Shelly Fireman opened The Hip Bagel in Greenwich Village in 1963 at a time when bagels were still a novelty, and he spent the next six decades building one of New York’s most recognizable restaurant empires on the back of something he never actually was: a Brooklyn kid.

Fireman grew up in the Bronx. So did Alexis Reyes. That detail didn’t stop Fireman from calling Reyes in the early 1990s to pitch him on leaving his manager’s post at Sarabeth’s on the Upper West Side to join a new venture. The concept was simple, the name was specific, and the ambition was outsized.

“He said we are going to be the finer diner, not a finer diner,” Reyes said. “He said that to me from the beginning.”

The Brooklyn Diner, which still operates at 212 W. 57th St., became exactly that. Neon-lit exterior. Classic comfort food. A deliberate evocation of Ebbets Field and Coney Island and every corner of a borough that neither Fireman nor Reyes could honestly claim as home. Fireman didn’t see that as a problem. He saw it as a selling point.

“I said to him, you’re from the Bronx. I was born in the Bronx,” Reyes said. “He said, ‘But you live in Brooklyn now.’ I used to spend summers with my godfather in Brooklyn. I loved Brooklyn. He was fascinated with Brooklyn. He had a love story with Brooklyn.”

Stephanie Holmes, director of guest experience for the Fireman Hospitality Group, said Fireman was clear-eyed about what the Brooklyn name could do for a restaurant brand. He didn’t just love the Dodgers, though he did love the Dodgers. He understood that Brooklyn carried a cultural weight that crossed borough lines, borough loyalties, and borough grudges.

“He said in an interview that Brooklyn is for everybody,” Holmes said. “The Brooklyn Diner seemed like a welcoming, open, accepting restaurant. You walk in and you’re immediately in Brooklyn.”

That universality was the whole business model. Reyes put it plainly: “He said this is the Brooklyn Diner. Everybody wants to be from Brooklyn. I said Brooklyn is the 51st state.”

Fireman built his empire incrementally, starting long before Brooklyn became a branding exercise for every artisan pickle company in the country. After The Hip Bagel, which appeared in Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam,” he saved up and opened Café Fiorello across from Lincoln Center in 1974. Decades of work followed, producing a portfolio that included two Brooklyn Diners, two Brooklyn Delis, Trattoria Del Arte, the Red Eye Grill, and Bond 45, among others.

Fireman died in November, in his early 90s. AMNY has a full account of his legacy across the Fireman Hospitality Group’s portfolio. Ben Grossman, named chief strategy officer a few years back, is now CEO of the company. The transition is underway. The original Brooklyn Diner is still open.

Gone is the founder who worked out of an office directly above the dining room.

Holmes described a man who showed up nearly every day until the end, watching over the restaurant he’d built into a brand. “He came into the office almost every day until the very end,” she said. “His office was above the Brooklyn Diner. He could look down at the guests standing outside waiting for their tables to be called.”

That image sits at the center of the Brooklyn Diner’s identity now, a founding vision made physical. Fireman didn’t build a retro restaurant chain by accident. He was deliberate about nostalgia as a commercial strategy, rooting it in specific New York imagery at a moment when that kind of particularity was rarer in the restaurant business than it is today.

The Fireman Hospitality Group has not announced any closures or structural changes to its restaurant operations following Fireman’s death. The company includes a range of Manhattan dining institutions that have outlasted trends, recessions, and the particular cruelty of New York’s commercial real estate market.

Reyes, who took the job at the Brooklyn Diner because Fireman convinced him the pitch was real, has stayed connected to that original conversation. He still returns to the line Fireman gave him before the place had a single table, a single customer, or a single neon sign on West 57th Street. “The finer diner.” Not a finer diner. The.