Tom's Restaurant (Manhattan)
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Tom's Restaurant is a diner located at 2880 Broadway on the corner of that avenue and 112th Street in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the Borough of Manhattan in New York City. Frequented primarily by students and faculty of nearby Columbia University, 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.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is housed in the floors above the restaurant.
[edit] In pop culture
Tom's Restaurant was immortalized in Suzanne Vega's 1987 song "Tom's Diner", and would later become a site for pop-culture pilgrimage due to the use of its exterior for Monk's Cafe 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). Seinfeld fans should know that the interior and exterior have been remodeled since the show.[1]
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)
