Long-time Bowery dweller Tommy Heidrick shares his story in Kevin Frech's Bowery Dish

No sooner had the lights come up in Tribeca than filmmaker Kevin Frech was on the spot.

A packed house bombarded him with questions about his fantastic new documentary Bowery Dish, which investigates the ways upscale restaurants and bars accelerated gentrification on the Bowery. And if there was any worry Frech's film might wield too limited an appeal to succeed among fickle New York filmgoers, the long post-screening discussions pretty much took care of that.

"People talk about real estate in New York the way people in other places talk about weather or football," Frech told The Reeler recently. "That was one of the things that sort of surprised me: How real estate really drives politics and economics in New York. That was coupled with my feeling that I wanted to talk about gentrification without putting people to sleep. When you say, 'I want to do a film about gentrification,' everybody sort of glazes over. So I wanted to find something to really crystallize it for people in a way that would be interchanging but would also convey the idea.

"Restaurants and bars were something seemed like something that people could sort of grab. It wasn't abstract."

"Grab" seems an appropriate enough word for it, Frech is counting on a similar response tonight at 7 when Bowery Dish enjoys a homecoming of sorts at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in the East Village.

Frech, 39, spent more than four years assembling his footage of famously rugged Bowery regulars and the entrepreneurs who arrived in the late 1990s to set up shop around them. The film traces less of an evolution than a stunningly rapid transition—bodegas giving way to bars; A-list eateries filling a vacuum that disappearing flophouses leave behind; a way of life succumbing to a lifestyle. Frech manages this pace with patient editing and camerawork that lets the subjects portray the conflict in the personal sense it deserves.

To this end, Frech avoids didacticism in exchange for a refreshingly candid and even entertaining glimpse at what is, at heart, a disappearing culture. Frech himself entered NYU's film program in 1988, arriving from Oklahoma in the middle of that year's Tompkins Square riots; as both a transplant and a witness to the area's recovery, he works to chronicle its change without judging its guiding forces.

Not that these forces can be judged too harshly under any circumstances. Through interviews with an "urban sociologist," Frech sets up the phenomena that made the Bowery's gentrification an inevitability—the city's economic shifts and swelling property values that subsequently pushed its neighborhoods toward "renewal." That the Bowery is lower Manhattan's last frontier in this regard owes much to its legend of poverty, addiction and crime, but Frech's illuminating interviews with flophouse manager Mathew Griffin and Bowery Mission director James Macklin prove that the idea of renewal—at least on the Bowery—has less to do with an area's perception than with its people.

Frech admitted it is a topic he could have covered for at least another four years. "The problem with doing a film about gentrification is that you have to draw a line in the sand," he said. "After filming for so long, I mean, people on the Bowery would know me and I would get e-mails and phone calls from them saying, 'Oh, they're putting up a new building—you've got to get down there right away.' I'm like, no. I'm done shooting; I'm in the editing room now. I can't go film anymore. And people were sort of dismayed, asking 'How can you stop?' There was this gradual realization that I had the footage to tell the idea of gentrification on the Bowery. There's no way it's ever going to be the final final version."

He added that he would like to revisit the story in the future, name-checking Michael Apted's Up Series as an influence. For now, he said he is working for a few extra screenings of Bowery Dish at the Pioneer and seeking out TV distribution for the one-hour film. With his hundreds of hours of additional footage on hand, I couldn't help but ask Frech why he avoided a feature-length film.

"It's just bowing to the pragmatic reality that it's really hard to get a feature-length documentary out there," he replied. "I think it's easier now than it's ever been with all the successes going on, and it still is just crushingly hard. Not just domestically, but even internationally, the market is really driven for things that can fit on TV. So unfortunately, the decision was something pragmatic in just making sure there was a big enough audience that would get to see the film."

Well, sure. There is nothing wrong with pragmatic. By the same token, there is not a whole lot wrong with Bowery Dish, either—it is worth at least an hour of any New Yorker's time.