Jessica Cohen reports:

Wondering what time Tom’s Restaurant closes on Thursday evenings, I
searched for the famed diner on Wikipedia, and I found these interesting few
sentences:

“Tom’s Restaurant…would later become a site for pop-culture pilgrimage 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; to avoid royalties, later episodes crop out “Tom’s”,
showing only the “RESTAURANT” wraparound.”

That night, after my meal there, I sought to corroborate the claim of the
anonymous writer with one of the owners who had been working the cash
register.

In a thick Greek accent, with much more than a twinge of anger in his eyes,
he declared,

“We would have never asked for their money!”