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Pitt’s Offers Camp and Comfort in Red Hook
Photo: Andrew Bui
“Maybe we can call this the Tiffany Room, I don’t know. I have a thing about naming rooms,” says the chef Jeremy Salamon. He’s standing in the front of his restaurant Pitt’s, which will open this Friday in Red Hook. Workers had recently installed, yes, a couple hanging Tiffany lamps with plans to install a few more, just to be sure the room lives up to the name. The space was once the home to Fort Defiance and, in talking to Salamon about the project, it starts to become clear that he wants his new restaurant to feel instantly familiar to pretty much anyone. (A few blocks up on Van Brunt, a flyer for the restaurant’s opening was plastered to the front window of a café: “Attention neighbors, you are cordially invited …”)
Salamon hadn’t been looking to open another business at all. His hands were full with Agi’s Counter, the Hungarian Jewish café that he opened in Crown Heights in 2021. But Agi’s was a bigger hit than Salamon had expected, and demand had led him to start looking for another space to bake their cheesecakes, cookies, and babkas. Initially, he was only looking for a commissary kitchen, but his friend Caroline Schiff told him that Fort Defiance was closing. He’d heard it had a good bakery, and he figured he’d look. That’s when he changed his mind: “I just really fell in love with everything,” he says.
While Agi’s Counter calls back to Salamon’s grandmothers, Pitt’s will draw more from his own life. “In terms of the menu, its structure is like a French bistro, but it has this underlying theme of American southern,” he says. He grew up in Florida and spent summers in North Carolina. One major inspiration for the food here, he says, is Bill Smith’s Crook’s Corner, a “landmark” Chapel Hill restaurant that closed during the pandemic. “It’s like French and southern food kind of coming together, but in a very diner, fun way,” Salamon says.
He also looked back on New York restaurants from the 2000s — places like Prune (where he cooked early in his career) — as he put together the menu. One highlight will be escargot with green-goddess cognac butter, which customers pour out of the shell into ranch-dusted leaves of lettuce to make cups. There will also be sweetbreads with rosemary, fish sauce, and yellow-eyed beans, a hint at the southern thread that will run through more of the food: There’s a Country Captain riff, fried poussin dusted with an “altered” version of the seasoning (including Sichuan peppercorn) and served with a side of carrot-ginger salad. Pimento cheese is made with two types of Gouda and fried saltines for dipping. The crackers also figure into a dessert inspired by the Atlantic Beach Pie (popular at Crook’s Corner). Salamon is calling his version a Pixie Pie. Other desserts include a Friendly’s style sundae with drinks, from bartender Ben Hopkins, that aim to be similarly approachable. The Rosie Martini is a Gibson-esque, with onion brine and an onion garnish. Taeko Coffee will be a nod to Fort Defiance’s locally famous Irish coffee.
Photo: Andrew Bui
Since taking over the space, Salamon and his interior designer, Sydney Moss, have done more than just install Tiffany lamps and booths. The back room, which was Fort Defiance’s barroom, has been decorated with a carrot wallpaper, which does not quite veer into grandma territory but is appreciably homey. The pastoral theme keeps up through the rest of the space, from a light-up duck to illustrations of farm animals (including a very portly pig) and tiles painted, by Salamon’s cousin, with fruits and vegetables. They’ve reupholstered the old chairs from Fort Defiance, added captain’s chairs for the bar, and generally brightened up the space, as well: “The other day, Sydney was like, ‘It’s a restaurant-themed restaurant,’” Salamon says. “I think it’s nostalgic.” There’s wood paneling, red booths, and those lamps that always remind Salamon of a billiards room, or maybe TGI Friday’s. “We wanted it to be kind of campy and tacky,” he says.
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