Tom's Restaurant (Manhattan)

Encyclopedia : T : TO : TOM : Tom's Restaurant (Manhattan)

right

Tom's Restaurant is a New York City diner located at 2880 Broadway between W. 112th and W. 113th in Morningside Heights. It has been owned and operated by the Greek Minasizoulis family since the 1950s. In 1997, the rival Greek diner on the same block, the College Inn, closed. (The building also houses NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.)

Tom's Restaurant in fiction

Tom's Restaurant was immortalized in Suzanne Vega's 1987 song "Tom's Diner", and would later become a site for pop-culture pilgramage due to the use of its exterior for the diner in the popular television sitcom Seinfeld where Jerry and his friends regularly ate. Early episodes showed the entire neon sign; later, allegedly to avoid royalties, the "Tom's" portion was cropped out, showing only the "RESTAURANT" wraparound. (Although this claim has been called into question by a Columbia publication's investigative reporting). [link]

A quotation from Meredith Sue Willis’ 1997 novel Trespassers (set in 1968):

"He knew a restaurant called Tom's, which he said had nothing really bad, and the hand-cut steak fries were top quality. It was a diner with big stainless-steel coffee pots and red vinyl booths. I think I had hoped for something darker and more atmospheric, but after I'd looked around at the coat racks, desserts under glass, the steam in the air, I thought, But this is the real New York, this is what is." (p.60)

References

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.