Tom’s Restaurant in Prospect Heights

New York has plenty of legendary eateries, but only at Tom’s Restaurant in Prospect Heights are coffee and cookies offered as you wait on line. It’s that personal touch—in addition to the cherry lime rickeys and lemon-ricotta pancakes—that has kept Tom’s in business since 1945, when the space was reconfigured from an ice cream shop to a breakfast and lunch joint and renamed after its then-owner. And Gus Vlahavas, Tom’s son, has been working there just about the whole time, mixing rickeys since he was nine years old. But in May, Vlahavas hung up his apron and handed the business over to his nephew, Jim Kokotas. “My wife worked with me at Tom’s for 40 years and she’s not well, so I have to stay with her,” says Vlahavas. “But it was also time to say goodbye. I’d like a few years for myself.”

Tom’s enjoys a fame that brings in customers from Manhattan and farther afield, but it’s nothing if not a neighborhood shop. The ties it has built to its community go so deep that during the blackout of ’65, locals made a human chain around Tom’s to protect it from looting. “This isn’t a tourist place where you serve someone you’ll never see again,” Kokotas says. “We couldn’t have survived all these years without taking care of the local people.”

Taking care of the locals includes recent innovations like opening on Sundays, which had been on patrons’ wish lists for years. But besides Sunday brunch and some new sidewalk seating, Tom’s will remain unchanged, Kokotas says: “If you walked in and hadn’t been here in a few months, you wouldn’t notice the difference.”

782 Washington Ave at Sterling Pl, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn (718-636-9738, tomsrestaurantbrooklyn.com)

Menu picks

Photograph: David Rosenzweig

• Pancakes, and lots of ’em —chocolate chip, banana walnut, sweet corn and cranberry, silver dollar…and the nice folks at Tom’s even let you mix and match.

• Golden challah French toast served with syrup, powdered sugar and three kinds of butter (strawberry, apple cinnamon and peach walnut).

• Crab cakes and eggs with a side of home fries, french fries or grits.—Nicole Caccavo Kear

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