A Day at Brooklyn’s Legendary 100-Year-Old Diner

Kellogg's Diner is a 96-year-old culinary institution

here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Working in a restaurant that never closes

is a little bit different

because there's not that moment of solace

when you walk into the kitchen and nobody's arrived yet.

The hoods are always going, the lights are always on,

people are always here.

The executive chef role can look a little bit different

at different restaurants, but here at Kellogg's,

I was brought in to develop the menus,

and we have seven of them currently,

breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner,

late night, dessert, and the kids' menu.

This new role is really fun and challenging.

I particularly love it

because Kellogg's does mean so much to so many people

and I've had an opportunity to fulfill that nostalgia

and carry the torch.

[bright music]

I'm Jackie Carnesi,

the executive chef here at Kellogg's Diner.

We are open 24/7.

It's noon on a Tuesday, and I just got here,

so y'all can follow me.

Well, I'm all suited up.

It's 12:30, we're here in the kitchen.

The lunch and breakfast team are working currently

and there's a lot of action happening.

You can follow me downstairs,

we're gonna check in with the pastry team

and do some inventory.

We have two kitchens here at Kellogg's.

The upstairs is largely culinary,

downstairs is where the pastry team works.

We're gonna check in with Jadel and Reina

and see how their day's going so far.

Hi, Reina. Hi, Jackie.

[speaks in foreign language]

Hi Jay. Hi.

This is Jadel.

She's head of our pastry team right now.

I'm making the meringue for tonight's service

that's going to be going on the passion fruit pie.

Rein is doing the base of the passion fruit,

which is the graham crust.

A couple of our the most popular dessert here

are the passion fruit pie and the strawberry pretzel salad.

Those are two desserts that I really wanted

to see on the menu and they made it happen.

A pretty small team that cranks out a lot of product

and rightfully so, our pastries here have gotten

a lot of attention.

It's a really phenomenal pastry program

and these guys do a lot of work.

Let's see.

Okay, so it looks like our mussels came in

and our clams, we'll get these purging.

For Christmas Eve and Christmas,

we're doing a special menu, a Feast of the Seven Fishes.

So I ordered a bunch of product to work on R and D'ing

that brand new menu that we're doing

just for a couple of days,

and I need to make sure that all

of the seafood that I ordered came in.

Our snapper did come in.

We're gonna pull it out, make sure that it is nice

and fresh and good to go.

Clear eyes.

The gills have already been removed,

but obviously we're always looking for fresh gills.

We'll get these changed out onto fresh ice

and get it back on the walk-in.

A lot of times diners are viewed as places

that where the menu is like pretty stagnant.

We're really trying to avoid that.

But we currently have seven menus in rotation.

We use all of them at any given time.

I think if I had to total it up, it would probably come

to like something like 200 menu items.

With the exception of pastry,

all of those have been recipe tested by myself

or somebody on my team.

So now we're gonna go from my favorite space

in the restaurant to do my least favorite task,

which is answering emails.

We're here in the office.

I would much rather be in the kitchen working on stuff,

but emails have to be answered, so here we are.

Don't look at my password.

I just got a couple emails here talking about

how Kellogg's was just mentioned in Grub Street

as a feature of the Best New Food in New York of 2024,

which is really exciting.

I'm really proud of our team.

We've worked really hard and it feels really good

to be acknowledged in that way.

A lot of the emails that I answer

are between like the owners and myself

trying to figure out things that we need

to change about the restaurant.

Being a line cook is really great

because you don't have to answer email,

but being a chef is really great

because you don't necessarily have

to work the line every single night.

And as much as I love working the line, it is exhausting

and the older you get, the less feasible it becomes

to work the line six or seven nights a week.

Now we get to go back into the kitchen

and do what we love to do.

It's two o'clock, we're experiencing a changeover right now.

Morning shift is leaving and night shift is coming in.

So there's a lot of traffic.

People are setting up their stations, putting stuff away,

and I'm getting ready to work on the soup of the day.

Every sandwich is served with the soup of the day,

so it needs to be something that any guests can eat.

I think today I'm kind of feeling cheesy potato soup,

but the soup of the day is really kind of like

I get to choose whatever I wanna do

in the moment type thing.

There are only a few stipulations

that I try to hold myself to,

which is I try to make sure it's vegetarian or vegan.

Now we're in our dry storage area through all my beauties.

We actually have three walk-ins in this restaurant.

The first one is upstairs.

It is just for food that has been processed already.

Down here is only produce and bar

and our other walk-in is just meat, dairy, and pastry.

Let's grab some onions.

I try to the best of my ability

to not order any extra produce,

even though we would go through it very quickly.

We just don't have that much space.

So I try to just use what we have.

And one thing we have is a lot of potatoes at all times.

So typically I try to produce

at least 22 to 30 quarts of soup at a time,

that'll last us roughly three days.

I very much could have developed recipes

and passed this task along to the prep team,

but once we opened up for lunch,

I just found that I really enjoy doing it.

It's kind of my once a week little zen place.

One of my favorite things to do is steal

a pellegrino from the bar.

It makes me feel important.

So we're just gonna go ahead and peel all of these potatoes,

get everything prepped out.

Kellogg's recently changed ownership.

It was closed for a period of time and I was brought on

and tasked with changing the menu.

Being from Texas, I was really excited to put a little bit

of Tex-Mex flare on it, feature some dishes

that really like meant a lot to me,

like Migas, which is a dish that I grew up with.

We're gonna cut up our onions for the soup.

One of my biggest gripes about working here

is that nobody takes labels off of anything.

There's this big thing among the chef community,

or at least every other restaurant that I've worked at,

where it's like considered so so offensive

to leave labels on stuff and here, nobody cares.

Would I prefer that people take their labels off stuff?

A thousand percent because then I end up with things

that say french toast or salsa verde

and it's, I can't get them off.

You know, you gotta pick and choose your battles for real.

So I have to be strategic about like when I do decide

to cook the soup, there's this like kind of sweet spot

at changeover when the AM prep team

is leaving and the pastry team is leaving,

so I can prep here pretty quietly and out of anybody's way,

and then once the AM prep team is gone from upstairs,

then I can take everything upstairs

and cook the soup without being in their way as well.

It's 3:30.

I haven't eaten yet today.

We do do family meal,

but it's not up for like another hour

and I'm really craving migas.

Migas are on the menu because I grew up eating them.

There's a restaurant called Mi Torito in Brownsville, Texas

that my family and I used to go to

after church every Sunday.

Migas are essentially day old chips.

Typically it's crisp up in a pan

and then a little sauteed onion, tomato.

We put jalapeño and [indistinct] in ours

and then scrambled eggs.

I really like to eat mine specifically with Doña sauce.

So bunya sauce is really popular in Austin.

It's hot sauce just made from the roasted jalapeños, garlic,

lime juice, salt and some blended oil

to emulsify everything,

and I put it on anything and everything.

Are we fresh fry all of our tortilla chips in house?

Do we have the half moon shapes that we use for flat nachos,

which are an homage to a restaurant

that I grew up eating at in Brownsville, Texas

called the Vermillion.

Basically flat nachos are just

individually assembled nachos, refried beans,

melted cheese, marinated fajita steak, pickle jalapeños.

It's great.

Maybe it's a little bit depressing,

but typically I eat my lunch here in the office.

It's just one of the few places

where I'm not gonna be in anybody's way.

So I'm gonna eat this up and I'll see y'all later.

It's four o'clock, I ate lunch

and now we're gonna move into working on R and D

for our Christmas prefix.

I'm working on a steam mussels dish.

I'm getting started by slicing up some shallots and garlic.

So we're actually doing Feast of the Seven Fishes,

which really is pretty abnormal for diner food,

but we wanted to do something exciting

and a little bit different.

So we're gonna get these mussels debearded

and then we will scrub them up.

When I work on a new dish,

either it comes to me organically, like divine inspiration

or the inspiration comes via the owner

or another chef telling me, Hey, I really think

we need something like X, Y, Z on the menu.

I'm gonna run upstairs, grab a saute pan, some wine

and some other stuff and I'll be right back down.

I just need to grab a [indistinct].

Head back down, corner.

It's so big and there are just so many people here.

That stuff is constantly moving around and going missing.

Like the amount of time that it may take me

to find a peeler is sometimes infuriating,

but you know, I get a lot of steps in.

It's really about like kind of being flexible.

I really have to just like figure it out every day as I go.

And sometimes that can be, you know, a giant waste of time

and sometimes it works out beautifully.

Okay, so what we're trying to accomplish here is create

a steam mussels dish that is a little bit spicy, filling,

has a nice body to the sauce but isn't saturated in butter.

We're gonna render out a little bit of this chorizo

and we just don't have any hoods down here,

so we're all gonna be coughing

because now I'm cooking chilies in a space with no hoods.

So we're gonna let those steam up.

I'm gonna run upstairs and grab some tasting spoons.

Be right back.

Sorry, can I grab some of these spoons?

Yeah. Thank you.

Cool.

Man, it's really smoked up down here.

Admittedly, I think the sauce needs a little bit of acid.

We have a shimmy tree that we put on our short rib hash

that I think will probably do really nicely

to finish out this dish.

I wanna reduce the sauce a little bit more

so it gets a little bit more body,

but other than that, I'm pretty happy with it.

Yeah, definitely need some herbs in here.

Maybe for a second I might be inclined to be like, wow,

this is so much work for one day or two days of service.

But realistically, it's like the thing that I love

to do the most is cook and create.

So I gotta check myself really fast

if I ever start complaining about it.

It needs a little bit of acid.

It's a little bit on the salty side,

but we're really close, pretty good for the first attempt

at what we're trying to do.

Normally if I'm creating something for the menu,

I try to do a few versions of it

and especially since we're on a little bit of a time crunch,

you know, the holidays are coming up,

we're gonna need to take photos of this food

so we can show people what we're making and you know,

have the staff try it, create allergy sheets

and information sheets for the servers to look at.

It's five o'clock already.

We have a bunch of guests coming into the diner right now.

I'm gonna put a pause on R and D for now.

I'm gonna run upstairs

and check in on the kitchen,

see if we can lend a hand on the line.

It's just a little bit after 5:00 PM,

I'm gonna go ahead and make the patty melt.

Ours is a little bit different in that it is rye bread,

but we also put pimento cheese as well

as cheddar cheese on here, caramelized onions

and a five ounce dried burger patty.

Pimento cheese is made in house like everything else here.

We do put fresh jalapeños in our pimiento cheese,

so it's a little bit on the spicy side.

There you go, Patty Melt.

Nice and melty.

Now it's time for me to kiss babies

and shake hands in the front of house.

Make sure everything's good up there

and you guys gotta get outta here.

Thank you for coming.