A return to Tommy’s Restaurant reveals how a quirky neighborhood café with room for everyone became a lifeline for a teenager still figuring herself out.
Walking into Tommy’s Restaurant in the Coventry Village neighborhood of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, feels like stepping back in time. The wooden paneled walls, the open kitchen, the sign instructing customers to “please sign in and wait to be seated” — all of it remains unchanged from my memories. Above the blond wooden booths, anthropomorphized cartoon vegetables still happily march along with forks and spoons in their hands, just as they did decades ago.
As a teenager, Tommy’s was a refuge for me. I became a vegetarian at 15 in 1995, thanks to some PETA materials that came to my house, and much to my mother’s dismay, a vegan the year after. (Blame a summer camp romance.) But thankfully, there was Tommy’s, a cheerfully omnivorous restaurant that welcomed everyone from skater kids to old hippies to newly minted yuppie parents. The vegetarian options were plentiful, but a staunchly Midwestern dad could still order a bacon cheeseburger with fries while his kids dug into a barbecue seitan sandwich or a hefty spinach pie packed with cheese and mushrooms. Everyone knew to finish their meal with one of Tommy’s legendary milkshakes, which of course included a Tofutti option.
Coventry Village itself became an extension of that refuge. The stretch of mom-and-pop shops lining Coventry Road was where I slipped away from the gaze of my rabbi father’s congregation and the preppy affluence of Shaker Heights, where I grew up. In the mid- to late ’90s, Coventry was well into its heyday — a vibrant gathering ground for leather-clad punk rockers, bell-bottomed Deadheads, and Goth college students.
“When classmates teased me for refusing hot dogs or pepperoni pizza, Tommy’s felt like a safe space,”
Sari Kamin
It was ground zero for the countercultural creative scene of northeast Cleveland. I spent hours combing the racks of used CDs at Record Revolution, sifting through vintage toys at Big Fun, and buying my first lava lamp and beaded door curtain at High Tide Rock Bottom. As a high school theater kid with a penchant for Manic Panic hair dye and thrift shop clothing, I’d settle into Arabica, the local coffee shop, with a café mocha, giggling with friends as the sweet scent of clove cigarettes drifted around us…