Tom's Restaurant (Manhattan)

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Tom's Restaurant

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, New York, United States. Frequented by students and faculty of nearby Columbia University, it has been owned and operated by the Greek-American Minasizoulis family since the 1950s.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is housed in the floors above the restaurant.

[edit] In popular culture

Tom's Restaurant was first immortalized in Suzanne Vega's 1987 song "Tom's Diner", and would later become a site for popular-culture pilgrimage due to the use of its exterior for Monk's Cafe in the popular television sitcom Seinfeld where comedian Jerry Seinfeld's eponymous character 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. The interior and exterior have undergone minor remodeling since the show; however, the trademark "Tom's Restaurant" marquee still exists above the exterior windows.

The restaurant also features in 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." (page 60).

Tom's Restaurant also appears briefly in the background in the 2000 film Little Nicky. The restaurant also appeared in the background of a scene of a sixth-season episode of Law & Order ("Girlfriends") while Detectives Rey Curtis and Lennie Briscoe interview a person of interest.