Frankie & Benny’s

Frankie and Bennys… This place is somewhere I would like to enjoy more than I do. The food always sounds and looks out of this world in the menus; The dazzling brown façade on a salacious and tender burger, the emollient reflecting an image of paradise and blissful childhoods back into my now wide eyes. The chips, a crunchy yellow breastplate shielding the undemanding passion of innocent potatoes!
Ohh the menus like a playboy mag for food lovers.
So the time comes to put the menu down, and I give the generally accommodating staff my order, slobber now tricking from every orifice… O_​O… im so absorbed by the pleasure I’m about consume i don’t even notice the squawking staff adherents, fortified with sacrificial cakes and forged smiles performing a medley of happy birthday rituals.
The food arrives. The anticipation is too much… i look down… Food just looks like a head-​butted battenburg. A slush of colours and sauces, bland to the taste, sickening in terms of texture and an overall disappointment.
Im not sure who left emptier on this woeful day, myself or my wallet.

Went here for a quiet date with the wife and was fairly disappointed. They first of all tried to seat us beside a 6 year old’s birthday party with at least a dozen very loud kids. However, they did move us when we asked.
The service was very average in every way. The food was average to slightly below. It was served with very little imagination and presentation was poor. My meal with slightly overcooked and tasted like it had been made a hour ago and kept warm. Not awful, but disappointing.

One glance at the «amazing skins» on the menu set tone for a hyperbolized meal. The eventual potato skins were dry, flavourless and unimaginative. The Americanized menu featured either cheese, beef, bread or potato in every dish. The Neapolitan chicken covered in cheese and served with spaghetti offered a strange choice of sides between fries, jacket potato or salad and proved a dissatisfying carb loaded meal.
The repetitive birthday serenade was garishly loud and ruined any opportunity for conversation.
The meal overall was overpriced.

If you like paying decent money for what tastes like microwaved, over processed ‘food’ this is the place for you!
A morons idea if Italian food, i genuinely feel sorry for anyone who enjoys this as there is probably more flavour in an elastic band, and the meat is similarly chewy!
Talking about plastic, the décor is cheap, the service is okay at best, atmosphere is insipid and the price you pay for all this would buy you something alot tastier from an independent restaurant.
In summary if you like McDonalds and wear tracksuits your probably going to love this place.

I find Frankie and Benny’s to be lacking in quality and a little expensive for what you get. yes, the food’s alright but… it’s nothing really special. It’s just another fandangled american eaterie…
I enjoy the atmosphere and the surroundings, the staff are nice, I love the whole New York vibe… but I just kind of see it as the place where 13 year olds go for their birthday parties and think they’re going somewhere top nosh…
Plus it’s annoying when happy birthday gets shouted out and ‘sang’ five times through your starter…

The outside of this restaurant, with its juxtaposition of an attention-​grabbing neon sign above ‘traditional’ continental striped canopies, should tell you just about everything to expect inside: a restaurant that takes American and Italian stereotypes and blends them together in one uninspired, uninteresting package. The décor here is fake-​looking and twee, with ‘personal’ photos on the walls that are no doubt replicated in hundreds of other Frankie & Benny’s across the country. When I visited it was quiet and the atmosphere was fairly non-​existent, with the only other guests being a few families, but that didn’t stop the staff taking quite a long time to take our order. To be fair to them, they’re obviously used to customers taking a long time to decide: the menu is irritatingly long, combining Italian pizza and pasta dishes with steaks and burgers, not to mention offering some dubious sounding crossover dishes like Philly steak pasta bake and meatball pizza, which felt more like a gimmick than any exercise in fusion cooking. When my goats’ cheese pizza arrived it was pretty good, although the toppings were a little sparse, but I expected something a bit more impressive for £8.75, especially considering that this puts it in the same price bracket as high-​end pizza places like Box. My friend’s steak and chips was equally uninspiring, with chips that tasted like they might have been shipped in from the Burger King nearby. They even had that little papery cup for the sauce. Although we didn’t leave hungry, we both felt that after paying a bill that came to nearly £30 with drinks we could have had a far more memorable experience for our money elsewhere.

Frankie and Benny’s is an American-​Italian style eatery that leans more towards the American size, hence the wide range of of burgers, steaks and other grill stuffs, the huge portions and the franchise-​style impersonality of the place.
There’s no hiding from the fact that the service in this place is slow — the bar, the food, even getting seated took longer than it should have… perhaps it’s not as efficient as other American franchises in this respect.
I found most of the food to be pretty special, however, and decided to mix up American and Italian over two courses by going for the tomato and herb soup followed by a proper thick, grilled steak. Both dishes were impressive and satisfying to the point that I couldn’t stomach a desert, despite the fact that they looked like they might be the best part about the restaurant.
But unfortunately, it is the slow service that you remember over the food, and the fact that it’s so family orientated that you feel those with kids get faster, more attentive service just annoys you. Unless you’ve got kids of course.