Sam’s, A Cobble Hill Red-Sauce Institution, Gets a Gentle Reboot

By Scott Lynch

Sam’s Restaurant is located at 238 Court Street, between Baltic and Kane Streets, and is currently open on Wednesday through Sunday from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Sam’s has been holding it down on Court Street since 1930, sending out an array of classic red-sauce dishes—as well as pizzas, steaks, chops, sea food, and “relishes”—to generations of Brooklynites feasting in those shiny red vinyl booths. And for nearly all of those 96 years, if you went to Sam’s, you were guests of the Migliaccio family.

Until this year, that is, when the famously gruff Lou Migliaccio, who had spent his entire life at Sam’s (literally born in the building), finally decided he had enough and handed the place over to Georgia Fulton, a perhaps unlikely on-paper successor. Aussie by birth, Brooklyn by choice, and Long Island Bar server by trade, Fulton had the one qualification Migliaccio cared about: she loved Sam’s as much as he did.

Photo by Scott Lynch

“I truly just stepped in the door about five years ago and immediately fell in love with the place,” Fulton told Brooklyn Magazine. “So I committed myself to coming once a week for all those years, to develop a relationship with Lou and with the space. I thought it was magical, so layered, and so full of history.”

Fulton’s new/old Sam’s opened last week, with a refreshed interior—cleaned up, opened up, and brightened, without losing any of its essential character—and a revamped, pared-down menu that feels exactly right for the space. The chef is Andrew Halitski, who previously ran La Rose, one of my favorite pizza parlors in Brooklyn, and he does an excellent job here of recreating Migliaccio classics as well as bringing some new stuff to the table that, frankly, wouldn’t have been out of place a half-century back.

Mozzarella sticks, $13 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

Starters here include a stack of comically liquid (but still good) mozzarella sticks, baked clams, “olives & celery” (a longtime Sam’s standard), and fried calamari.

Orecchiette and sausage, $24 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

Then there are the pastas, about a half-dozen, headlined by a very solid spaghetti and meatballs, but we went slightly cheffier with Halitsk’s terrific orecchiette and sausage, pepped up with plenty of rabe, garlic, and chili pepper.

Pizza with half pepperoni, $30 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

And there’s pizza, of course, a Halitski specialty, and Sam’s mainstay since forever ago. These are old-fashioned, brick-oven, eight-slice pies—doughy, not too floppy, bright tomato sauce, cheesy as hell—that you can get topped with things like pepperoni, mushrooms, meatballs, anchovies, and/or eggplant. It’s the perfect pizza for this place.

Chicken parm platter, comes with spaghetti, $30 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

But the showstoppers at Sam’s are the parm platters. We got the chicken and couldn’t help but laugh when this beast hit the table. It’s an enormous serving of cutlets, breaded, fried, blanketed in stunning amounts of cheese, and blasted in the oven until crisp and chewy. It comes with a side of spaghetti, a bargain at $30.

Sam’s Special Salad, $19 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

My buddy Mike was convinced that we needed to order a big bowl of “Sam’s Special Salad” to go with everything else, and he was correct. Not only did this many-ingredient dish bring some welcome tang to the party, but when I dropped a tong’s worth of salad atop a slice of pizza, I created possibly my favorite bite of the night. Those little red sweet-and-spicy pepper drops are awesome.

Sam’s sundae, $14 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

You can order the expected tiramisu for dessert, but much more fun is the mountainous Sam’s Sundae, with generous scoops of pistachio, chocolate, and strawberry gelato buried under chocolate sauce, crushed almond cookies, whipped cream, and, naturally, a cherry on top. Cocktails skew classic and cost about $17, beers are eight bucks, and extremely full glasses of wine can be had for around $15.

Photo by Scott Lynch

When you come—and you definitely should—be sure to take a moment to really look at the place. The ancient menus framed up front, the glorious old murals in the newly reopened back dining room, the phone booth upstairs next to the Overlook-Hotel-vibing party photos from the 1950s, the ephemera dating back decades scattered about—every square inch of the space is designed to wreak of its history, and keep the regulars (including the film location scouts) coming back to those booths.