How Flow Saved a Chef

A few years back, I was screwing around Instagram and I stumbled across some cooking videos made by this dude called Frank. He had a strong New York accent, and maybe he was a little abrasive—but he could be funny as hell too—and it was pretty easy to tell he had a lot of heart.

So I gave him a follow. Why not?

Even on a tiny screen this guy was a magnetic presence, an explosion of kinetic energy. Extolling the virtues of arugula, Sicilian dried oregano, and cooking healthy food for your loved ones while chopping heaps of garlic one minute and cranking out ravioli the next.

I soon came to find that whenever this guy showed up in my kitchen—looking out from my iPhone through his big-ass glasses and telling me what to do and how to do it—good food seemed to appear in my pots and pans.

With his evangelical enthusiasm for good cooking, and for the Italian food that is his birthright, he soon had me using his methods to crank out some truly amazing dishes: scrumptious spaghetti limone, complex Neapolitan ragù, some wicked marinara, and his signature crispy eggs.

Here’s what really hooked me, though. The next time I was in New York, just for grins I dropped him a DM asking where I might buy some decent olive oil in the city. I was flabbergasted when he took time out of his busy day to chat back and forth (I later learned that he answers all his DMs) and he personally guided me to DiPalo’s on Grand in Little Italy.

That’s how Frank Prisinzano flowed into my life. And it turns out that ‘flow’ is something Frank has thought a lot about.

It was in the kitchen that a young teenage Frank discovered how to flow, and it was the power of flow that guided his evolution from a misfit outsider kid from Queens into a confident, ambitious chef and restaurateur. Frank’s flow is behind his three wildly successful restaurants, Frank, Lil’ Frankie’s, and Supper. They’ve become integral and beloved parts of the community landscape of New York’s East Village—and they serve the very food that Frank shows his followers how to flow with on Instagram.

Frank says that when he’s in flow it’s like autopilot: ‘You’re doing what you love and it doesn’t feel like work. You can even escape your body’s movements so that your mind is free to wander and see the future.’

Wow, that’s pretty heady metaphysical shit from a guy who in one breath can wax eloquent about the invisible flowing forces that guide his life… and in the next bark out ‘Al dente or I’ll break ya legs!’, and ‘Olive oil—you should be pourin’ it down ya neck!’

But that’s the kind of rich contrast I and Frank’s other tens of thousands of followers have come to expect and love from this inspiring, complex, emotional, Novello olive oil-anointed man.

There’s no one quite like him, so let’s chop some garlic, get the pan nice and hot, and see what’s cooking with Frank Prisinzano.

Frank Prisinzano introduces himself

I’m a chef, and I want to share the very profound moments that you can have with food. I do this in my restaurants, on Instagram—and through the way I live my life.

I’ve reached the point where I’ve got my life pretty much figured out—I really do not work, so I can pretty much do what I want, and be where I want. Everything for me is play, otherwise I won’t do it.

My main mission now, with the security and reach and trust that I’ve built, is simply to find out how much good I can do. Through Instagram, I’m personally tutoring tens of thousands of people in cooking at this point. If I can help them figure a few things out in the kitchen—and get them and their friends and families eating better and healthier—that’s amazingly fulfilling for me.

But through all of this, my hands are not on the wheel. I basically just flow.

The feeling of ‘flow’ saved me, and it guides how I set goals and make decisions.

I discovered flow really early in my life, back when I started working at a pizzeria in Queens when I was 13. I was kind of an outcast as a kid, and I didn’t have a lot of friends. But the flow I discovered in cooking saved me – I’d be working the line and I’d feel it—it felt like I was dancing. I would work a whole night and not make a single fucking mistake.

I became obsessed with creating food, and everything changed for me once I started doing that. I got addicted to the flow of that job, and I wanted to do it every fucking day—and I basically have for the last forty-three years.

I love the feeling of being in the zone and just knowing that I’m doing what I’m supposed to do—in cooking and in my life, that’s flow.

Flow for me is a kind of meditative state—it’s a plateau of balance and creativity. I’m flowing constantly. If I’m out walking around, what’s in front of me is what I should be asking questions about. If I happen to run into a friend, that means I’m supposed to stop and talk to them. Whatever I do, I have to feel like I’m supposed to be doing it.

Flowing is all about the moment you are in. Your goals are the decisions you make in those moments—the ones that push you toward the life you want to flow into. When I’m in a flow state, the coincidences that happen guide me. Usually they guide me towards my goals, but often they don’t—which is what makes me start to consider a change.

Right now, I’m having the time of my life. I feel like everything I’m doing is worth every second of my time—and I didn’t plan any of it. I’m flowing better than ever, just following the coincidences—which happens to be exactly how I fell into the way I use Instagram.

How I flow with Instagram.

When I first started an Instagram account, I used it as a travel notebook. I go to Italy all the time, because it’s my heritage and a massive part of my life, but also to do research for my restaurants. I was posting photos of everything I was eating and seeing, and I started to get a big following.

A few years back, though, I started working on what I call the ‘crispy egg method’, and it occurred to me how valuable that method could be as a teaching tool. So I posted it on Instagram using Stories, and it blew up really quickly.

The method teaches people about searing—it helps them conquer their fear of a super hot pan and super hot oil—and harness it in the kitchen. If you can learn the cadence of how to make a crispy egg, you can learn how to properly sear fish, or chicken, or a steak—anything.

From there, my Instagram morphed into me posting detailed videos of whatever I was doing in the kitchen. As I started posting more and more methods, I got more and more followers, and it became clear that I was helping people build confidence in the kitchen and experience some real epiphanies about cooking—exactly what I was hoping for.

I never post recipes: you can’t flow using recipes. Instead, all the tutorials I post are methods for making the things I eat over and over again. These methods are a part of my life—they’re how I make the food I cook at home for my family and how my cooks make the food in my restaurants.