Georgia Fulton inside her new-old restaurant, Sam’s.
Photo: Jingyu Lin
Fans of Sam’s, the pizzeria that has been around since 1930, have long viewed the restaurant as a ticking clock. Louis Migliaccio, the beloved curmudgeon who ran the place all but single-handedly, regularly groused about his aching bones. But he didn’t appear to have any succession plan in place. Sooner or later, Sam’s was seemingly fated to shutter. Against all odds, the restaurant has found an heir apparent: Sam’s savior is not a deep-pocketed restaurant group or even an experienced restaurant owner. It is Georgia Fulton, a young Australian whose chief résumé credit is as a server at the Long Island Bar nearby. She began working there just months after its current iteration debuted in 2013 and stayed for 12 years, becoming as much a fixture in the place as any of its bartenders.
“I did not have an idea to open my own place,” Fulton says. “I surprised myself when I first walked in. I said, ‘I have to somehow commit to making this happen.’ It would break my heart to hear that it was closed, or that it was taken over by some corporate restaurant group.”
Sam’s will be the latest in a string of restaurant resurrections and renovations, but unlike Gage & Tollner, Le Veau d’Or, or Ferdinando’s Focacceria, Sam’s is not a culinary icon, nor is it terribly famous. Instead, it’s cherished by an ardent contingent of fiercely devoted regulars who appreciate its frozen-in-time quality. This group won’t hear a word against its classic red-sauce-joint menu or Migliaccio’s idiosyncratic, “my way or the highway” approach to hospitality. (I am one of these people.) “Sam’s is an archetype,” says St. John Frizell, co-owner of Gage & Tollner. “You couldn’t be anywhere else in the world but Italian American Brooklyn. But what time are you? Anytime from 1935 to the current day — it’s hard to say.”
Fulton didn’t eat at Sam’s until 2021. Once inside, she was hooked. Determined to save the place, she became a regular, dining early on weekends, and slowly started to work her way through the voluminous menu. She also began working on Migliaccio. “I was quite obsessed with it, but I had to be subtle,” she says. “He always put me in a booth. That’s how I knew Lou liked me.”
For the six months before Sam’s closed in 2025, Fulton worked alongside Migliaccio, slowly learning the business — or at least Migliaccio’s version of the business. “I thought I was an analog person, but this was so far beyond analog,” she says. Every order and bill was written by hand; tickets were walked back personally to the kitchen staff. “You get three tables and you are in the weeds, because you have to do everything,” Fulton adds. “I’m trying to make martinis and Lou is yelling at me because I’m chilling the glasses.”
Fulton persevered, which is no small feat: The restaurant was founded in 1930 by Migliaccio’s great-uncles, brothers Danny and Sam D’Arco. It was named after Sam, who died before the place opened. Mario Migliaccio, an Italian immigrant and the D’Arcos’ nephew, entered the picture in 1950 as a dishwasher. He worked at Sam’s for six decades, retiring in 2009. Louis Migliaccio (who declined to be interviewed for this story, of course) took over after that, and he’s been front and center ever since. There were cooks in the kitchen, but they were not seen. An additional waiter has assisted Migliaccio here or there over the years, but none lasted long.
“Her superpower is to deal with grumpy old guys,” Adam Kolesar, a longtime Sam’s regular, says of Fulton. “She’s got that sensibility dialed in.”
Now, Fulton is in the final stages of renovating the space, essentially making Sam’s a brighter version of itself. A beautiful, Brooklyn-built back bar, with its gingerbread canopy — long buried behind a massing of bottles, knickknacks, framed pictures, government signage, and files — now shines. There will be barstools for the first time in Sam’s history. The back room, which was often dark and used only for large parties, will now be open for business. There are plans to restore the murals, which date from the 1940s. The old wooden telephone booths and telephone-book stand are staying — though one booth was moved upstairs to make room for an additional barstool.
Other details couldn’t be saved: Most of the kitchen was removed to make way for new equipment, with the critical exceptions of the brick pizza oven and an enormous cast-iron flour mill made by the Peerless Bread Machine Co. of Sidney, Ohio. “You couldn’t get rid of it if you wanted to,” says Fulton.
Other design changes owe a debt to Long Island Bar. (Joel Tompkins, a Long Island Bar co-owner, is an investor here.) Fulton had a rail built to divide the bar from the tables, creating a layout much like that at LIB. “It looks like it’s always been there,” Fulton points out.
The food will still be red-sauce Italian, but paring down the 90-ish-item menu was no easy task. “We wanted the essence of it to stay the same,” Fulton says, “to definitely do things that are Sam’s.” She hired Andrew Halitski — who was a sous-chef at Flora Bar and ran La Rose Pizza, a Detroit-style pizzeria, on Smith Street for a short time — to be the chef. (“It was like looking back in time,” Halitski says of his first scan of the original menu.) The new roster of dishes will include a few selections each of appetizers, pastas, salads (including a Sam’s Salad and a Lou’s Salad), meat dishes (including the various parms), desserts, and, of course, pizza. Fulton became particularly intrigued by a humble relish listed as “celery and olives” on the old menu. “It was just Key Food undressed celery and olives straight from the bag. It was like a painting. I thought, If I can re-create that and make it delicious …”
Fulton also plans to keep up Sam’s long-standing relationships to the few remaining culinary holdouts on Court Street. She will get bread from Caputo Bakery (established in 1904), meat from Staubitz Market (1917) and cookies from Court Pastry Shop (1948).
The menu at Sam’s always listed a wide array of classic cocktails, usually mixed by Migliaccio himself. At the new Sam’s, cocktails will take a more central role, and there will be more wine choices, including a “Sam’s house red.” The old regulars — one, Sam Premutico, is another investor — are already onboard with the new direction. “I see this as an annex of Long Island Bar for people with kids,” Kolesar says, “Sam’s being a complement, a synergistic Brooklyn experience.”
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