Dirty Frank's

Dirty Frank's is a dive. It's dirty, noisy, and cheap, and filled with hard-drinking artists, hard-drinking old men, and drunks. It's a great bar.

The outside of Frank's has no sign at all, just a mural of famous Franks (Zappa, Sinatra, -enstein's Monster), naming the place in a giant rebus.


The place hasn't lost the grimy ambience it had when we first saw it in the 80s, when then-Inquirer columnist Clark DeLeon was a regular and the movable-letter takeout menu, which was unappealing to begin with, was made worse by vandalism and its half-hearted repair:

original	vandalized	fixed, sort of
TAKE OUT FOOD MEAT BALLS HARD BOILED EGGS TUNA SALAD	TAKE OUT FOOD RAT BALLS H B EGGS TUNA SALAD	TAKE OUT FOOD AT BALLS H B EGGS TUNA SAL

The final version was there for quite a while. Who the hell would eat any of those things coming from Frank's? Assuming they could actually be bought?

But one thing at Frank's that everybody loves is Sheila. Behind the bar for more than two decades, and with the gossip rag brouhaha past and forgotten, she is institutionalized at Frank's, if I mean what I think.

The key to a successful visit to Dirty Frank's, as in so many things, is timing. If you get there before eleven or so, you're likely to score a booth. But if you arrive too much earlier, the place will be dead. And if you get there really early, there may be enough light to see how nasty it is. But as the evening draws on, the bar fills up with people and energy. It's a Philadelphia experience not to be missed.