Back in the 1940s, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg often closed down the bar at the West End.

Over the decades, thousands of their fellow Columbia University students did the same in the cafe opposite their Manhattan campus. And now, it’s almost last call for everybody at the Broadway fixture where a beer and burger was virtually part of the curriculum.

The West End, a well-known Columbia haunt in a variety of incarnations since 1911, is set to become a Cuban restaurant. Its owners, after running the place since 1990, are ready to try something else.

“I’ve always said over all these years that nobody owns the West End,” the current owner, Katie Gardner, who first visited the restaurant as a Columbia undergraduate, said. “You caretake it. You make sure you don’t do it harm. You try not to lose the flavor of the place.”

It was in the West End that Kerouac, author of the classic “On the Road,” did some of his earliest writing. Ginsberg often joined Kerouac at the bar, with a Columbia dean eventually calling the poet’s father about the pair’s long hours at the West End.

As news of the restaurant’s impending sale began to spread, regulars stopped by to commiserate and the phone rang constantly during lunch hour. “People want to know what’s going on,” Ms. Gardner said. “They’re worrying if the West End is going to be the West End.”

It is. And it isn’t.

The new buyer, Jeremy Merrin, owns a pair of Manhattan restaurants called Havana Central, where the cuisine tends to run away from typical college bar fare. But he’s also familiar with the old West End: He spent many hours inside while earning a master’s degree at the Columbia Business School.

The restaurant, with its wallet friendly $5 hamburger, is so linked to Columbia that it gets a mention on the university Web site.