Who among us, when passing some beautiful, crumbling, paint-peeling old building, hasn’t dreamt of restoring it? Of breathing new life into its walls and windows?
Of maybe inviting others in to enjoy it, too, turning it into, say, a lovely B&B or sweet little homey restaurant where folks can gather and shoot the breeze over a pint and a plate of fresh oysters?
Of course, these things are never just a little dream at all. They’re big, fat, time-consuming, red-tape enduring, money-sucking, patience-testing, bear-wrestling giant dreams—which is why most of us just keep on driving down the road.
But Anthony Martignetti? He’s no fair-weather dreamer. When the New York boutique restaurateur bought the disintegrating Old Mill Inn (5775 W Mill Road, Mattituck, 631-621-2251) more than half a decade ago, he knew what he was in for—and he was all in for it.
Left: The Old Mill in horse-drawn carriage days. Right: Making the old building new again.
The Compass Points East
It’s been six years in the making, with Martignetti quietly re-opening the Old Mill Inn in May for friends and family and holding June as the month of the big reveal.
He first fell for the North Fork back in 2007 when he and his brother, Tom, had a bar called Brinkley’s in Manhattan, in which they decided to serve only New York-made beer and wine. An invitation from Barbara Shinn, whose Wild Boar Doe red they served by the glass, to come for a visit to her then-namesake winery that she ran with husband David Page, took him down a rabbit hole that one day he would happily call home.
Being a Massachusetts boy, he fell hard for the farm-laden lands and familiar small-town vibes. Despite a successful run of bars, clubs and restaurants in Manhattan (he and Tom still own three together: an oyster bar called The East Pole, the jazz club Melody’s Piano Bar, and The Palace nightclub), over the years he kept making trips east whenever he could, dreaming of one day finding a project to dig into on the North Fork.
In 2019—the same year he met his wife, Angela Ledgerwood, who runs the excellent literary podcast “Lit Up”—he found it at the end of West Mill Road.
The mill had gone on the market in 2017, with the former owners initially asking well over a million. But the work required to bring it up to code, which included raising the building to bring it to FEMA standards, left an echo chamber when it came to serious offers, and over time the price dropped considerably. Eventually, the property landed in the hands of real estate agent Sheri Winter Parker, who helped Martignetti seal the deal.
“Two days after making my offer, Sheri called and said, ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ And I said, I guess I’ll take the good news. And she’s like, well, they accepted your offer,’” Martignetti recalls with a smile. “I was like, what’s the bad news? And Sheri said: ‘They accepted your offer.’ We had a really good laugh—and then I had to get to work.”
Angela Ledgerwood and husband Anthony Martignetti take a much-deserved pause to toast the Old Mill. Martignetti designed all the new elements himself, like the zinc bar and mahogany booths. (Photos by Doug Young)
When he first brought Ledgerwood to see it, she was gob-smacked by its history and possibility.
But that would have to wait. With the COVID-19 pandemic not only slowing down the supply chain but also putting Martignetti’s Manhattan-based restaurants in a stasis, a hold was put on his plans, delaying work in earnest until March 2023. In the meantime, he started the long process of filing and gaining permits and approvals for the eventual moment when work could begin.
Martignetti also began steps toward another piece of his future, with he and Ledgerwood tying the knot in 2020 and, eventually, buying a home with a little vineyard nearby, where they began to make wine under the label Old Sound Vineyard with the consulting help of Macari winemaker Byron Elmendorf. By January 2024, Martignetti and Ledgerwood would mark two Mattituck milestones: the birth of their son, Max, and the rebirth of the Old Mill Inn.
Flour Powered
Overlooking Mattituck Inlet, the Old Mill Inn started its life around 1820 as a grist mill powered by the tides with a peaked tower just across the street, presumably used to hold extra grain. The mill was built and run by Samuel Cox, back when going to a nearby market for your five-pound bag of Gold Medal or King Arthur wasn’t in the cards and people had to bring grain to a local grist mill to have it ground into a useful pantry staple or feed for animals.
Chef Kyle Bloomer’s menu mimics the charm of the beloved old building, serving crowd-pleasing favorites and elevated comfort foods. (Photos by Doug Young)
By 1902, a steam-powered mill opened in town, rendering the old tidal mill obsolete. It pivoted immediately into a seafaring tavern with a couple of rooms for rent upstairs. During Prohibition, it morphed into a speakeasy of sorts—accessible by water and tucked well away down West Mill Road from any prying, spying, disapproving eyes in the then-teetotaling town.
“By Prohibition, it became a very fancy black tie, jazz place. All the towns were patrolled, so all of the bars in the villages, from Mattituck to Southold to Greenport, weren’t really able to have parties and sell alcohol,” Martignetti says. “This being down here at the end of a dead-end road and with access by water, where the booze would come in and get unloaded here, it became a really well-known jazz joint.” So well-known that screen luminaries Clark Gable and Carol Lombard allegedly engaged in a tête-a-tête here before they were married, trying (unsuccessfully) to escape the press.
Over the years, the Old Mill Inn remained a popular perch to catch up over a beer, dive into a plate of broiled local scrod or some fried clam strips, and even to hear some pretty great live music, like Nona Hendryx or local East End chanteuse Nancy Atlas. But most importantly, over all that time, it became a beloved institution.
East Enders are no strangers to outsiders buying up old favorite haunts and subsequently turning them into something unrecognizable. The so-called improvements are often done in the name of branding the notion of nostalgia but do the exact opposite or, worse, strip every bit of history and memory from a place until it may as well be razed to dust.
“You need a lot of passion with a project like this—which Anthony has naturally—to want to go through the rigorous process,” says Glenn Heidtmann of Cutchogue builders Heidtmann & Sons, who Martignetti engaged for the difficult project. “Especially with a building that is 28 feet over the Mattituck Inlet.”
Martignetti admits that he initially did get his fair share of local side-eye, but it didn’t last long.
Historic details, like the original beams signed by past patrons, mix with new, elegant touches that offer a new vision with an old soul. (Photos by Doug Young)
“People saw that this was a chaotic task and that while some outsider maybe had taken it on, he was doing it the right way. All the old fishermen would come by, and all the old guys in trucks to check this out, and they saw me working in my overalls every day for two years, whether it was pouring concrete or working on wood or up on the roof,” Martignetti says. “When they saw that, they would honk their horns, say hi and introduce themselves and say, ‘Whatever you need…’”
Grist for the Mill
When planning the overall renovation—with he and Ledgerwood living in the old grain tower across the street—Martignetti decided that he wanted to restore the mill to its original footprint.
“I brought the building back to the era that I thought was the best, which was in 1913 when they had this porch on the side, and I took off the 1930s addition because this was the shape of the landmark building.”
For the work, in addition to Heidtmann, Martignetti brought on marine construction and engineering company Chesterfield Associates from Westhampton Beach for giant tasks at hand.
“It was enticing because it’s a unique project unlike, I think, anything. The opportunity to do something like this is once in a generation, but with a ton of difficulty and expense to Anthony,” says Heidtmann. “But we just had a very unique relationship, and that holds true with any of these historical restoration projects in this town—you have to have the right hand and the left hand in unison to make it work.”
The biggest nuts to crack: moving the entire building to raise it five feet higher to comply with FEMA guidelines (which required the installation of 67 new timber pilings), stabilizing the old building by constructing a new bulkhead seawall and foundation, and doing all of that without ruining any of the original materials and details that are part and parcel to the Old Mill Inn’s life story: the original 1820 framing of the mill, which remains intact.
One such detail was the actual millstone, found ensconced in concrete and buried in the water, likely for over a century.
Bloomer and sous chef Zachary de la Canter helm the open kitchen at the Old Mill. (Photos by Doug Young)
“We thought the millstone was lost to time. When Chesterfield was driving piles underneath where the kitchen now sits, they got stuck—something was blocking them,” Martignetti says. “At first, they thought it was a boulder or some ballast rock dumped there to hold up the sea wall, but when they brought in a crane to dig it out, they discovered it wasn’t a ballast at all; it was the millstone.”
Martignetti, who dabbles in stone sculpting as a hobby, rented a jackhammer to move away the concrete and then, with one of his own chisels, spent three days exhuming the 200-year-old, six-foot-diameter French limestone. He got Tap Welding in Cutchogue to make a new frame for the pieces of the wheel and plans to display it out front for all to see.
In addition to keeping the original red color and painstakingly preserving many of the building’s historic details, like the hearty old beams signed by patrons over its hundreds-year history, one of the changes Martignetti’s making will undoubtedly be welcome: the Old Mill Inn will be open year-round.
“I’m not going to have it open for just July and August and put, you know, a $200 lobster salad and a bottle of Krug on the menu,” he says. “Nobody wants that. We’re going to serve a great burger and you’re going to be able to get a Guinness. We’re going to serve local seafood and it’s still going to be the Old Mill.”
Martignetti designed every detail of the space himself. The old bar shape and specs remain, but it’s now topped with a handsome zinc counter surrounded by 12 seats, some of which are the original decades-old perches sat in by generations of patrons. In the bar area there is a cozy wood-burning stove and a few small tables for chatting.
To the left of that, a half wall divides the bar from a trio of simple but lovely carved mahogany booths and mahogany and iron tables (designed by Martignetti, who once designed furniture). On the outer-facing walls, now windowed with water views for the first time since the 1930s, a cache of simple wooden tables seat about 30 indoors. And tucked at the end of the indoor dining area is a wide-open window to the kitchen, which seats four for those who want to watch chef Kyle Bloomer, a Mattituck resident, and his sous, Zachary de la Cantner, craft everything from a gorgeous plate of fluke crudo to that perfect burger of Martignetti’s.
On the covered porch, 25 more seats are available for the full menu; another 40 can chill on the deck for drinks—which includes a classic cocktail menu and a wine list that’s a 50-50 split of local producers, including Martignetti and Ledgerwood’s own Old Sound label, and favorite wines he’s found from around the world.
There are two floating docks and two boat slips, too, for water-approaching patrons, but he plans to leave those open for those who live on the inlet and want to paddleboard or kayak over. And those rooms upstairs that once secreted away Lombard and Gable? They’ll be open for guests who come from further afield for an overnight stay or two.
But most importantly, the Old Mill is now on new, solid footing.
“It’s always been part of the community in many iterations, as a working mill and as this popular place. At its heart, it’s a pub,” says Martignetti. “It’s a place to meet up. And I can’t wait for it to be a really fun spot where everyone gathers.”
