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Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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What Is The Deal With The Seinfeld Meal? [No Soup For You]

Posted Feb 24, 2009 by Jeff Houck

Updated Feb 24, 2009 at 09:51 AM

Chefs are like you and me. They love a good sitcom.

That explains why chef Mark Heimann at the Renaissance Vinoy Resort and Golf Club came up with a menu based on the show ‘Seinfeld.’

The meal, being served for dinner Thursday and Friday in the resort’s Marchand’s Bar & Grill, was created to salute Jerry Seinfeld, who appears at St. Petersburg’s Mahaffey Theater Friday night.

Fans of the show still use references to the Soup Nazi and the marble rye episodes as shortcuts in conversation. Heimann told me he hadn’t realized how many food references there were in the show until he did the menu. Makes sense for a sitcom that was partly based in the booth of a diner.

According to Wikipedia:

Tom’s Restaurant is a diner located at 2880 Broadway on the corner of that avenue and 112th Street in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. Frequented by students and faculty of nearby Columbia University, it has been owned and operated by the Greek-American Minasizoulis family since the 1950s.

Tom’s Restaurant was first immortalized in Suzanne Vega’s 1987 song “Tom’s Diner”, and would later become a site for popular-culture pilgrimage due to the use of its exterior for Monk’s Cafe in the popular television sitcom Seinfeld where comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s eponymous character and his friends regularly ate. Early episodes showed the entire neon sign; later, allegedly to avoid royalties, the “Tom’s” portion was cropped out, showing only the “RESTAURANT” wraparound. The interior and exterior have undergone minor remodeling since the show; however, the trademark “Tom’s Restaurant” marquee still exists above the exterior windows.

According to Phil Boerner, Barack Obama’s former roommate, Obama used to eat at Tom’s Restaurant during his time at Columbia College. Said Boerner, “I remember often eating breakfast with Barack at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway.”