Taking a break mid-episode (what, I have a TiVo!) to share this with y'all:
The restaurant Matt reads in the security guard's mind is
Shopsin's. It is - or was - a
real place. A downtown
institution. Either you couldn't deal with the eccentricity of it, or you loved it. Apparently, the writer of this episode is in the latter category. Me, I SHRIEKED WITH GLEE when he said the name.
Shopsin's was in some ways a victim of its own success -- they got tired of running the larger restaurant they moved to when they lost their old lease. Kenny Shopsin plans to open a sandwich counter in the Essex Market later this year -- it won't have the
11-page menu, but maybe it'll have some of the ambience of the original, which was like being the guest in a family's home that just happened to be a restaurant. A wildly eccentric family, to be sure, but that was part of the fun of the visit.