Design Brooklyn: Auto-Eclectic Meets Fine Dining at Speedy Romeo in Clinton Hill

Design Brooklyn is an occasional column featuring Brooklyn interiors, both residential and commercial. The column is written by Anne Hellman, with photographs by Michel Arnaud. They blog at Design Brooklyn and have a book of the same name coming out in October. 

Even an auto-parts store can become a restaurant one day, given a clever conversion using car-themed remnants in the new décor. That is in essence what design group Hecho achieved for Speedy Romeo in Clinton Hill, the pizza-based eatery launched by Todd Feldman and chef Jeff Bazdarich in 2012. The designers and the owners worked together to create a space that includes its past life in unexpected ways.

A pizza oven burns brightly in the brick sidewall, while both the brick and the tin ceilings were spray painted to look as though fire smoke has rubbed them for a decade. Grills from semi-trucks serve as air-conditioning covers and caged industrial fans spin above, reminders of the earlier shop. A 1930s walk-in refrigerator was installed in the back, its wooden shelves taken out and repurposed as wall decoration over a banquette in the dining room. Other industrial pieces, such as megaphones and found machinery, were mounted throughout as ornaments.

The owners salvaged a firehouse door and installed it as a corner entrance to the restaurant, refurbished in red. Outside, a “Liquors” sign from the 1960s remains in place. Feldman and Bazdarich liked the sign too much for the layer of history it provided and decided to keep it. And the name, “Speedy Romeo”? The restaurant was christened for the winning harness-racing horse Feldman’s parents owned when he was young; a painted portrait of the champion hangs on the “old” brick wall, next to the pizza oven.