Antique Bar & Bakery

The Restaurant

Antique Bar & Bakery occupies a 1908 brick bakery building on Willow Avenue, a half-mile west of Washington Street, that retains the original coal-fired oven of the storefront's first century of life. Chef-owner Paul Gerard — a Brooklyn-and-Panama-trained cook who appeared in the unaired Anthony Bourdain and Tom Colicchio pilot 'Work the Line' before opening the room in 2014 — reactivated the coal oven and built a menu around it. The dining room seats about sixty across communal wooden tables, a long bar at the front, and a chef's counter at the back overlooking the oven. The walls are unrestored exposed brick; the ceiling is original pressed tin.

The coal-fired oven runs at over 800°F and produces the menu's two signatures: a Neapolitan-style pizza with a charred-edged crust unique to coal heat (the Margherita, the Soppressata, and a seasonal Funghi rotate as the bestsellers), and a slow-roasted whole-fish or whole-chicken preparation served family-style for the table. The Sunday Gravy programme — a slow-braised tomato sauce with meatballs, pork shoulder, sausage and braciole over pappardelle, served only Sunday afternoons — has run as the signature for a decade and is the reason the room is the warmest table in the city on Sunday evening. The dessert programme is short but anchored by an olive-oil cake with mascarpone that travels with the regulars to Manhattan.

The wine list runs about one hundred and twenty references with an Italian-and-California bias and an unusually fair by-the-glass programme. The chef's-counter dinner — a six- to eight-course tasting served at the rear counter for up to ten guests, bookable for the full counter — is the room's quiet special-occasion option and the version Gerard's restaurant-industry peers tend to book for staff dinners and birthdays. Antique is the right Hoboken room when a team or family wants a warm, generous, communal evening rather than a formal one.