Nightlife
A Key in a Red Ribbon, Georgia Fulton Keeps Sam's Lit on Court Street
A server from the Long Island Bar became the keeper of a 96-year-old Cobble Hill red sauce room, and the regulars are back in the booths
An old man in a brown suit walks into Sam's on Court Street and asks for Miss Georgia. He has been eating here since the 1970s, he tells her. He hands her a small box tied with a red ribbon. Inside is a key. Then he leaves.
Georgia Fulton still does not know what it opens. She told Patch that the man simply gave it to her and walked away, and that it made her want to cry. It is the kind of thing that happens when you take over a room that has been feeding Cobble Hill since 1930.
From Regular to Keeper
Sam's opened on Court Street in 1930, the work of two brothers, Danny and Sam D'Arco. Sam died before the doors opened, so Danny put his brother's name on the sign. A nephew, Mario Migliaccio, came over from Italy about twenty years later. His son Lou was born in the apartment upstairs and spent his life downstairs, running the place on instinct.
Fulton is an unlikely heir on paper. She grew up in Australia and works as a server at the Long Island Bar, a few blocks away on Atlantic Avenue. For more than a decade she lived near Sam's and passed it on the way to work. About five years ago she started stopping in before her shifts, then once a week, alone and with friends. She told Brooklyn Magazine she fell in love with the place the moment she stepped in.
"I thought it was magical, so layered, and so full of history." Georgia Fulton
Lou ran Sam's his own way. There was no point of sale system and no fixed staff structure, Fulton told Patch, and the kitchen could close whenever Lou decided he was tired. He once let a vegetarian friend of hers in on a secret, that there was meat in the red sauce. They came back the next week anyway.
When his knees started to go, Lou began thinking about what would come next. Fulton worked weekends at Sam's for the last six months of his run, learning the rhythms. Then he handed her the keys. He was 69, PIX11 reported, and the last of the family in the business.
"It wasn't like I was ambitious in the way I want to be a restaurant owner," she told Patch. "It was very specific to Sam's."
The Same Room, Gently Lit
Sam's reopened in September. The red vinyl booths are still there. So are the old menus framed up front, the murals in a back dining room that is open again, and a phone booth upstairs beside party photos from the 1950s. Location scouts have always loved the room, and a film shoot even pushed Fulton's planned summer reopening back, Grub Street reported. The old Sam's closed every August while Lou went to Italy, so the delay felt almost traditional.
The menu keeps about 90 percent of what was there, cut down from nearly a hundred items. The baked clams stay. So do celery and olives, the pizza and the parms. The hard part was that there was no recipe book. Lou's notes were closer to shorthand, and he showed the chef consultant, Andrew Halitski, the coffee cups and dishes he used to measure. Halitski, who ran the Brooklyn pizzeria La Rose, also has to coax the old pizza oven, which has no thermostat and runs on two gas pipes.
There are new dishes, like orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe and a pork chop Milanese, built to sit quietly beside the old ones. The cocktail list was always long and mostly for show. Now the bar actually makes them, from a Singapore Sling to a Rob Roy, under bar lead Rene Hidalgo. Brooklyn Magazine put cocktails at about $17, beers at eight dollars and generous glasses of wine around $15.
The Old Regulars Approve
The point is that nothing feels new. The green trimmed plates are the same ones Lou used. Salads still come in wooden bowls with metal tongs. Fulton's rule, as she told Grub Street, is to get it as close as possible to the original, but better.
The neighborhood seems to agree. Former schools chancellor Carmen Fariña, a Brooklyn native, told PIX11 the place felt nostalgic, a little of the old and the new. Lou has been at his family's home in Ponza, Italy, during the handover. Fulton told PIX11 she is waiting for him to walk through the door with a tan and a big fedora.
"I will do everything to keep it going." Georgia Fulton
Brooklyn Magazine lists Sam's at 238 Court Street, open Wednesday through Sunday from 5 to 10 p.m. Go after dark, take a booth, and order the parm. New York keeps losing rooms like this one. Every so often, as at Donohue's on Lexington, somebody decides to hold the door instead.