The mozzarella sticks come out first, three fat cylinders leaking cheese onto the plate, exactly the way they always have. The red vinyl booths are the same ones. The framed menus up front, yellowed and curling at the edges, haven't moved. Somewhere upstairs there's still a phone booth parked next to a wall of black and white photos from parties thrown decades before anyone eating dinner tonight was born.
Sam's reopened on Court Street this month after ninety-six years in one family, and the easy version of that sentence makes it sound like a sale. A building changed hands, a new sign went up, the neighborhood got its landmark back. That's not what happened. Nobody bought Sam's. Lou Migliaccio, who was born in the building and spent his entire life inside it, spent six months teaching a Long Island Bar veteran named Georgia Fulton how to run the place before he handed her the keys.
Ninety-Six Years, One Family, Until This Year
Sam's opened in 1930 and stayed with the Migliaccios for the better part of a century. Lou grew up in the building. He ran it as the last owner of that line, and by every account he was as much a fixture of the room as the red booths themselves, the kind of proprietor regulars describe by his mood at the door rather than his name. This year he decided he was done, and instead of listing the business or selling to a restaurant group looking to gut it and rebrand, he picked a successor from among the people already sitting at his tables.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Court Street has lost old-guard Italian-American spots to landlords, retirements, and buyouts for years, and the ones that reopen under new ownership usually reopen as something else entirely: a wine bar, a fast-casual concept, a name that means nothing to the block. Sam's took a different route.
Six Months Before Anyone Got the Keys
Georgia Fulton was born in Australia and spent twelve years behind the bar at Long Island Bar, the Boerum Hill cocktail institution a few blocks away, before she ever walked into Sam's. That was in 2021. She became a regular, then a fixture, watching Lou hold court the way regulars do when a place starts to feel like theirs. Over time, according to Brooklyn Magazine's account of the handoff, Lou started to see the next version of Sam's sitting in his dining room. The two of them worked side by side for six months before he handed her the keys.
There was no broker in that story. No listing, no bidding war, no outside capital deciding what Sam's should become next. The qualification that mattered to Lou wasn't a business plan. It was that Fulton already loved the place the way he did, which is a strange thing to put a price on and an even stranger thing to teach in half a year, but that's the timeline the record shows.
What Changed and What Didn't
Walk in now and the room reads as brighter and more open than it used to, not reinvented. The back dining room, with its old murals, is open again after sitting closed for years. Everything else that made Sam's recognizable stayed put:
- The framed vintage menus at the front of the room
- The phone booth upstairs, still parked next to the 1950s party photos
- The scattered decades of ephemera nobody bothered to catalog, let alone remove
- The red vinyl booths regulars have been requesting by number for years
The menu got shorter under new chef Andrew Halitski, previously of the well-regarded Brooklyn pizza spot La Rose, but the cuts landed in the right places. The doughy brick-oven pizza is still on the menu. So is the chicken parm, still built with what one longtime reviewer called a nearly one-to-one ratio of cheese to bird. Baked clams still come with breadcrumbs sandy enough that panko would be an insult. The starters keep the old standard of olives and celery next to fried calamari, and the pastas have added a genuinely new dish, orecchiette and sausage with broccoli rabe, garlic, and chili, priced at 24 dollars, sitting comfortably next to a spaghetti and meatballs that never left.
Nothing about the changes reads as a rebrand. They read like an editor's pass on a manuscript nobody wanted rewritten.
The Closure Nobody Told Her to Keep
For years, Lou closed Sam's for the entire month of August and flew to Italy, leaving Court Street without its pizza and parm until he wandered back sometime after Labor Day. It was less a business decision than a habit baked into the calendar, the kind of thing regulars learned to plan around rather than question.
Fulton had penciled in a midsummer reopening for 2026. She ended up pushing it to September 10, according to a food industry write-up on this fall's restaurant openings, without setting out to repeat anything. She wasn't trying to honor a tradition. She landed on almost the same seasonal rhythm Lou had kept for decades anyway, which says something about how deeply a business's habits can transfer along with its keys, even the ones nobody wrote down or asked her to preserve.
A Booth With a Second Job
Sam's has spent years living a second life most regulars never think about. By its own count, the restaurant has hosted more than 60 film and television shoots over the decades, drawn by the same murals and vintage fixtures that make it feel frozen in a specific New York moment. The most recent production sent it furthest back: for Maggie Gyllenhaal's film "The Bride!," the dining room was dressed to look like a 1930s Italian-American social club, which for a restaurant that opened in 1930 wasn't much of a stretch.
That history is part of why the room reads the way it does even to people who've never seen a camera crew there. Every fixture that made Sam's useful to a period film is the same fixture that made it worth saving rather than replacing.
The Continuity You Can Actually Taste
Court Street has plenty of newer restaurants doing interesting things, but Sam's occupies a different role on the block. It's the place where a stranger from Australia spent five years earning her way into a booth before she ever touched the register, and where the new owner's biggest instinct wasn't to modernize but to leave the room mostly alone. The back dining room reopened. The murals stayed on the walls. The phone booth still works, or at least still sits there looking like it might.
What changed at Sam's this year wasn't the menu or the decor. It was the name on the lease, and even that came with six months of apprenticeship attached to it.
Cobble Hill keeps its landmarks through people willing to put in that kind of time, one regular at a time, one booth at a time. If you're curious what else on this stretch of Court Street has stayed in the same hands for decades, or you're thinking through your own next chapter in this neighborhood, Matthew Melinger is happy to schedule a private consultation and talk through what makes a block like this one worth staying close to.
