Brooklyn’s iconic Kellogg’s Diner goes bankrupt, seeks buyer
Williamsburg’s landmark greasy spoon is holding out for a hero.
For nearly 100 years, this corner cafeteria has continued flipping burgers as the neighborhood completely changed around it.
Now, though, Kellogg’s Diner — the neon-lit, sticker-covered blue eatery that greets straphangers as they exit the Metropolitan Avenue/Lorimer Street L and G trains — is up for bankruptcy sale and seeking a new landlord with $2.5 million to spare, Eater first reported.
“For sale is the iconic Kellogg’s Diner, a mainstay of the Williamsburg neighborhood since 1928 located at 518 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY,” advertises a listing for the 150-person-capacity property, which also comes with a 30-year lease, a full liquor license, staff and a reported $3.5 million gross yearly revenue.
The price is quite the blue plate special for a high-profile corner lot in the highly gentrified nabe, where two-bedroom condos regularly list for much more.
Kellogg’s, though, is in dire straits.
After barely surviving the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the beloved late-night haunt filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2021 after racking up at least $750,000 in unpaid expenses including rent, utility bills and legal fees from a 2019 federal wage theft lawsuit, according to Eater.
An undated photo of Kellogg’s Diner shows staff and patrons staring at the clock, awaiting Williamsburg’s first natural gas arrival. New York Post
Irene Siderakis, who began running Kellogg’s after the former owner, her husband Chris Siderakis, died suddenly in 2018, pulled out the stops to get the 24/7 business back into good standing, selling food under 18 different names on delivery apps and opening a back room comedy club.
“I had no idea how to run a diner or if I could,” she told the New York Times. “But people really helped.”
It wasn’t enough: This January, Kellogg’s entered Chapter 7 bankruptcy, was handed over to creditors and closed for three weeks before reopening in February with shorter hours (between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. on weekends, patrons can only purchase takeout and delivery).
Inside the 518 Metropolitan Ave. diner. Getty Images
Operations, which are now overseen by a bankruptcy trustee, are slated to continue until it is sold, Eater reported.
Williamsburg’s booth-filled lodestar has seen it through almost a century of Brooklyn life, including renovations, a cameo in HBO’s “Girls,” becoming a meme as a result of its cameo in “Girls,” other celebrity-world antics, burning to the ground following a truck fire, rebuilding, then having a cop drive a van through its window — but now its fate hangs in the balance.
“Good reliable food and warm service. It’s a constant,” Joe Weisbord, who’s known to locals as the neighborhood’s mayor, told The Post of Kellogg’s, which he has eaten at “countless times since the mid-1980s” and affectionately refers to as “The Log.”
A scene from the HBO series “Girls” shot in the diner. HBO
In a section of the borough which, over the course of a few short decades has completely transformed, to have such a recognizable, retro restaurant continue holding down a high-traffic corner — still slinging hash after all these years — is nothing short of a New York miracle.
In simply staying put while hardly anything else did, Kellogg’s charm has become irreplaceable.
“To me it’s a neighborhood landmark,” said Weisbord. “I hope there’s a buyer out there that thinks so too.”
Source: New York Post
