Order the Pie First, Everything Else Second
A 1930 red-sauce room on Court Street where the cheese pizza is the reason to come and the rest of the menu is the reason to stay.
The plain cheese pie lands at the table and the crust is doing the work — thin, blistered underneath, the sauce sitting bright on top of the mozzarella instead of drowning under it. $27 for a whole pie in a Cobble Hill dining room that has not been redecorated since roughly the Truman administration. The phone booth in the corner is not a design gesture. It is a phone booth.
Sam's opened in 1930, founded by the D'Arco brothers, and the Migliaccio family have run it for decades since. The room, the menu, and the pace all move at a speed that predates OpenTable — even though OpenTable is now how you get in. The Infatuation called it a red-sauce joint that feels perfectly old again, which is the right register. This is not a revival. It is a restaurant that outlasted the revival cycle by never leaving.
The cheese pie is the best in the neighborhood and the rest of the menu is a reason to stay for a second drink.
Editorial Deep
The pastas are the weak side of the menu. Some of the red-sauce classics land where you'd expect a 96-year-old Italian-American room to land — competent, generous, not the reason anyone drove over the bridge. A plate of ziti here is a plate of ziti. Order it if you want it. Do not order it thinking it will be the meal.
Court Street between Kane and Baltic gives you no warning. The storefront is narrow, the signage is the same signage it has been for decades, and from the sidewalk it reads as one more small Cobble Hill Italian place among several. Then you're through the door and inside a room that has been left alone on purpose since 1930 — pressed tin overhead, dark wood booths run tight along the walls, a working-condition phone booth in the corner that is not a prop. Lighting is low and yellow, from wall sconces rather than anything overhead. The music, when there is any, is quiet enough that the room noise is the room noise.
This is a room that rewards the neighborhood regular and punishes the diner on a schedule. Service is warm — family-run warm, not trained-warm — but it is slow. Reports of twenty minutes to have an order taken are not exaggerated on a busy night. If you have an 8:30 movie, do not come here for the 6:45 seating. If you have the evening, the pacing is fine and the people running the floor are people you will be happy to see again.
The $27 cheese pie is the number to defend, and it defends itself. That is a whole pizza, in a sit-down dining room with a booth and a waiter, for less than the price of two slices at any of the newer Brooklyn pizzerias trading on wood-fired provenance. The sauce and crust are doing work that the number does not suggest.
First visit you order the plain cheese and one pasta because you want to know. Second visit you order two pies — the plain again, and whatever the specials board is doing that night — and you skip the pasta entirely. That is the move, and it is the version of Sam's that scores higher than the version most first-timers get.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Cheese pizza, baked clams, roasted long hot pepper
“The cheese pie is the best on this stretch of Court Street and the room is the last of its kind — order pizza, skip the pasta.”
Come for the $27 cheese pie and the 1930 dining room; skip the pastas and bring cash. If you want the red-sauce classics done at a higher level, Rucola a few blocks north is the redirect for pasta-forward evenings — Sam's is the pizza-and-a-booth version of the same neighborhood.
The Verdict
