The best apple pie in the city

"The Best Apple Pie in the City…"

Under the buzz of neon, a couple meander through their dessert and their conversation, watched over by the cashier and a painting of a familiar big-haired gentleman in a grey jacket.

Outside, cars tiptoe around the landmine-like potholes, past Sunday night pedestrians lit by the electric glow.

Once a shining beacon of nineties television, time has taken its toll on the sign but hasn't taken it down, a symbol of resilience we could all take a page from, or an episode of Seinfeld.

Tom's Restaurant

Tom's is a diner at 2880 Broadway, on the corner of West 112th Street in Morningside Heights. It takes up the ground floor of Armstrong Hall, a Columbia University building, and Columbia students and staff have been regulars for years.

It has been on this corner since the 1940s, and the Greek American Zoulis family has run it for decades. Sources differ on how it started. Forgotten New York says the Zoulis family founded it. Wikipedia says a man named Tom Glikas did, and the family bought it later and kept the name.

The sign Seinfeld made famous

To Seinfeld fans, this corner is Monk's Café, the show's diner, for its whole run on NBC from 1989 to 1998. Only the outside belonged to Tom's. The show used it for exterior shots, and the scenes inside were filmed on a set in Los Angeles that looked very little like the real room.

Early episodes showed the whole neon sign. Later the TOM'S part was cropped out or dimmed, leaving just the word RESTAURANT. That's the long sign on the right of this photo, on the side facing 112th Street.

The show even had an apple pie plot. In "The Pie" (1994), Jerry's girlfriend turns down a taste of his apple pie after dinner at Monk's, and he can't let it go.

The big-haired gentleman

Inside, Tom's doesn't look like Monk's, but it hasn't ignored the show. Visitors' write-ups mention signed photos of the cast, and several mention Kramer. Food Republic noted a poster of Kramer's portrait in 2011. Patch found a portrait of him at the front booth in 2017. InsideHook put an illustration of Kramer by the counter in 2019, and in 2021 The Blue and White, a Columbia student magazine, described one large portrait of him hanging inside. The descriptions don't quite agree on where it hangs, so it may have moved, or there may be more than one. Either way, the big-haired gentleman watching over that couple is almost certainly Cosmo Kramer.

Kramer had his portrait painted on the show too. In "The Letter" (1992), Jerry's girlfriend Nina, an artist, has Kramer sit for her, and a socialite couple can't take their eyes off the result, one charmed and the other disgusted.

Tom's Diner

Before Seinfeld, there was the song. Suzanne Vega, a graduate of nearby Barnard College, wrote "Tom's Diner" about this place in 1981 or 1982. It opens her 1987 album Solitude Standing, sung with no instruments at all.

In the song, the narrator stops in for a cup of coffee, reads the paper, and watches two women: one who comes in, and one who stands outside in the rain. The idea came from Vega's friend, the photographer Brian Rose, who said he saw his whole life through a pane of glass, a witness to a lot of things who was never really involved in them. She tried to think and write that way, sitting in Tom's.

In 1990 the English producers DNA remixed it, and their version became a much bigger hit than the original, reaching number five in the US and number two in the UK. The German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg also used Vega's a cappella recording while he was developing MP3 compression, because he knew a warm voice on its own would be nearly impossible to compress well. Audio engineers took to calling her the mother of the MP3.