Part Scrapbook, Part Cookbook – ‘Diner: Day for Night’ Reflects on the Making of One of the City’s Most Enduring Restaurants

Nearly 25 years before Hermès and Chanel set up shop on North 6th Street, a new Williamsburg restaurant, simply dubbed Diner, was getting ready to open its doors for the first time, on New Year’s Eve 1998. Diner: Day for Night chronicles the making of this Brooklyn institution. Known as one of the city’s most influential culinary establishments, Diner has played a major role in pioneering the city’s artisanal food movement, using locally sourced, sustainable ingredients in its dishes.

The book is packed full of photos that capture the energy of the place and reads as part scrapbook, part journal, part cookbook, with members of Diner’s team reflecting on how the restaurant came about. Diner’s co-founder Mark Firth traces the business’s early days in a section intriguingly titled “Brooklyn: My Part in Its Downfall,” reflecting on how he and Andrew Tarlow, his fellow co-founder and owner of the Marlow Collective, a group of Brooklyn food establishments, lived together in a 6,000-square-foot loft in Williamsburg. As Firth puts it, this was “basically a catalyst for everything that happened and everyone we met before we opened the restaurant.” Firth and Tarlow, who worked at places such as Odeon and Balthazar back then, transformed their apartment into a magnificent space, boasting an ax-throwing range and plenty of room to roller skate; the duo also rented out the loft for music videos, fashion shoots, and more.

After convincing their landlord to purchase a small building on Broadway and lease it out to them, renovation began and Diner was born. “The first thing we did was take down the old siding behind the bar, discovering rows of original subway tile that we put aside for later,” Firth recalls in the book. “We then screwed up a piece of sheetrock and scrawled on it ‘Build it and they will come.’” 

Late-’90s Williamsburg was a vastly different place: The Domino Sugar factory was still functioning as a factory and the East River waterfront was dotted with abandoned warehouses. 

And come they did. In the early days, the kitchen crew whipped up burgers, vinaigrette-dressed salads, and chocolate Nemesis cakes for patrons, which included artists who had moved to Williamsburg in search of bigger spaces and cheaper rent. Today, the spot acts as a gathering place for neighbors and tourists alike to dig into large plates of brick chicken, parmesan-sprinkled Caesar salads, and grass-fed beef burgers punctuated with pickled red onions. The space itself has a way of getting lodged in your memory, long and narrow with square windows and a curved ceiling, the bar a nearly 100-year-old Pullman dining car. From the outside, it might look like a short one-story building, but enter through the front door and it’s like stepping through a portal that sends you into a small-town restaurant, where people know each other’s names, though in reality you’re in the middle of New York City, population 8.3 million. Diner is timeless, and always buzzing.

Caroline Fidanza, Diner’s opening chef and culinary director of the Marlow Collective, recalls that late-December night when Diner began. “In 1998/1999 you didn’t just take the L train over and walk south,” Fidanza writes in a chapter titled “NYE 1998 into 1999.” “For those of us who only took the train to Bedford, no one knew to ride the JMZ.” She describes how there were hundreds of people at the restaurant’s New Year’s Eve opening, which was surprising to her at the time. Diner was new, green, and hidden in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge — it wasn’t yet the destination it would become. Late-’90s Williamsburg was also a vastly different place: The Domino Sugar factory was still functioning as a factory and the East River waterfront was dotted with abandoned warehouses. This was years before brunch hopefuls set phone alerts on restaurant-reservation services to snag a table at one of Williamsburg’s hot spots. 

The book feels personal, which is fitting because Diner has always felt personal. My own experience with it goes back more than a decade, when I moved from my native Queens to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn and found myself passing by the corner eatery during my commute to work. What first struck me about Diner was its name; there’s Kellogg’s Diner, on Metropolitan Avenue, and Tom’s Restaurant, the Upper West Side institution immortalized by Seinfeld and Suzanne Vega, but when it comes to the little converted dining car on Brooklyn’s Broadway, it’s Diner, just Diner, like Elvis or Madonna. Ordering a salad at the bar or enjoying a meal of chicken and burgers with friends in one of its booths is always a warm experience. (I moved back to Manhattan during the pandemic, and Diner is still one of the first places I suggest when meeting up with people in Brooklyn.)

The photos, taken by photographer and self-described “sometimes bartender” Julia Gillard, give the reader a deeper look into what goes into creating an iconic eatery. A sort of static B-roll of everyday moments, the book showcases shots of cooks wearing stained aprons, someone wheeling a dolly, snow piling up on outdoor seating, a waiter jotting down the daily specials on a paper tablecloth. A section titled “Evening in a Room Waiting for People” is filled with action shots — one person sipping a glass of wine, two people in the kitchen glancing over their shoulders as they prepare orders, a group enjoying a dinner, family-style. “The Middle of the Night Has You in It” is celebratory, joyous, and euphoric, depicting couples kissing and champagne being poured. “And Four Menus for Four Times of the Year” offers close-ups of dishes alongside recipes — vibrant green asparagus, a pink plate of risotto with pea shoots, Basque cheesecake. Some recipes (there are 48 in total) are written as if a friend has jotted them down for you: “Serves two to four depending on how much salad you eat”; “Toast the bread and spread a nice layer of cheese over it”; “If you are eating this with bread, you can go heavier on the tomatoes.” 

The book’s conclusion, “The End is Just the Beginning,” was written by Kate Huling, a designer, entrepreneur, and Andrew Tarlow’s wife. In it, Huling reminds us that just as humans grow and evolve and come into their own, so do places. Diner is no different. “I look at the Diner with the same adoration and awe with which I look at my growing children,” writes Huling. “They are their own perfect vibrations, and I did not make them; they are not mine, they are their own. The Diner is its own.” Cheers to Diner’s next 25 years. ❖

Brittany Natale, a born-and-raised New Yorker, is a freelance writer who covers the city’s vibrant history and culture. Her work has appeared in i-D and Teen Vogue, among other publications.

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