” If you happened to wake up and find a $20 in an old coat you haven’t worn in a while. If you just got promoted at work. If you’re feeling really good about your financial prospects. If the market closed up the day prior.

You might have that swagger to see the $18 salmon sandwich, while standing up, while in a hurry, while hungry, and say, “I’m going for it. Fuck it.”

Then you’ve made a grave mistake.

Because it will be nearly impossible to return to Birchwood and not find yourself with a deep fire in your belly to order it again.

Then you see it. It arrives at your table, and the sandwich doesn’t make sense.

If the Louvre were in the business of making sandwiches, this is what I’d imagine one would look like. You know how this goes at, say, the Wendy’s drive-thru. The burger in the menu picture looks incredible, delicious, immaculate.

You order it. You open the bag when you get home. The burger looks not like the menu picture but like its ugly step-cousin with a really dangerous drug problem who probably needs an intervention. Like, yesterday.

The salmon bagel at Birchwood isn’t pictured on the menu. It should be. This isn’t just a sandwich. It’s a testament to careful human craftsmanship.

It’s also why it takes 25 minutes to come out, even though nothing on it requires any elaborate cooking. The bagel just gets toasted. Which, by the way, is rather large, has the perfect doughiness-to-firmness ratio, and, I shit you not, has sesame seeds on both the top and the bottom. As if you ordered a bagel sandwich with two tops.

The first time I got it, I almost didn’t want to eat it. I’m not a take-pictures-of-my-food guy. I am the kind of person who will aggressively make fun of people who do, when I see it happening in public. But my first instinct with this piece of culinary craftsmanship was to pull out my phone for a photo, which I will obviously have professionally edited, framed and hung next to my wife’s PhD from Northwestern.

Then you taste it.

The thing fucking slaps. The combination of ingredients vibe so perfectly in your mouth, sort of like the Beatles did on Sgt. Pepper’s. Just an orchestra of flavor.

I blacked out the first time.

Let me be precise about something. The salmon bagel at Birchwood, at $18, is a luxury experience. Not a thing you grab and go and eat while waiting for the commuter rail in the rain.

I’ve had this sandwich dine-in. I’ve had it to-go. The presentation, the taste, the alignment of the toppings, the craft of the construction, are the same. They don’t change.

In nearly five years, I’ve ordered this sandwich probably 30 times. It comes out the same. Every. Single. Time.

The salmon bagel at Birchwood has no bad days. Death. Taxes. And the salmon bagel at Birchwood Bakery in downtown Franklin.

The salmon bagel doesn’t have competitors. Not really. It isn’t fighting for breakfast-sandwich market share against the egg-and-cheese at the diner down the street. It isn’t squaring off against the bagels at the place two towns over with the better parking lot — or, more reasonably, Elizabeth’s nearby. Those are different sandwiches and different bagels doing very different jobs for different moods.

The only thing the salmon bagel competes with is the voice in your head telling you not to order it.

That voice is, to be sure, loud. It is the voice of a guy who grew up in the Midwest in the ‘90s, whose dad would have had a small stroke at the idea of $18 for a piece of bread with fish on it. It is the voice of every reasonable adult instinct that says you can make something almost as good at home for four bucks. It is the voice of a generation that watched its parents clip coupons and now feels weird about ordering anything that isn’t on the value menu.

Birchwood’s only real opponent is your own flinch. And the sandwich wins. Every time. It wins because it is, against all odds, worth it.

It wins because once you’ve had it, the math in your head quietly reorganizes itself, and $18 stops being the price of a sandwich and starts being the price of admission to a small, repeatable, 10-minute thing that makes your week marginally better.

That’s the whole trick. Not the salmon or the bagel. The permission.

I gave myself permission a long time ago. Highly recommend it.

Harvard Business School should write a case study on this thing.

Like I said. It doesn’t make sense.

Frank Kalman lives in Franklin, Massachusetts, with his wife Kelly, daughter Madison (4), son Benny (7 months), and Lola, a German shepherd-husky mix who runs the household. He’s a Northwestern-trained journalist who pays the bills writing content marketing for a construction tech company. Amateur guitarist, pro guitar collector, music lover, Chicago sports fan, which is to say a glutton for sustained heartbreak. Indiana University and Northwestern alum.

I was born in Chicago and largely grew up in its northern suburbs. Glenview, Illinois, specifically. The poorest of the tony North Shore suburbs along the lakefront, which sounds like a self-deprecating thing to say but is also literally true and a fact I have always been weirdly proud of. The North Shore is the John Hughes corridor. It is also, more recently, the fictional setting of Mean Girls. None of that has anything to do with food, but I wanted you to picture it.

What does have to do with food is that I grew up partly Italian. My grandfather on my mom’s side was 100 percent. The cultural inheritance of this is that the operative question at our house was never “Are you hungry?” The operative question was “Would you eat?” There is a meaningful difference between these two questions. The first leaves room to say no. The second does not.

At holiday dinners, spaghetti and meatballs were the appetizer. Then came the lamb or the prime rib. Then the potatoes. On a normal weekend, my mom would make chicken parm for our family of four and put a platter on the table suitable for 20. I would ask, every single time, whether other people were on their way. They were not. The platter was for the four of us. The implication was that you would eat what was put in front of you, and then you would eat more, and then you would have a slice of dessert and feel entirely fine about all of it.

This is the food culture I started with.

And then there’s the city itself

Chicago is, I will argue with anyone who’ll listen, the best food city in the world. I am not talking about the high-end restaurant scene, although that is in fact world-class, and you know this because you watched The Bear on Hulu. I am talking about the rest of the culture. The regular places. The places you stumble into and they happen to be brilliant.

Deep-dish pizza, which is correct and good and people who tell you otherwise are wrong. Tavern-style pizza, which is the form of pizza most actual Chicagoans really eat, and which, in a wooden booth at a place like Barnaby’s with a cold pitcher between you, is one of the great civic experiences available to a human being. Italian beef. The hot dog (no ketchup, do not test me on this). Greek food, specifically the gyros. The dive bar burger joints, every single one of which is somehow a hidden gem according to whoever brought you there.

This is what I mean when I say Chicago is the best food city. Not that it has the best restaurants, although it might. The point is that you can walk into almost any random spot in the greater Chicago area and have a real meal. The baseline is high. The floor is high. The ceiling is also high, but the floor is what I’m flexing on.

Then I left

Some years after grad school, I ended up in Los Angeles. Pasadena, specifically, which if you know you know. LA is its own thing. The sushi alone reorganized my understanding of what fish could be doing on a plate.

The Mexican food, well. I’ll come back to the Mexican food. The Mexican food in Southern California moved me, on a regular basis, into states of borderline religious experience. I could eat Mexican food every day and not notice.

I bussed tables at a Mexican restaurant for three summers in college, by the way. And I waited tables, between college and grad school, at an upscale Italian bistro that for some reason also had bocce courts and a bowling alley attached. I was very bad at the actual job of waiting tables. I am still slightly haunted by specific tables I served.

But I learned more about people in those years than I have in any job I have had since, including some that paid considerably better, and I now believe it should be a national service requirement that every American spend at least one summer waiting tables. You learn what dignity looks like under fluorescent lights at 11 p.m. You learn how the room actually works. The people who do this for a living are skilled in ways most office workers never will be.

The people who treat them as beneath being nice to should, in my honest opinion, serve prison time. When I go out to eat now, you can mess up royally and I will still thank you effusively and tip you well. If you know, you know.

And then we moved here

Eventually I came back east to Massachusetts. Boston has its places. The greater Massachusetts area, however, leaves a lot to be desired food-wise, and I am tired of pretending it doesn’t.

The Irish pub is elite as a category, but largely not because of the food. Irish food, with all due respect to my Irish friends, sucks, unless we are counting Guinness as a food, in which case yes, fine, Irish food is excellent.

But Massachusetts is where I live now. Franklin, specifically. And the thing about Franklin and the towns around it is that there is in fact a real food scene here. It’s just one nobody is writing about with any honesty or particularity. People will tell you a place is good. They will not tell you why or whether to believe them.

My go-to spots, in and around Franklin

Since landing here in 2021, the rotation has settled into something like this. Not a ranking, not a definitive list, just the places I find myself most often.

• Mirchi. Indian. The default move when nobody can agree on what to do.

• Santa Fe Burrito Grill. The fast-casual Mexican spot in town that earns its place.

• Chipotle. Because of course.

• The Raillery. The nachos, as previously documented. Janet’s queso follow-up still pending.

• Teddy Gallagher’s. The Irish pub from the last dispatch. The waffle-fry-nacho verdict is still under investigation. The Guinness, as established, is the food.

• Mykonos Greek Kitchen. Greek food in Franklin, better than it has any right to be.

• 3 Restaurant. The Italian. Not Chicago Italian, but locally outstanding.

• Birchwood Bakery. Pastries that justify the morning.

• Elizabeth’s Bagels. The bagel. The actual bagel.

• Dunks. Required infrastructure in this part of the world.

• Medway Café. Worth the short drive over the town line.

• Mickey Cassidy’s. Another Irish pub. See above re: Guinness as a food.

• Pam’s Diner. RIP. We will not be the same.

I am almost certainly forgetting something. The comments are open.

So here is who you’re reading

A guy raised in a Chicago Italian household where the operative question was always “Would you eat?” A guy who lived in Pasadena long enough to develop strong opinions about California Mexican food versus Mexican Mexican food. A guy who actually waited tables and remembers what it felt like. A guy who currently lives in Franklin, Massachusetts, where he is, according to a recent Facebook post, reasonably well known for getting upset about nachos.

I love Italian food and Mexican food, in that order, and it isn’t close. I love dive bars. If a place feels like it’s trying too hard, I am already out the door. I will defend a great Irish pub for what it is, but I will not pretend its menu is the reason. I think servers should be protected by law and that being rude to one should carry actual consequences.

That, friends, is what you’re getting.

Now let’s go eat.

Frank Kalman lives in Franklin, Massachusetts, with his wife Kelly, daughter Maddison (4), son Benny (7 months), and Lola, a German shepherd-husky mix who runs the household. He’s a Northwestern-trained journalist who pays the bills writing content marketing for a construction tech company. Amateur guitarist, pro guitar collector, music lover, Chicago sports fan, which is to say a glutton for sustained heartbreak. Indiana University and Northwestern alum.

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The cheese, what there was of it, sat in a single defeated puddle at the very top of the pile. The jalapeños were huddled together in the dead center like they were cold and trying to keep warm. And approximately 30 percent of the chips at the bottom of the plate had no toppings on them at all.

They were just chips. They were chips on a plate, served to me, a paying customer, in the year 2026, in a restaurant in Franklin, Massachusetts, by people who knew exactly what they were doing and chose to do it anyway.

I sat there for a long minute doing the math on what was about to happen. Which was that I was going to have to pry the cheese-bearing chips off the top, eat those in a sort of cheese-rationing operation that a grown man should not be performing in a public dining room, and then sit at 7:15 staring at half a plate of inedible naked tortilla wedges while the table next to me got their goddamn entrees.

That, I thought, sitting there, is a moral failure.

And then I thought: I should write a Facebook post about this.

So I did. I posted in All About Franklin Mass, the local group I am, according to its administrators, a top contributor and rising voice in, mostly because I am bad at hobbies and Facebook is one of them.

The post said about what you’d expect a post like that to say. That Franklin restaurant owners should beware. That I would be writing an omnichannel review. That I would be telling friends. That I would be writing my state representatives. That I would not stand for such injustice.

And then, in the kind of clipped landing I have been told works well in this format: “Be better.”

It got 74 likes. It got 28 comments. It is, by the standards of the All About Franklin Mass Facebook group, a banger.

And the comments, my god, the comments.

This is where it became clear that Franklin, Massachusetts, my home of more than four years, is a town with deeply held nacho opinions, and that I was not so much the person making an argument as I was the guy who happened to be standing on the soapbox at the moment the dam broke.

Sarah Christine Tuffo came in early to inform us that Chili’s used to have the best nachos because they put the same amount of toppings on every one, and that, alas, this is no more, which is the kind of sentence that makes you stop and think about where the country is going.

Mari Peti contributed: “We go elsewhere for Nachos, if you can’t make em right<>don’t make I say!” That is a sentence whose punctuation choices I will not pretend to understand, but whose underlying energy I respect entirely.

Howard Heilweil offered, simply, “We demand justice!” Sabrina Garrahan called it “doing the Lord’s work.”

And Sarah Sullivan, and this is the line that almost made me cry into my dry chips, wrote: “You know what Frank? I agree. Nachos should be done right. Justice for nachos!”

Justice for nachos. I have a new tattoo idea.

There were, of course, the dissidents. There always are.

Tom Beksha, in what I can only describe as the comment of a man who has made some kind of weary peace with mediocrity, wrote: “I’m more concerned about trash pickup than how nachos are made.” To which I responded, with what I think we can all agree is admirable restraint: “I can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

That reply got seven reactions. Tom did not write back. I am choosing to interpret his silence as concession.

Mike Ficco weighed in: “Nachos are for toddlers.”

Mike. With all due respect. That is a take from which there is no honorable retreat.

Justice for nachos. I have a new tattoo idea.

But the recommendations, friends. The recommendations is where the thread really started cooking.

Chandra Bellamy Juncker asked what I thought about the Irish nachos at Teddy’s, the ones made with waffle fries as the chip, to which I said, and I stand by this in print as in life, that the Irish should be nowhere near a kitchen and the Mexicans should be allowed to cater the meal.

Dina Costello Merolla pointed me to Depot Street Tavern, which is now on my list. Chris Oliveira told me to skip the trouble entirely and go to the Raillery, where the nachos are, in his words, the best in town.

So I went, that very night, because I am nothing if not a guy who follows up. And reader, the nacho game at the Raillery is real. Three solid layers on a hot, cast-iron skillet, full coverage, every chip accounted for. I considered emailing my state representative to retract the previous letter.

And then. And then Janet Waldron entered the chat, replying to Chris, to inform us that the Raillery has switched to using a watery, salty “queso,” in scare quotes, which makes the chips soggy and inedible.

I have not yet been able to confirm or deny Janet’s report. But I want her to know that I have read it, that I take it seriously, and that a follow-up dispatch on the queso situation is forthcoming.

I would be remiss not to mention Erika Czubik, who contributed nothing but a photograph of a man on a city sidewalk holding a cardboard protest sign that read, in block capital letters, STOP THE UNEVEN DISTRIBUTION OF NACHO TOPPINGS.

There is nothing I can add to that image. The image is, frankly, the entire thesis of this newsletter, made visible.

So look. Here is where we are.

I sat down to write this piece intending to lay out the mechanics of proper nacho construction (a layer of chips, toppings applied evenly, heat, another layer, repeat, stop putting dishes on your menu you cannot execute), and to threaten state representatives, which I still intend to do, and to land on something austere and bar-stool-philosophical along the lines of “if you can’t put cheese on every chip, take the dish off the menu.”

But somewhere between Mari Peti’s punctuation and Erika’s protest sign and Janet’s queso whistleblowing, this stopped being a piece about nachos and started being a piece about the fact that I live in a town of several thousand people who, when prompted, will all show up to a Facebook thread to defend, lament and forensically adjudicate the local nacho situation in real time. With photographic evidence. With dueling sheet-pan reviews. With at least one reference to doing the Lord’s work.

That, friends, is the whole reason I am doing this newsletter.

Here is what Frank-ly Food in Franklin is going to be. A hyperlocal food blog about eating in and around this town. The actual restaurants. The actual dishes. Real visits, on real nights, with real verdicts. Rave reviews where the place earns it. Takedowns where the place has phoned it in. Scene pieces about openings and closings and trends and the specific texture of trying to get a table at 7:30 on a Saturday in a five-square-mile dense burb 45 minutes from Boston that pretends, mostly successfully, that it isn’t.

It will not be a Yelp roundup. It will not be a service-journalism digest. It will not be a restaurant column dressed up in a newsletter’s clothing. It will be a guy who lives here, eats here, and is writing the thing he wishes existed. The reader I am writing for is the neighbor wondering whether the new place downtown is any good, the friend who just moved to town and asked me where to eat, and the cousin coming up from Connecticut who wants to know if there’s anything worth driving for. If you are one of those people, this is for you.

Posts will land when the spirit moves, which is to say when something is worth writing about and not before. No publishing schedule. No content treadmill. Just dispatches.

So consider this the first dispatch. There will be more. There will be takedowns. There will be love letters. There will, almost certainly, be a follow-up on the queso situation at the Raillery, which I am now obligated, by Janet, to investigate. There will be a real verdict on Teddy’s Irish nachos and whether waffle fries belong on a plate sold under that name. There will be a sit-down at Depot Street Tavern. And there will be other things entirely, because this town is not just nachos, even though, today, it is.

In the meantime, if you are a Franklin restaurant owner currently serving nachos, do me, and Sarah Sullivan, and Howard Heilweil, and the man with the protest sign in Erika’s photograph, one very small favor.

Layer them.

Be better.

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