"I thought it was going to be slow today," Gladys Bido says from her post behind the stainless-steel bar, as she looks out at the movie trailers setting up shop across the street. Her thick, dark hair is curled and pulled back neatly in a ponytail, her dark Levi's are spotless, and she appears relaxed, Zen-like. Despite the thick flakes of falling snow, there is a growing crowd of people waiting for breakfast outside of Clinton Street Baking Company. On a Tuesday. At 8 a.m.
The restaurant has been the city's go-to destination for pancakes since chef-husband-and-wife team Neil Kleinberg and DeDe Lahman opened in April of 2001, and their food often racks up waits as long as two-and-a-half hours. By the time I sat down at their two-seat counter, there were already three stacks of their best-sellers in the kitchen, waiting to be dressed up with the day's special of chocolate chunks, fresh raspberries, and a raspberry caramel sauce.
"Saturday and Sunday are particularly brutal, because we'll have a line out the door first thing in the morning. That first shift of customers is nerve-wracking," Chef-owner Neil Kleinberg says. "You're dealing with 30 to 35 orders all at once. That initial wave is always the most painful."
The four-person kitchen team and their one "relief" staffer (who takes over for whoever needs to make a phone call or use the bathroom) beats around 800 eggs, shreds 20 pounds of cheese, and whips up at least 100 orders of pancakes to a Latin beat behind the kitchen's swinging doors.
The kitchen can do a little to anticipate the crushing volume of the early brunch shift; they'll fire several orders of popular dishes like the blueberry pancakes, sausage, hash browns, and french toast before a single customer is seated. "If someone doesn't order it, one of us will eat it, or we'll send it out to the next table," says Kleinberg.
But 32-year-old Bido, who is in charge of to-go orders, take-out, and the customers at the bar, can't plan ahead.
"My first shifts at the counter were really stressful," she says. However, after 12 years of working the morning rush, Bido is now unfazed. "I just do drinks and to-go orders first," she says. Yet she seems to be doing at least six things at once: whipping up lattes and stocking new cartons of soy milk; packing take-away orders and bagging pastries; checking on customers at the bar (including a woman visiting from Japan who had found Clinton Street's pancakes staring up at her from her guidebook); and letting me pester her about how she and her sister-in-law, 35-year-old waitress Santa Diaz, ended up working in this narrow, old-school Lower East Side pancake haven for the last decade and change.
Bido and Diaz both grew up in big families in the Dominican Republic (Bido in Bonao, Diaz in Santiago), and both moved with their parents to the LES when they were young. Bido lived on Orchard Street while Diaz was just blocks away on Pitt, when the neighborhood looked very different than it does today. They didn't cross paths until they worked together at a laundromat on Mulberry Street, which is how Bido met her husband, Jose. That'd be Diaz's brother Jose, who is a chef at the Yale Club. They were elbows-deep in laundry when they found Clinton Street.
Diaz, with her button nose, crinkled dark eyes, and round cheeks, is just as busy as her sister-in-law. She initially worked the bar too, but found the pace of the floor more her speed. She checks on tables, enters orders, and moves seamlessly from diner to diner like she owns the place, which serves brunch to around 700 people each weekend.
"We let them do what they do best and get out of their way," Lahman told me. "They don't need to report to anyone. They run our show quietly and with crazy commitment, and our customers love them."
The tiny restaurant’s team is eagerly awaiting its expansion next door out to the corner of Houston and Clinton, which is tentatively slated to be done by the end of spring and will double their capacity to sixty seats. The new space will “maybe cut down the wait from two hours to one,” Kleinberg says. “But right now, we’re at the mercy of the contractors.”
Following her every move—pouring coffee as she pours water, handing her jam and hot sauce as she sets down butter next to a warm order of pancakes—is Pedro.
Pedro left his family of 10 siblings in Puebla, Mexico to come to California in 1998, and has been a runner at Clinton Street for 11 years. Though he never stops moving in the three hours I am there, he says the hardest part of his job is not knowing English well. "I like it here," he says. "I love it here."
To watch the three of them work the breakfast rush is like watching artfully controlled chaos. Pedro refills a stack of plastic cups as Bido scoops chocolate ice cream from the freezer, which materializes into a picture-perfect chocolate shake.
"Just by looking at each other in the eye, we know what the other one needs," Diaz tells me as we sit at the front counter after her shift, watching her two kids get haircuts at the barber shop across the street. "We get along, we help each other. [Bido and Pedro] make it so easy."
Breakfast and lunch breaks are about 10-15 minutes long, since there's no space or time for a staff meal. "The days here go fast," Kleinberg tells me. "By the time three o'clock rolls around, our staff have accomplished a lot."
"There's a lot of expectation and excitement when a customer who has been waiting for two hours on line sits down to eat with us," he adds. "It's infectious. Our staff want to bus places, bring ketchup and hot sauce and maple syrup, refill water glasses. We want to anticipate the customer's needs so they don't have to think, ask, raise their hand, nothing. It becomes a ritual, almost like a game."
Uma Tantri, the house manager at Clinton Street, joined the team in 2012 after helping to open Sullivan Street Bakery. She tells me that Diaz and Bido trained her when she started, adding that it took her about six months to get comfortable with the pace of the restaurant. She credits the three of them with setting the tone for their service: warm, highly efficient, and as their t-shirts say, "made with butter and love."
"They've created the culture here," Tantri says. "Yes, our food is amazing, and we do a really high volume. The pace is very fast, and our service remains super friendly. The three of them hold everyone to that standard. They make sure everything is being done the Clinton Street way."
Lahman, who is busy bouncing between Clinton Street and overseeing their new restaurant renovations, essentially leaves the three of them to run the place. Tantri wasn't scheduled to arrive until 10 a.m. the morning I was there, leaving Bido, Diaz, and Pedro, along with a handful of other staff without a manager for the morning breakfast rush.
"Santa, Gladys, and Pedro are the best greased machine you have ever seen," Lahman the co-owner tells me. "They are literally the backbone of our daytime operation."
Twelve years is a long time to be in the restaurant industry, especially in the front of the house, and especially at one restaurant. Part of the reason for their longevity is the schedule: Bido and Pedro each have three kids, and Diaz has two, so Clinton Street's focus on breakfast and brunch means its daytime floor staff avoids the late nights and crazy partying that are standard for so many industry jobs.
Part of the draw is, literally, the famous pancakes. Diaz told me she's still not sick of them, and has to limit herself to a once a week indulgence.
"I have a huge sweet tooth, and I'm constantly going to different breakfast places to try them out," she says. "I just keep coming back to these pancakes, to this place. I still think we're one of the best in the city."
Perhaps the biggest reason this unassuming dream team has stuck around for more than a decade seems to be Lahman and Kleinberg themselves.
"I've worked in many restaurants in New York, and this is the first one where the owners are actually really nice people," Pedro says. "And with these two here," he says in Spanish, gesturing to Diaz and Bido sitting next to him after their shifts, "I'll never go anywhere."
Pedro may be staying put, but Diaz and Bido have designs to open their own place one day, hopefully with their brother/husband Jose. Will they be going head-to-head with their bosses on pancakes?
"I'd like to do tapas," Bido says. "They're so much fun to make and order."
Whatever they serve, they'll have the service down pat.
"Time will teach you so much," Diaz says, a knowing smile creeping onto her face. "Like how to kill customers with kindness."
Talia Ralph is a journalist and masters candidate in food systems at NYU. She also writes for VICE Munchies, Lucky Peach, and several Edible magazines.
