Across New York City, younger chefs are tweaking the menus, prices and interiors of diners on the brink, but not too much else.
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Last year, Jackie Carnesi received an unusual proposal. Would she be willing to leave her job as the executive chef of a popular Brooklyn restaurant to work in a nearly century-old New York City diner?
Kellogg’s Diner, a chrome clunker at a busy corner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had shuttered suddenly last January after its owners filed for bankruptcy. The new owners wanted to keep it a diner. But they needed a chef.
Had the proposal been made earlier in her career — Ms. Carnesi, 37, previously worked at Empellón Cocina and Roberta’s — she would have said no. “My ego would never have listened,” she said. But they’d caught her at the right time.
“How could you not be excited about being part of something that has so much history?” Ms. Carnesi said. “It’s high pressure, right? You don’t want to let anyone down.”
Kellogg’s, which opens to the public on Friday, is the latest in a string of decades-old diners that have been saved from closing or spared the ultimate indignity — being razed to make way for luxury apartments.
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