Restaurant Review: Kellogg’s Diner in Williamsburg

To everything, there is a season, and to every season, there is a diner. It’s an odd irony that the most long-lived of restaurants — good diners are aged in decades, not years — can feel so particular to a particular time of life. Proust had his madeleines; I have my cheese fries. My first diner (of blessed memory) was Moondance, on Sixth, with its post–Studio 54 crescent moon beaming out over the avenue. My high-school diner was Socrates (1983–2007) on Hudson Street, where I sopped up my earliest hangovers with raspberry pancakes the size of hubcaps. You will have your own associations, but Kellogg’s, on the busy intersection of Union and Metropolitan Avenues in Williamsburg, will always be a young-adult diner for those of us in Generation Girls, an all-night place of last resort, equally amenable for greasy decisions to regret tomorrow, or greasy decisions to assuage yesterday’s regrets.

Now Kellogg’s is under new management — previous owners put it into bankruptcy in 2023 — with a new menu that is careful to pay tribute to its past while tweaking it for the future. It is part of a wave of neo-diners that are cropping up all over, including Three Decker in Greenpoint, Montague Diner in Brooklyn Heights, and, a little more broadly defined, Golden Diner in Chinatown or Thai Diner in Nolita. “The Millennials Are Rebooting The Diner,” runs a new round of headlines, gussied-up joints where you can still get your corned-beef hash or a cheeseburger and fries, but as often as not, with a martini and a lengthy wait. If a good diner is a place where, as Gael Greene memorably put it, you can get “Jell-O served without irony,” these are the diners ironized, for better or worse. At Kellogg’s, the Jell-O is served a wiggly square of strawberry pretzel salad, which, as any Southerner can tell you, is not a salad at all, but a cheesecake bar with a pretzel crust. It is a church-cookbook classic, and it seems at least a little weighed down by the winkiness of being served here at all.

On opening weekend, Kellogg’s was bumping, its reservations long gone and the wait for a party of four quoted at two-plus hours. If the traditional diner is defined by its timelessness, Kellogg’s is timely — Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish on the playlist, the photographer Collier Schorr and the cookbook author Natasha Pickowicz in the booths. (She recommends the passion-fruit-Tajín icebox cake.) The layout is much the same as ever, though the chrome is newly polished and the light is warmer and milkier than it once was. Under Jackie Carnesi and pastry chef Amanda Perdomo, the menu has enough diner fare to please the traditionalists, plus a decided Tex-Mex slant. The meatloaf is studded with poblanos, and there are two types of queso (classic and cashew) as well as two types of nacho (“tall” and “flat”), which get points for good, crisp-fried tortillas, but were a bit more spartan than I’d have liked. The old menu’s chicken and waffles are still here — fine waffle, better chicken — but now so is a pescado divorciado, a branzino as famously served at Contramar in non–Tex Mexico, head on and splayed open, “divorced” because each flank gets its own salsa, one verde, one rojo. Served with corn tortillas, rice, guacamole, and pickled onions and chiles, it was tasty, if not destined to become diner canon.

Must a diner be timeless by definition? The “classic” diner design is still based on the dining cars of trains, from which the term originates. (From the San Francisco Examiner, 1924: “Hoyt’s Diner, a replica of a railway dining car, is one of the really original and ‘different’ restaurants in a city that is celebrated for both its cuisine and the cosmopolitan aspects of its many eating houses.”) Or can the genre accommodate the tweaks and twerks of every successive generation? Kellogg’s tries to have it both ways. That’s as it should be, I suppose. Restaurants as much as neighborhoods change with the times, even when they hold on to history. For one of the many kids that the Lorimer-Metropolitan station still belches up every few minutes, right outside the window, this version of Kellogg’s will become the diner of their season. It may introduce them to the egg cream and the poblano, but for maximum effect, it must make these introductions sometime circa 2 a.m. Round-the-clock service is apparently coming soon. To be timeless is to be here all the time.