2 CommentsJessica 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!”
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2 Comments
@J.K. I should add that the MP3 compression algorithm was tuned to Vega’s song. So it’s supposedly the song most flattered by MP3 compression.
Download it now, legally. Seriously: Dean Quigley said so.
@J.K. Before there was Seinfeld, there was Suzanne Vega, a now-famous Barnard English major.
In 1981, she wrote a little song about Tom’s, which doesn’t really say much for the owner, if this same guy was around then:
I am sitting
In the morning
At the diner
On the corner
I am waiting
At the counter
For the man
To pour the coffee
And he fills it
Only halfway
And before
I even argue
He is looking
Out the window
At somebody
Coming in
“It is always
Nice to see you”
Says the man
Behind the counter
To the woman
Who has come in
She is shaking
Her umbrella
And I look
The other way
As they are kissing
Their hellos . . .
This weekend, my friends were at Tom’s sometime late in the evening, sitting at a booth, when one realized she was sitting in a puddle of vomit. They called over the waiter to point out the state of things; he looked on in mock incomprehension. After some prompting he asked, “Whaddya want me to clean it?” Moments later, he moved them and sat down an entering group in the vomitorium.
It’s nice to know some things never change.