The diner booth that served as the set for one of the most-discussed scenes in television history can be yours, if you’ve got tens of thousands of dollars in your TV memorabilia budget.
New Jersey restaurant Holsten’s is offering the diner booth from the final scene of the HBO mob drama The Sopranos on eBay. It’s where Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), his wife Carmela (Edie Falco), and their son AJ (Robert Iler) waited for their daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) in the series finale. The scene notoriously fades to black, leaving an open question as to whether Tony gets whacked.
The booth has become a pilgrimage site for fans of the show, which ran for six seasons, ending in 2007, and is widely considered one of the greatest TV series of all time.
Bidding opened at just $3,000 on Wednesday and has soared to $82,300 at time of publication. Holsten’s diner, in Bloomfield, is offering the seats, table, and divider wall, as well as a plaque stamped with the words “Reserved for the Sopranos Family.”
“The time has come,” Holsten’s wrote on its Facebook page. “All good things sometimes need an upgrade. The famous Sopranos Booth is getting a much needed facelift. We are auctioning off the well-endeared booth on eBay starting today… Obviously, we aren’t going to change the nostalgia of our beloved shoppe… we aren’t crazy! Just polishing up the place!”
After dozens of comments on the post, some of them critical, the shop elaborated:
“A note from the owners: Please understand that we don’t want to do this. But the integrity of the booths are now compromised. They have been repaired many times and this furniture is over 60 years old. Obviously, we do not want to do this, however it has come to a point where they are structurally not safe anymore as a whole and we need to think about the safety of our patrons first.”
Or, as Tony Soprano might say, “What are you gonna do?”
Fans are so wild to sit in the booth, co-owner Chris Carley Carley said in an interview with NJ Advance Media, that he recently saw one couple wait 40 minutes to sit in it, even though other seats were available. He also said that the new booth will be designed to look as much like the old one as possible.
“People will either get used to it, or they won’t get used to it. But I think they will… hopefully, the response will be when the new one is in that everyone likes it,” Carley said. “They’ll see that it’s really not that much of a difference.”
The listing has two specifications buyers may want to be aware of. The jukebox that played Journey’s song “Don’t Stop Believin’” in the final scene is not included. And because of the object’s size and weight, the seller isn’t offering shipping, so the buyer will have to pick it up or arrange their own.
