“We are SO EXCITED to be in the neighborhood,” the Brooklyn pastry chef Caroline Schiff told me via email when I asked about her recent move on the old Marie’s (195 Wyckoff Ave.) spot. Marie’s had not lasted very long, maybe just about a year or so after Miguel Trinidad decided to try out a bold Italian menu that he called a “love letter to Bushwick.” This involved putting together creations like a “lamb patty” ragù and a “chopped cheese” ravioli. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good and made my stomach hurt. I remembered Trinidad’s final moments of running that restaurant best, when he tried giving the stuff away.

Before Trinidad went Italian, he was hired to run the kitchen when it was the more beloved Sally Roots, a Caribbean brunch spot initially developed by the restaurant designer Matthew Maddy, himself considered “at least partially responsible,” by at least one account, for the “Brooklyn look in the restaurant world.” Before Maddy decided to depart to a “raw bar” in Williamsburg, his place in Bushwick was known best for the bottomlessness of its brunches, which circulated a kind of culture that had been previously stuck a few stops down the L line. 

Now, it will become the Monday Diner, which Schiff plans to open in “late summer / early fall,” according to her publicist Nikki Spilka. Schiff is in good hands; Spilka will tell you that she has already gotten stories on new Chinatown spots plugged in the Wall Street Journal and new martini dive bars in Oakland profiled in WSJ’s weekend style section.

At last, the Wall Street Journal is coming to Bushwick. One imagines the dreams of Miguel Trinidad, that lifelong local neighborhood striver, now finally coming true inside what were once his kitchens. We can’t always get what we want, but if we try sometimes, someone else can get it instead. 

“So what are we opening? A diner! Not an ‘elevated diner,’ or a diner with a ‘twist.’ Just a classic, casual, accessible, welcoming diner where you can come anytime for eggs your way, fluffy pancakes, great sandwiches, soup of the day, blue plate specials, pie by the slice, and excellent coffee. And we hope more than anything that you will be our friends and regulars,” reads a letter Schiff and her business partner Tori Ciambriello wrote to Brooklyn’s Community Board 4 in their liquor license application (“an integral part of a profitable business in New York City”). The board voted last December to recommend giving them a liquor license at the address, unanimously (though with one abstention). 

The pair won’t have trouble getting attention from the WSJ and other monitors of Brooklyn’s disposable income; in fact, Eater has already put the opening on its list of “The Biggest Anticipated NYC Restaurants of the Season in 2026.” Eyes are on both Schiff and Ciambriello, because they both hail from the popular downtown Brooklyn restaurant Gage & Tollner, a century-old seafood spot that re-opened to much fanfare in the early days after the pandemic. Schiff had been hired to run its bakery, where she was tasked with unearthing “forgotten favorites of the Victorian dessert canon” as Pete Wells puts it. He calls her chèvre cheesecake “extremely compelling,” but the most popular dish there was her version of a baked alaska (“Almost every table seems to get the brown blob the size of a well-fed house cat.”) It landed in a trend piece that Vogue published last year titled “The Baked Alaska Is on Fire—Again,” calling Schiff’s take “one of the most recognizable versions” of the dessert. In the New York magazine story on her departure from Gage & Tollner, the writer Ella Quittner observes of Schiff, “She feels a great deal of pressure to find her next Baked Alaska.” Her whole life of cooking, which has taken her to competing in various episodes of the Food Network’s Beat Bobby Flay to being named a finalist for the James Beard Award in 2022, in the Outstanding Pastry Chef category, will have led to this moment, when we will discover what an indelibly-executed, platonic ideal of what a diner ought to look like.

The diner concept is smart, in a business way, as well; the only competing version in the area is the Bushwick Diner (299 Wyckoff Ave.) a 24/hr spot down the street that is fondly described by people on r/Bushwick as “historically and monumentally … trash since its inception” and “the most exceptionally mediocre diner I’ve ever encountered. It’s perfect.”

New development reminds locals of what they already have, but also shows them that it can actually be made better by someone else who is trying harder. Before Ciambriello took over as general manager at Gage & Tollner, she had been a sommelier at Gramercy Tavern, which is known for hand-simulating a certain kind of upmarket City authenticity. It’s the same place that brought the people behind Rolo’s together, and which provides a broad sketch for what Schiff and Ciambriello are trying to do in nearby Bushwick. 

Per Quittner’s account, Schiff’s “sourdough pancakes, which somehow get even crispier as they sit, are one of the sure bets for her diner menu.” Can you imagine seeing that on the menu at the Bushwick Diner?

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