Frankie Bones’ Restaurant and Lounge

Flavor: Steak, seafood and Italian standards

Ambiance: Upscale hotel restaurant with great background music

Publicists for Frankie Bones’ Restaurant and Lounge—the self-consciously swanky steak-and-seafood joint that recently took up residence on a busy stretch of Hendersonville Road that downtown Asheville denizens still consider the Deep South—touted the restaurant as the sort of place Frank Sinatra would have frequented. Press releases invoked a sweetly sinister image of the 1950s, when men were mobsters, women were molls, and everybody appreciated a good meatball.

Sinatra and his fellow Rat Packers, who lived on a steady diet of adulation and red meat, probably did end up patronizing restaurants like Frankie Bones, which feels less like an in-crowd hideaway than a high-end hotel eatery. On concert dates from Tampa to Duluth, Sinatra’s crowd likely found themselves in restaurants just like Frankie’s, which offsets its cookie-cutter character with generous portions of above-average food and superlative service.

Buoyed by Frankie Bones’ publicity, I had envisioned the restaurant as a politically incorrect Italian-American theme park, with waiters dressed as wise guys and busboys offering customers action on the night’s fight. Far from it: Frankie’s plays the class card where most themed restaurants would resort to kitsch. Other than the leatherette banquettes and a well-chosen soundtrack of crooners, there’s little indication you’ve gone “back to the swinging style of ‘50s and ‘60s restaurants in big cities across America.” I’d imagine most of Frankie’s regulars simply think of it as a nice place to eat. Because you don’t gotta have a gimmick when the food is good enough to sell itself.

Frankie’s menu is huge. Literally. I have dresses in my closet smaller than the sheets of poster board on which Frankie’s prints its offerings. But even with the extra yardage, the items are still printed in an itsy-bitsy typeface that could challenge some early-bird diners. There’s just that much food: The dinner menu features nearly 40 entrées, in addition to a wide selection of appetizers, salads, side dishes and fancy add-ons designed for any dish, including Oscar topping and a cold-water-lobster tail. Ten minutes after receiving the menu, it’s still possible to find something you hadn’t yet noticed (“Cannelloni? Where’d that come from?”); like any great work of literature, the thing just keeps giving.

The wine list is considerably less expansive, with much of it devoted to well-known California names like Caymus and B.R. Cohn offered at high-roller prices. Even grocery-store standards like Ravenswood command upward of $30 at Frankie’s. Better to forgo the vino and order a martini, preferably accompanied by a hand-stuffed olive sampler.

Frankie’s must employ a bartender who’s obsessive about his olives. The olives—variously stuffed with roasted garlic, blue cheese, onions, jalapeno and anchovies—are the single best $1 food you’ll find in all of Buncombe County. Our server was especially excited about the way the olives’ flavors commingled with the vodka (or, should you be a purist about these matters, gin), but the high-quality ingredients make them marvels in their own right.

Frankie Bones is as anachronistic as its publicity promises in its reticence to trumpet its use of exceedingly fresh ingredients. Who made the food and what they used to make it takes a back seat to who’s eating it, a refreshingly retro concept more restaurants would do well to adopt. But the great ingredients are still there, from a sweet shredded carrot dashed into the satisfying Bolognese sauce that envelops the dense meatball appetizer, to the chunky blue-cheese dressing ladled over a hunk of iceberg lettuce in the cool wedge salad.

The cool wedge, studded with smoky bits of bacon, is a far better salad than the Caesar, teeming with the flavors of lemon water, or the house salad, in which the mixed greens are spoilt by vinaigrette that bears an unfortunate resemblance to waffle syrup. Frankie’s also offers a robust minestrone with the overwhelmingly ripe tang of canned tomatoes, speckled with squash and cannelloni beans.

Perched precariously on the menu between the appetizers and the entrees on Frankie’s menu, trapped in some sort of culinary identity crisis, are the four flatbread pizzas. Frankie’s does a good job with bread (the complimentary, chewy house bread served with garlic butter is much more than just stomach padding), tomato sauce and cheese, so it stands to reason its pizzas would be pretty good. But kitchens aren’t always reasonable places, and the pizzas are largely disappointing. The hard-baked crust and mix of cheeses refuse to play together, so the dish is really a $9 plate of cheese and crackers.

Frankie’s fares better with its classic steak-house appetizers: The menu includes oysters Rockefeller, shrimp cocktail and a toothsome crab-stuffed artichoke. The tremendously rich plate, drenched in lemon-butter, is a nice twist on the omnipresent crab-artichoke dip.

Crab reappears aboard the Salmon Oscar, which features a wood-grilled slab of salmon wearing a little crabby hat. While the crab and accompanying asparagus and mashed potatoes were all well prepared on our first visit to Frankie’s, the salmon itself was cooked a little too long. The kitchen also struggled with cooking times on pasta—both a side dish of noodles and a rigatoni entrée were so undercooked we had to send them back.

The glitch was beautifully handled by our server and manager, who quickly offered us a free dessert. On both my visits to Frankie’s, service was efficient, attentive and informed—our first server claimed to have eaten every dish on the menu (judging by her appearance, she couldn’t possibly have finished them). She was a great fan of the marinated rib eye, and rightly so: While she claimed the flavors of the steak’s coffee rub were barely perceptible—“It’s just a tenderizer,” she told us—the dish had strong overtones of joe, enlivening an otherwise basic dish.

But the steak couldn’t compare to the chicken parmesan, a masterful take on the Italian-American favorite. The breading was subtly seasoned, and just the right amount was wrapped around the tender chicken cutlet.

Frankie’s dessert menu is a lineup of greatest hits, including cheesecake, crème brulee and the make-‘em-at-your-table s’mores that were all the rage about a decade back. There’s also a “big chocolate cake” that’s so enormous it barely fits on the plate.

Like the cake, Frankie Bones seems poised to outgrow its boundaries. The restaurant really doesn’t need its half-hearted thematic affectations—so long as it keeps serving stuffed olives and chicken parm.