Tom's Restaurant

Where it sits. Tom's occupies the corner of Broadway and West 112th Street in Morningside Heights, on the ground floor of Armstrong Hall, a Columbia University building whose upper storeys house the Goddard Institute for Space Studies — meaning that one of the world's better-known climate modelling laboratories sits directly above a Greek-American coffee shop serving eggs over easy. Broadway at this point is wide and low-rise, with the campus gates two blocks south, Barnard College across the street, and the enormous unfinished bulk of the Cathedral of St John the Divine four blocks east. The 1 train stops at 110th Street, a short walk south.

The story behind it. The diner was founded by Tom Glikas in the 1940s and passed at some point to the Greek-American family of Minas Zoulis, who kept the name and, more importantly, kept the sign. It has functioned ever since as the neighbourhood's default room: a place for Columbia and Barnard students to work through a night, for faculty to have breakfast meetings, and for local families to eat cheaply. Barack Obama ate here as an undergraduate; the late Senator John McCain was a regular when visiting his daughter during her student years. None of that is why anyone travels to it.

On screen. From 1989 to 1998 the exterior of Tom's stood in for Monk's Cafe, the coffee shop where the four characters of Seinfeld convened in almost every episode. The establishing shot is a static plate of this corner, reused for nine seasons, and it created one of the most recognisable frontages in American television. Two details are worth getting right. First, the interior on the programme bears almost no resemblance to the real room: those scenes were shot on a set at CBS Studio Center in Studio City, Los Angeles, roughly four thousand kilometres away, and the booth layout, counter and window on television do not exist here. Second, the sign changed. Early episodes show the full wraparound neon, reading TOM'S RESTAURANT; later ones crop or dim the TOM'S portion so that only RESTAURANT appears, which is why fans arriving for the first time often feel the sign is somehow wrong. It is not — it is the same sign, and it has survived the modest remodelling the place has had since.

The other reason it is famous. Suzanne Vega, who studied at Barnard across the road, wrote Tom's Diner in 1981 and released it on the 1987 album Solitude Standing; it describes sitting at the window of exactly this corner watching the street. The a cappella original was remixed without permission by the British duo DNA in 1990, the bootleg became a hit, and Vega's label released it officially. The song then acquired a strange technical afterlife: engineers developing the MP3 compression format at the Fraunhofer Institute used the unaccompanied vocal as a reference recording, tuning the codec until the artefacts stopped being audible on it, which is the basis for the claim that Vega is the mother of the format. A diner, a sitcom, a folk song and a compression standard is an unusual amount of cultural load for one street corner.

What you actually see today. A working neighbourhood diner. The menu is standard Greek-American — omelettes, souvlaki, burgers, gyro, rice pudding, milkshakes, filter coffee refilled without asking — served at booths and a counter, at prices that remain reasonable by Manhattan standards because the customer base is students. Portions are large. The corner window is the seat people want and it is usually taken. Staff are used to visitors photographing the sign and are unbothered by it, but the room is a business, and ordering something is the price of the pilgrimage. The neon comes into its own after dark, which is when the photograph most people want is actually available.

Getting there and timing. Take the 1 train to Cathedral Parkway–110th Street and walk two blocks north on Broadway, or the B and C to Cathedral Parkway and walk east. Opening hours are long, historically around the clock at weekends, though this has varied; check before making a late-night trip. Term time is livelier and more characteristic than the summer, when the student population empties out.

What to combine it with. The Cathedral of St John the Divine, begun in 1892 and still incomplete, is four blocks east and worth an hour. Riverside Park and Grant's Tomb are ten minutes west; Columbia's Low Library steps are two blocks south; and Harlem begins at 125th Street, a twenty-minute walk north along Broadway.