Our story
A neighborhood restaurant in a town that used to make bricks.
For about a hundred years, Haverstraw made bricks. Clay dug from the banks along the river was pressed into molds, stamped with the yard’s initials, fired in the kilns and sent down the Hudson by the barge-load. A good part of New York City is built from it.
Claybank opened in 2021 in an old hardware store a few blocks up from the water. Ana Delgado grew up in the village. Pete Marsh cooked in Manhattan kitchens for twelve years and drove home over the bridge every night. They wanted the kind of place they kept leaving town to find: somewhere you can come in for a flatbread and a beer on a Wednesday, or bring your parents for their anniversary.
The oven came first
A mason from Stony Point built it from about 1,800 Haverstraw bricks pulled out of a warehouse that was coming down. Some still carry the stamps of brickyards that closed a century ago. Sit at the counter and you can read a few of them on the oven’s face.
Nearly everything we serve passes through that oven or over its coals. The bread goes in every afternoon. Vegetables come from farms in Rockland and Orange counties while they’re in season. The menu is short, and it changes when the season does.
The name
The clay banks along the river were what the whole town ran on. Most of them are gone now, dug out or built over, but it seemed like the right thing to name a brick oven after.