Who is Francis?

In the winter of 1953, a bass player at New York’s swanky Stork Club was arrested for armed robbery. Multiple victims identified him as the criminal and it appeared his fate was sealed—that is, until his defense attorney started seeing holes in the evidence. That attorney was Francis “Frank” O’Connor. 

This case of mistaken identity inspired Alfred Hitchcock to make The Wrong Man, the only “ripped from the headlines” noir of his career.

When The Wrong Man came out in 1956, Frank O’Connor was already a prominent political figure in New York. In 1966 he ran for governor against Nelson Rockefeller. (He lost, but by a smaller margin than most of Rockefeller’s challengers.) For most of the 1970s and 80s, he was a justice on the state's supreme and appellate courts. The New York Times called him an “unabashed liberal” and reported that after losing the governor's race “Mr. Rockefeller said of his Democratic opponent, ‘He never even told one lie about me.’”

Frank O’Connor also happens to be the grandfather of Nora O’Connor-Uyaroglu. Nora and Murat named their son Teoman Francis in part after his great-grandfather. 

Bar Francis takes its inspiration from multiple generations. It pays homage to Frank’s Brooklyn before he rose to prominence, when he was a student at Brooklyn Law School, observing the world as the idealistic son of Irish immigrants. It also celebrates contemporary Brooklyn, as a neighborhood bar serving innovative takes on classic cocktails and bar snacks.