(upstairs) · down the laneway · 4pm till late
(upstairs) · The Crossing · 166 Cashel St · Ōtautahi
I’m not Italian.
No one’s glass is ever empty.
Everyone is fed.
Every person through the door is a long-lost friend we’ve been waiting for.
Nobody wrote that down. Nobody trained it. It was simply what you did when someone arrived.
My grandmother was never rich. You would not have known it at her table. Whatever there was came out, all of it, for you. That’s the thing I took with me: abundance was never about how much you had. It was about how much you gave. That’s what we set in front of you now.
Then I went to Italy and didn’t want to come home.
The long lunches. The afternoon that becomes the evening without anyone deciding. Piano piano — a table that holds you for three hours and nobody checks their watch. I knew exactly what that was. It was my grandmother’s table with better wine.
So I built the room I didn’t want to leave, and I gave it an Italian accent.
The Franco script above the door is drawn from my mother’s signature — her hand, kept. What it stands for is simple: no costume, no cliché, no pretending to be something we’re not. Pasta made by hand, a Negroni poured properly, a room that wants you in it.
The dachshund is Humphrey. The other dachshunds you’ll meet — on the coasters, the menus, the posters — came from two places: the old Campari posters I love, and a camera roll full of dachshunds I kept photographing all over Italy. Some people collect postcards.
Two levels. One world.
Downstairs, the Negroni and Spritz bar, where the evening starts slow.
Upstairs, the open kitchen, where we cook like someone’s coming home.
You’ll find us tucked off Cashel Street — the kind of door you have to know about. Some places want to be seen. Bar Franco wants to be felt.