Tom’s Restaurant from “Seinfeld”

Considering it is one of New York’s best-known film locations, you’d think I would have stalked Tom’s Restaurant, aka Monk’s Café from Seinfeld, ages ago.  That was not the case, though.  While the Morningside Heights eatery had been on my To-Stalk List ever since my first visit to Manhattan back in 2005, due to the fact that it is located all way at 112th and Broadway, it kept getting pushed to the back burner.  Then, while doing research prior to my April 2016 trip to the Big Apple, I came across the following passage in the book The Best Things to Do in New York – “As a rule, comfort food gets better the father uptown you go, and the melts, shakes, and fried chicken at Tom’s are close to perfect.”  Near-perfect fried chicken?  Say no more!  I was not going to pass that up!  So straight to the top of my To-Stalk List the restaurant went and the Grim Cheaper and I headed right on over there with our friend Lavonna one of our first days in town.

Tom’s Restaurant was originally founded way back in 1940 by Greece native Tom Glikas.

He didn’t hold onto the place for long, though.  A scant six years later, Glikas sold his namesake eatery to the Zoulis family who continue to own and operate it to this day.

Still situated on the same busy corner on which it was originally established, little of the restaurant has changed throughout the course of its almost 80-year history.

The quality Greek and American offerings, massive menu, affordable prices, and late-night hours turned the diner into a neighborhood staple from the get-go and it remains such today, with locals, tourists, and students from nearby Columbia University alike all popping in for superb comfort food, most of it made from scratch.

Even celebrities have been known to drop by.  Over the years such luminaries as William Hurt, John McCain, Larry David, Madeleine Albright, Christopher Reeve, Mike Tyson, Richard Dreyfuss, Bruce Willis, Danny Aiello, and Barack Obama have all been seen dining on the premises.

Considering Tom’s long history in New York, it is not surprising that the place found its way onscreen.  On Seinfeld, the restaurant popped up pretty much weekly as the regular hangout of Jerry Seinfeld (played by himself), Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George Costanza (Jason Alexander), and Kramer (Michael Richards).  Though it is arguably the show’s most iconic location, its familiar exterior did not make an appearance until the Season 2 premiere titled “The Ex-Girlfriend.”

Prior to that, the outside of the gang’s favorite coffee shop was only featured on one occasion – in the pilot.  For that episode, titled “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” a different exterior was utilized.  Located at 208 Varick Street in the West Village, the site is currently home to a McDonald’s (pictured below via Google Street View), but it housed an independent diner at the time that the series started filming.  Though the signage shown on Seinfeld reads “Pete’s Luncheonette,” I am fairly certain that was not the establishment’s actual name.

The same restaurant was also utilized in the 1984 comedy The Muppets Take Manhattan as the spot where Kermit the Frog lands a day job while trying to get his Manhattan Melodies musical onto Broadway.  In looking at the imagery of Pete’s from both productions, I am fairly certain that what was shown in “The Seinfeld Chronicles” was just recycled footage from The Muppets.

Back to Tom’s.  As you can see in the screen capture as compared to the photograph below, though some aspects of the eatery’s exterior, including the windows and wood framing, have changed since Seinfeld was shot, the place is still very recognizable from its onscreen stint.  The interior is another story, however.

Only the outside of Tom’s Restaurant appeared on Seinfeld.  As is the norm with sitcoms, which are shot in front of a live audience, all of the show’s interior filming took place on studio-built sets.  In this case, the Monk’s Café scenes were lensed on a soundstage (Stage 19 during Seasons 1-3 and Stage 9 during Seasons 4-9) at CBS Studio Center, located at 4024 Radford Avenue in Studio City.

I got to see portions of the Monk’s set, including a booth and a wall, when I visited the Warner Bros. “Television: Out of the Box” exhibit at The Paley Center for Media in 2012.  (Though, considering many of the items on display weren’t exactly authentic, I cannot say with certainty that the artifacts pictured below are indeed legit.)

The actual interior of Tom’s does not resemble the Monk’s set in the slightest, which made seeing the restaurant in person rather jarring.

Though the place does have a counter . . .

. . . and booth seating, it looks nothing like the spot made famous for its big salads.

While not a big restaurant by any means, Tom’s is also significantly larger than Monk’s.  Regardless of the disparities, it was still a huge thrill to finally see the site in person.

And I am happy to report that the assertion made in The Best Things to Do in New York was not wrong.  While I opted for chicken strips instead of the fried chicken meal (I never pass up chicken strips when I see them on a menu), they were outstanding – as was the ranch dressing they were served with!

For those wondering how the name “Monk’s Café” came to be, per an article Jerry Seinfeld wrote for New York magazine, the moniker was rather uninspired.  He says, “We called the coffee shop Monk’s because there was a Thelonious Monk poster in the office where Larry [David] and I were writing, and we just needed a name.”

Tom’s Restaurant also appeared in the Season 3 episode of The Bionic Woman titled “Long Live the King,” which aired in 1978.

Because The Bionic Woman was filmed in Los Angeles, the eatery was only utilized for establishing shots in the episode.  The scene taking place inside the restaurant was lensed elsewhere – either at a actual L.A.-area café or a studio-built set.

Italian director Gian Franco Morini made the eatery the subject of his 2014 film, Tom’s Restaurant – A Documentary About Everything.

That same year, Jerry Seinfeld paid homage to his former series by shooting a Season 3 episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee at Tom’s along with fellow alums Jason Alexander and Wayne Knight.

The episode, titled “The Over-Cheer,” finally gave us a shot of George and Jerry sitting inside the actual Tom’s.

Not only is the eatery a filming location, but it also inspired a popular song – Suzanne Vega’s 1987 ditty “Tom’s Diner.”  As the singer explained to The Guardian in a 2016 article, “When I was at college in Manhattan in the early 1980s, I used to go to Tom’s Restaurant on 112th and Broadway for coffee.  I liked its ordinariness: it was the kind of place you’d find on any corner.  One day, I was in there mulling over a conversation I’d had with a photographer friend, Brian Rose, about romantic alienation.  He told me he saw his life as if through a pane of glass.  I came out of Tom’s with the idea of writing a song about an alienated character who just sees things happening around him.  I was walking down Broadway and the melody popped into my head.  The line about the actor ‘who had died while he was drinking’ was true: William Holden’s obituary had been in that morning’s paper.  The ‘bells of the cathedral’ were those of St. John the Divine up the street, though I made up the bit about the woman ‘fixing her stockings’ and changed ‘restaurant’ to ‘diner’ to make it rhyme.”  A fan named David Hammar did a deep dive into figuring out the exact day Vega penned the song (a man after my own heart!) and posted the results of his quest on Suzanne’s official website.  Parsing through old newspaper archives and weather reports, Hammar pinpoints the date as November 18th, 1981.  Well, sort of.  The article makes for a fabulous read.  You can check it out here.  (For whatever reason, the photo below was not actually taken at Tom’s Restaurant, but at a different establishment.)

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Tom’s Restaurant, aka Monk’s Café from Seinfeld, is located at 2880 Broadway in New York’s Morningside Heights neighborhood.  You can visit the eatery’s official website here.

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