On a recent Friday, the New York Times was on site at Sam’s Restaurant in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. Passersby wouldn’t have known it, but inside the pizzeria was a flurry of activity associated with the shooting of “The Bride!”: a Maggie Gyllenhaall-directed feature film that will star Christian Bale and Penelope Cruz, among others.
The owner of Sam’s Restaurant, Louis Migliaccio, will take home $85,000 for the use of his restaurant, the Times reported. He needs it, too—from the sound of it, the 94-year-old pizzeria has barely stayed afloat lately.
To hear the Times tell it, Sam’s Restaurant has fallen out of favor with a new generation of Brooklynites. The exact reasons why film scouts have identified Sam’s Restaurant as a great place to film a Hollywood movie may be the same reasons why the restaurant struggles: it is decidedly old school.
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The vinyl booths in Sam’s appear to not have been replaced in decades. The walls are made up of wood paneling from a similar era, and there are phone booths that have long since fallen out of favor. Sam’s Restaurant has no website, nor a social media presence.
Sam’s serves up authentic escarole pizza, alongside pasta dishes “that center on clams and chops and chicken, which is referred to on the enormous laminated menu as ‘fowl,’” the Times writes. “There’s also Chianti, as well as Cokes that come in plastic bottles. Mr. Migliaccio keeps a secret stash of Manhattan Special, an old-school espresso soda, for himself.”
Migliaccio, 67 years old, never wanted to work in the family business, which his parents owned as he grew up. In fact, Migliaccio was born in the apartment above Sam’s Restaurant. He tried working in grocery stores and had dreams of becoming an architect, but that never panned out. So instead, in 1990, Migliaccio became a “reluctant waiter” in the family business and eventually took it over.
The film shoots started, Migliaccio guessed, in the 1970’s. The recent shoot of “The Bride!” was the 59th time Sam’s Restaurant has been turned into a film set. In other words, even with an $85,000 pay day for the most recent shoot, the restaurant’s second job as a movie set is infrequent enough that it’s not as if Migliaccio is rolling in Hollywood money.
Michael Hartel, a location manager who was featured in the Times’s story, has used Sam’s Restaurant on more than one occasion. He’s filmed mob or mob-adjacent scenes in the pizzeria, using Sam’s to bring to life a certain era of New York City’s past. There are other spots in New York to shoot scenes like this, Hartel noted, but few are as reliable as Sam’s.
“Trying to find a dining establishment with the red vinyl booths that looks old-school is so much harder than it used to be,” Mr. Hartel said. “Everything [in New York] looks like a Pottery Barn now.”
In other words, even if diners aren’t as crazy about Sam’s Restaurant as they once were, film scouts love Sam’s Restaurant as much as ever. And so it was on that recent Friday that Gyllenhaall, sporting a black baseball cap pulled down over her eyes, presumably to obscure her identity, walked up to Migliaccio on the sidewalk outside of his pizzeria.
“You’re the best,” she said to Migliaccio before clocking in for work. “I was just telling everyone.”
