Katz's Delicatessen

Where it sits. Katz's occupies the corner of East Houston and Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side, a low, wide, plainly built room with an aluminium-framed shopfront, a neon sign and a much-photographed painted wall advertising salami. Houston Street is unusually broad here because it was widened in the early twentieth century for subway construction, and the delicatessen's slightly stranded position on the north side of that widened roadway is a direct consequence: the business moved to this side of the street around 1917 when its earlier premises were taken. The Second Avenue station on the F line is one block west; Ludlow Street south of the door is the spine of the neighbourhood's bar strip.

The story behind it. The business dates to 1888, when it opened as Iceland Brothers. Willy Katz bought in around 1903, the sign became Iceland and Katz, and after his cousin Benny Katz and Harry Tarowsky joined, the name shortened to the one still over the door. It served an immigrant Jewish neighbourhood that at its peak was among the most densely populated places on earth, and it outlived essentially all of its competitors: of the hundreds of kosher-style delicatessens that once operated in Manhattan, a handful remain. The wartime slogan urging families to send a salami to their boy in the army came from the proprietors' own sons serving overseas, and the line is still printed on the wall.

How the place works. At the door a member of staff hands each person a paper ticket. Everything ordered at the counter is written on that ticket by the counterman who serves you; you pay at the exit, and losing the ticket is expensive. Ordering at the counter is faster and gets you a slice of pastrami handed across as a sample while the sandwich is built; there is also table service in the side rows, with a surcharge. The pastrami is cured from navel-cut beef for weeks, rubbed with spice, smoked, steamed for hours and carved by hand rather than machine, which is why the slices are thick and irregular. The room itself — formica, fluorescent tubes, salamis on strings, framed photographs of every celebrity who has eaten here — has not been redesigned in any meaningful way for decades.

On screen. The delicatessen's fame outside New York rests on one scene: in When Harry Met Sally... (1989), directed by Rob Reiner from Nora Ephron's screenplay, Meg Ryan's character demonstrates across a table that a performance can be convincing, and a nearby diner played by Estelle Reiner — the director's mother — orders what she is having. The table sits in the middle of the room and carries a hanging sign pointing it out. That scene is only the best known of many. Johnny Depp's undercover agent meets his FBI contact here in Donnie Brasco (1997). Max reveals his draft notice over sandwiches in Across the Universe (2007). The deli appears in We Own the Night (2007), in Enchanted (2007) as the place from which the scheming Nathaniel telephones his queen, in Off Beat (1986), in Sidewalks of New York (2001) and, in the background of the bus-stop scenes, in the Australian animated film Mary and Max (2009). A contract on Frank Sinatra's character is drawn up in the meat locker in Contract on Cherry Street (1977). Law and Order has filmed on the pavement outside more than once. In February 2025 Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal returned to the same room for a Super Bowl commercial that restaged the scene, with the famous line delivered by Sydney Sweeney.

Getting there and timing. F train to Second Avenue, or the J, M and Z to Essex Street. Weekend lunchtimes produce a queue down Houston Street and a room loud enough to make conversation difficult; a weekday mid-afternoon is a different and better experience, and the kitchen stays open around the clock from Friday morning through Sunday night. Prices are high for a sandwich and the portion genuinely feeds two. Tipping the counterman a couple of dollars when he hands over the sample is customary and speeds everything up.

What is around it. The Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, three minutes away, reconstructs the apartments the delicatessen's first customers lived in and is the best possible companion visit; its tours are timed and sell out, so book the same morning at the latest. The Eldridge Street Synagogue, completed in 1887 with a Moorish Revival front and a rose window of coloured glass, is ten minutes south and open for tours most days. Russ and Daughters, an appetising shop trading since 1914 and still run by the founding family, is one block east on Houston and sells the smoked fish half of the same culinary tradition. Between them, the four addresses make a compact and genuinely historic morning on foot, and none of them is a reconstruction: all four are the original businesses or buildings, still operating on the streets where they started.