Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army: The Complete Guide to Katz's Delicatessen

There is a deli on the corner of Houston and Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side that has been there since 1888, which means it predates the zipper, the automobile, the airplane, the motion picture, and the borough of Queens. It has survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the near-collapse of the surrounding neighborhood, the gentrification of the area, and every food trend of the past century with precisely zero adjustments to its operating philosophy. The pastrami is hand-carved. The line is long. The pickles come free with your sandwich. There is no Wi-Fi.

Katz's Delicatessen is not the oldest deli in New York — that distinction belongs to Russ & Daughters, around the corner, or possibly Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side, depending on how you define your terms. But it is the most famous deli in the world, which is a different kind of achievement and one that requires a different kind of explanation. Katz's has been in the same building, serving the same food, to the same cross-section of humanity — politicians and laborers and celebrities and tourists and the grandchildren of people who ate here before anyone reading this was born — for 136 years. It is not a restaurant that happens to be historic. It is history that happens to still be a restaurant.

The Building and the Room

The deli occupies the ground floor of a corner building at 205 East Houston Street, a structure of no architectural distinction whatsoever and of enormous cultural significance. The interior is large — larger than it looks from outside — with seating for several hundred people at long communal tables and smaller two-tops arranged in rows under fluorescent lighting that has been the same quality, more or less, since fluorescent lighting was invented. The floor is linoleum. The walls are covered with photographs of famous visitors, framed newspaper articles, and the accumulated memorabilia of 136 years of operation.

The photographs are worth examining closely. They constitute an informal history of twentieth-century American celebrity: presidents and senators photographed at the counter, actors and musicians holding sandwiches, athletes looking pleased, journalists looking serious. The cumulative effect is of a room that has been the location for so many recorded moments that it has acquired a quality — familiar even on a first visit — that no amount of interior design could manufacture. Katz's looks the way it does because that is how it looked when the photographs were taken, and the photographs are as much of the room as the walls they hang on.

The sign at the entrance reads "Katz's That's All!" — a slogan of such confident finality that it functions as both description and argument. The awning above the entrance on Houston Street is yellow and red. The neon sign in the window is old enough to have been photographed in black and white. There is a line, and then there is a counter, and then there is a man with a knife and a piece of pastrami, and everything that has ever been written about this place is really about what happens between those three things.

The History

Origins: Iceland Brothers and the Lower East Side (1888)

The deli was founded in 1888 by two brothers named Iceland — a common Americanized name for Jewish immigrants of the period — at a moment when the Lower East Side was the most densely populated neighborhood in the United States and possibly the world. Between 1880 and 1920, approximately two million Eastern European Jews arrived in New York, the overwhelming majority passing through or settling on the Lower East Side: a district of roughly 1.5 square miles below Houston Street and east of the Bowery that housed, at its peak, more than 700 people per acre.

The food economy of the Lower East Side in this period was intense and specific. The Jewish dietary laws of kashrut — which forbid the mixing of meat and dairy — combined with the poverty of the immigrant population and the traditional food culture of the Russian Pale of Settlement to produce a cuisine of cured, smoked, and preserved meats, pickled vegetables, and fermented dairy products, all dense with calories and salt and flavor, designed for a population that did heavy physical labor and could not afford waste. The deli was not a luxury. It was a communal institution, the neighborhood’s kitchen, serving people who lived in tenements without adequate cooking facilities and who needed a hot meal at a price that a garment worker's wage could cover.

The Iceland brothers' deli on Houston Street was one among dozens in the neighborhood, distinguished primarily by its location — the corner of Houston and Ludlow was a significant intersection, Houston Street being the main east-west thoroughfare — and by its scale, which was larger than most of its competitors from the beginning.

The Katz Family (1903)

In 1903, Willy Katz joined the Iceland operation as a partner. By 1910, the Iceland family had departed and the deli bore the Katz name alone. Willy Katz's son Isidore — known universally as "Izzy" — eventually took over management and ran the deli through the middle decades of the twentieth century, a period that encompassed the transformation of the Lower East Side from immigrant ghetto to post-immigrant neighborhood and the various economic and social upheavals that accompanied it.

The Katz family's management philosophy was, in essence, to not change anything that was working. The menu that Willy Katz and the Iceland brothers had developed in the 1880s and 1890s — built around cured and smoked meats, particularly pastrami and corned beef on rye, served with half-sour pickles and yellow mustard — remained the menu. The physical layout of the deli evolved only as necessity required. The prices increased with inflation; everything else stayed put.

"Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army"

The most famous single moment in Katz's history before Meg Ryan is the slogan, and the slogan came out of World War II.

When American soldiers began shipping out to Europe and the Pacific in the early 1940s, Katz's began a mail-order program that allowed families to send salami — dense, shelf-stable, and capable of surviving the postal system and the conditions of military service — to their sons overseas. The promotion required a slogan, and the slogan that emerged — "Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army" — is a piece of American vernacular poetry: eight words of perfect rhythm and rhyme that accomplish everything advertising aspires to and that have never been improved upon.

The sign bearing the slogan still hangs in the deli, in the same place it has hung since the 1940s. It is now a decorative artifact as much as an active promotion, though the mail-order business continues. But the slogan did something that advertising very rarely achieves: it entered the language. To say "Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army" is to invoke not just Katz's but the entire world of the Jewish-American Lower East Side at mid-century — the immigrant generation sending their American-born children to fight a war, expressing love in the only vocabulary available, which in this case was a cured sausage.

The Lean Years and Survival

The decades from roughly 1950 to 1990 were difficult for the Lower East Side and for Katz's. The postwar substantiation that remade the American landscape drained the neighborhood of its working-class Jewish population — the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation moved to the Bronx, to Brooklyn, to Queens, to Long Island, to New Jersey, following the highways and the federally subsidized mortgages that made home ownership in the suburbs possible and attractive. By the 1970s, the Lower East Side had transitioned from a Jewish immigrant neighborhood to a predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican one, with significant populations of Chinese immigrants expanding westward from Chinatown to the south.

Katz's survived this transition by being too stubborn to close and too well-known to fail. The regulars who remembered it from childhood came back — sometimes from Queens, sometimes from Long Island, sometimes from further — for the pastrami, for the pickles, for the act of return itself. The tourists began arriving as the neighborhood’s fame as a historical site grew. The deli operated as a kind of anchor: the thing that had been there longest and would be there still.

The current ownership is the Yezreel family, who have been involved in Katz's management since the 1980s. Fred Austin, who purchased a stake in the business in 1988, and his son Jake Austin, who took over management in the 2000s, have been the public faces of the modern Katz's — maintaining the traditional operation while navigating the transformation of the neighborhood around it and managing the explosion of fame that the deli has experienced since the early 1990s.

The Sale That Almost Was

The real estate story of Katz's is, in some ways, as remarkable as the sandwich story. The building sits on a corner of the Lower East Side that, during the gentrification wave of the 2000s and 2010s, became extraordinarily valuable. The development pressure on the neighborhood — which has transformed from the artists-and-immigrants district it was in the 1990s into one of the most expensive zip codes in Brooklyn-adjacent Manhattan — has been intense.

In 2015, it was reported that the air rights above Katz's had been sold to a luxury condominium developer, with plans to build apartments above the deli while it continued to operate at street level. The deal was controversial and widely mourned as a harbinger of the deli's eventual displacement. The deli's lease, however, runs through a period that guarantees its operation at the current location for decades to come, and the Katz's management has been clear that they intend to remain. The luxury apartments now rise above the historic corner; Katz's operates below them with the same indifference to its surroundings that it has maintained for 136 years.

The Menu

The Philosophy

Katz's is not a restaurant in the contemporary sense. It does not have a chef with a culinary philosophy or a menu that changes with the seasons or a wine program. It has a deli counter and a kitchen that have been producing the same food since the Tammany Hall era, and the food it produces is the most fully realized version of the Jewish-American delicatessen tradition that exists anywhere in the world.

The menu is long and, on a first visit, slightly overwhelming. The correct approach is to ignore almost all of it and order the thing that Katz's does better than anyone: the pastrami on rye. Every other decision can wait until you know the room.

The Pastrami

The pastrami at Katz's is the standard by which all other pastrami is measured. This is not New York chauvinism but a statement about production method: Katz's cures its own brisket in a proprietary spice mixture for approximately a month, then smoke-cooks it at low temperature for several hours, then steams it to order to the precise level of tenderness and internal temperature that allows the hand-carver to produce slices of the correct thickness and texture.

The resulting meat is dark red at the center, nearly black at the edges where the spice crust has caramelized during smoking, tender enough to require no effort to chew, and dense with the flavor of coriander, black pepper, garlic, and smoke in a combination that has never been precisely replicated elsewhere despite the best efforts of a great number of talented people. A Katz's pastrami sandwich contains approximately half a pound of meat — the weight that produces the correct ratio of meat to bread — piled in a slope between two slices of rye that struggle, visibly, to contain it.

The rye bread comes from a supplier whose relationship with Katz's predates the current ownership by decades. It is seeded rye — caraway seeds pressed into the crust — with a slight sourness from the fermented dough and a structural integrity that allows it to hold the meat without disintegrating under the weight and the moisture. The combination of the bread with the pastrami is not incidental but calibrated: the sourness of the rye is what the richness of the pastrami needs.

The condiments are yellow mustard — the sharp, vinegary American yellow mustard, not Dijon — and nothing else. The carver will ask if you want mustard; say yes.

The Corned Beef

Katz's corned beef is produced by the same extended curing process as the pastrami but without the smoking stage: the brisket is salt-cured with a pickling spice mixture, then braised until tender. The result is pink, mild, and moist — a completely different sensory experience from the pastrami, and a matter of genuine theological division among Katz's regulars.

The pastrami vs. corned beef argument is one of the fundamental arguments of New York deli culture, and Katz's is where it is most intensely conducted. The corned beef is exceptional; the pastrami is transcendent. On a first visit, order the pastrami. On subsequent visits, order both, which is available as a combination sandwich — the two meats layered, a construction that requires the sandwich to be eaten in two hands and finished with a degree of commitment.

The Hot Dogs and Knishes

Katz's serves hot dogs — all-beef, natural casing, snapped open when you bite them — that are as good as any in New York outside of Coney Island, which is very good indeed. They can be ordered plain, with mustard and sauerkraut, or with mustard and grilled onions.

The knish — a baked pastry of potato or meat filling in a dough casing, as definitively Eastern European Jewish as any food on the menu — is made in the traditional style: large, dense, served hot, adequate as a side dish or as a meal in itself depending on the appetite of the consumer.

The Pickles

The pickles at Katz's are free and are placed on the table (or brought to the counter) as a matter of course. They come in two varieties:

Half-sour pickles are brined but not fermented — cucumbers that have been in the salt solution for a short time, retaining their crunch and their fresh cucumber flavor beneath the salt and garlic. They are bright green, crisp, and essential.

Full-sour pickles are fermented — brined for a longer period until lactic acid fermentation has fully transformed the cucumber into something funkier, softer, and more complex. They are darker, more assertive, and the preference of those who take their pickle seriously.

A plate of half-sours and full-sours arrives with every table order, replenished on request, at no charge. They are also sold by the pound to take home, and taking home a pound of Katz's pickles is an entirely reasonable decision.

Other Menu Highlights

The Reuben: Corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on grilled rye — a combination of dairy and meat that Katz's, operating as a non-kosher deli, produces freely and well. The Reuben at Katz's is definitive.

The Turkey: Carved from whole roasted birds, not deli-sliced processed turkey. If you want turkey at a deli, this is where it should be eaten.

The Brisket: Braised beef brisket, available by the pound or in a sandwich. Softer and more yielding than the pastrami or corned beef, and the preference of certain regulars who will not be argued with.

Matzo Ball Soup: Chicken soup with a large matzo ball — dense or fluffy depending on the day — available year-round but most comforting between October and March. The soup is the color of gold and tastes the way childhood memories are supposed to taste.

Egg Creams: The New York egg cream — a beverage containing neither eggs nor cream, made from chocolate syrup, whole milk, and seltzer in a ratio that admits no variation — is available at the counter and is as correct here as anywhere in the city.

Dr. Brown's Sodas: The canonical accompaniment to a New York deli sandwich. Cel-Ray — the celery-flavored soda that sounds like a punishment and tastes like a revelation with pastrami — is the correct choice. Black Cherry is the crowd-pleaser. Cream Soda is the compromise. All are correct.

How to Order: A Step-by-Step Guide

Katz's does not have a simple ordering process, and the confusion it generates in first-time visitors is both genuine and part of the experience. The system is this:

Step 1: Get Your Ticket

At the entrance, a staff member will hand you a paper ticket. This ticket is critical. Do not lose it. Everything you order will be written on it by the person who serves you, and at the end of your meal you present it to the cashier who tallies the total. The ticket is also what gets you out of the deli — the cashier requires it. People who lose their tickets are charged a flat fee (currently around $50) on the assumption that they have eaten without recording it. Hold onto your ticket.

Step 2: Understand the Service Model

Katz's operates two types of service simultaneously, which is a source of confusion for newcomers:

Counter service: You approach one of the carvers behind the deli counter, tell them what you want, and they prepare it in front of you. The counter service is where most sandwiches come from, and it is the correct way to order pastrami or corned beef. The carvers will typically offer you a sample slice of the meat before completing your sandwich — a gesture of generosity that also functions as an implicit quality-control conversation. If the slice is not to your liking (too lean, too fatty, not hot enough), you can say so. The carver will adjust. This is not rude; it is how the transaction is supposed to work.

Table service: For certain items — soups, hot dogs, full plates, and some other menu items — a waiter will come to your table and take your order. The waiter marks your ticket; the food comes from the kitchen rather than the counter.

For a first visit, the recommended approach is: go to the counter, order the pastrami sandwich, take it to a table, and then consider whether you want anything else from the table service menu.

Step 3: Navigate the Counter

The counter is staffed by multiple carvers at any given time. There is no formal queue system; you establish your place through presence and eye contact. Move toward the counter when space opens, make eye contact with a carver, and state your order. Do not be tentative. The carvers are experienced and efficient and are not going to be harsh with a first-time visitor who is clearly bewildered, but decisiveness is appreciated.

State your order clearly: "Pastrami on rye, please" or "Corned beef on rye with mustard." The carver will ask about mustard if you don't specify. The carver will mark your ticket. Take your sandwich to a table or, if you prefer, eat standing at the counter, which many regulars do.

Step 4: Tip the Carver

Tipping the carver — in cash, handed over at the counter — is standard practice at Katz's and is not incidental. The carvers' tips are part of their compensation, and the practice of tipping is also, historically, the mechanism by which a good carver communicates to you that you are getting the best of what is available. The tip is not required; the quality of what you receive does not explicitly depend on it. Tip anyway.

Step 5: Cash or Credit

Katz's accepts both cash and credit cards — it is no longer strictly cash-only as it was for much of its history. However, bringing cash is advisable, as the system runs more smoothly and the deli's historic character is most fully experienced without the intermediary of a card machine. There is an ATM inside the deli if needed.

Step 6: Check Out

When you are done, take your ticket — which should have every item you ordered written on it — to the cashier at the exit. The cashier totals your bill; you pay; you receive a receipt and your change. The process is orderly. The line at the cashier can be long at peak times; this is the last patience test the deli requires of you.

The Scene: When to Go and What to Expect

Weekday lunch (11 AM – 2 PM): The busiest period, with lines out the door on any day with reasonable weather. The crowd is a genuine cross-section of New York: tourists from everywhere, office workers from the neighborhood, delivery drivers, film crews, journalists, celebrities who have learned that Katz's is not the place where you are recognized, elderly regulars who have been coming for fifty years, young people discovering it for the first time.

Weekend brunch and lunch: The longest lines. Saturday and Sunday midday can mean a wait of 30–45 minutes to get in during peak season. The wait is almost always worth it; the deli is large enough that the line moves faster than it looks.

Weekday dinner: Significantly less crowded than lunch. The menu is the same; the atmosphere is quieter; the experience of sitting with a pastrami sandwich in a half-empty Katz's at 7 PM on a Tuesday has a particular quality — melancholy, comfortable, historically dense — that the midday chaos cannot provide.

Late night: Katz's is open late on weekends — until 2:45 AM on Friday and Saturday nights — and the late-night crowd, a mix of bar-goers, night-shift workers, and insomniacs, has its own character entirely. Eating a pastrami on rye at 1 AM in a fluorescent-lit deli on the Lower East Side is one of the more genuinely New York experiences available.

Fame Through Film and Entertainment

When Harry Met Sally (1989)

The most famous scene in the history of Katz's Delicatessen — and, arguably, the most famous restaurant scene in the history of American cinema — was filmed on location in the deli in 1988 and released as part of Rob Reiner's romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally in 1989.

The scene: Meg Ryan, as Sally Albright, demonstrates to Billy Crystal's Harry Burns that women are capable of faking satisfaction convincingly enough to deceive men who think they can tell the difference. The demonstration — conducted at a table in the main dining room, surrounded by other diners, building from a conversational pitch to a complete theatrical performance — culminates in one of the most quoted lines in American comedy history.

The follow-up line — spoken by an unnamed woman at an adjacent table to the waiter, after Ryan finishes — is "I'll have what she's having." The line was delivered by Estelle Reiner, the director's mother, who had come to the set to watch filming and was cast in the role on the day. It is the best example in film history of a single line of dialogue becoming permanently attached to a location.

Katz's now marks the table where the scene was filmed with a sign on the wall above it: "HOPE YOU HAD WHAT SHE HAD! Enjoy KATZ'S." The table is almost always occupied. People specifically request it. The sign has been photographed so many times that it is nearly as famous as the scene it commemorates.

The effect of the scene on Katz's business is genuinely difficult to overstate. The film, which was an enormous hit, introduced Katz's to an international audience that would not have encountered it through the normal channels of New York food writing. In the decades since 1989, "the When Harry Met Sally deli" has been a primary means by which visitors from outside New York identify and locate Katz's. The scene did not save the deli — it was not in danger in 1989 — but it expanded the deli's cultural footprint into something approaching global ubiquity.

Other Film and Television Appearances

When Harry Met Sally is the most famous, but Katz's has been used as a location repeatedly over the decades, both because of its authenticity as a setting and because its fame makes it a legible shorthand for New York deli culture.

Donnie Brasco (1997): Al Pacino and Johnny Depp in the booth. The deli appears briefly but memorably, its neon and fluorescent interior providing exactly the kind of unglamorous realism the film required.

Enchanted (2007): Katz's appears in the animated-to-live-action Disney film as part of Amy Adams's princess-discovers-New-York montage — an unlikely pairing that works, somehow.

Man on a Ledge (2012): The deli features in the thriller.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime, 2017–2023): The Amazon series set in 1950s New York uses Katz's as a recurring location, which is historically plausible — the deli was operating during the period the show depicts and would have been a natural gathering place for the Lower East Side Jewish community the show portrays. Midge Maisel and her family eat here; the deli is dressed to period and appears multiple times across the series's run. The combination of the show's cultural moment and its use of the deli introduced Katz's to a new generation of viewers who had not encountered it through When Harry Met Sally.

Across various TV shows, commercials, and documentaries: Katz's has appeared in segments on virtually every major food program, morning show, and travel documentary that has covered New York over the past three decades, making it one of the most filmed restaurant interiors in the world.

Literary Appearances

Katz's has appeared in American literature in ways that reflect its status as a symbolic location rather than merely a restaurant. Paul Auster set scenes in the Lower East Side novels; various food writers have used Katz's as the centerpiece of meditations on immigration, food culture, and American Jewish identity. The deli appears in memoir, in food writing, in travel writing, in journalism — wherever the story of New York's immigrant past meets the present, Katz's is available as the anchor.

Famous Fans and Notable Visitors

The wall of photographs at Katz's is the most honest record of the deli's famous visitor history, and it is extensive.

Barack Obama visited Katz's during a trip to New York as a senator, a visit documented in the photographs on the wall and in the subsequent media coverage that every presidential or near-presidential visit to the deli generates. The pattern — politician visits New York, goes to Katz's, is photographed — has been repeated enough times to constitute a ritual.

Bill Clinton has been photographed at Katz's. So have numerous New York mayors across the decades, from Ed Koch (who was identified with the deli as a matter of personal brand — he was reliably photographed eating there) to subsequent mayors who understood that being seen at Katz's communicates a specific set of values about a relationship to the city's working-class history.

Ed Koch, the three-term mayor who served from 1978 to 1989 and who embodied a certain kind of outer-borough New York Jewish identity, was one of Katz's most famous regulars. His association with the deli was genuine rather than performed — he ate there because he liked it, and the photographs of him there across three decades track his career from politician to elder statesman to private citizen.

Nora Ephron, who wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally and who wrote about food and New York with equal intelligence, was a confirmed Katz's devotee. Her writing about the deli — particularly her essay on the pastrami sandwich, which appears in various collections of her food writing — is among the best short prose the place has generated.

Calvin Trillin, the food writer who spent several decades writing about American regional food for the New Yorker, wrote about Katz's with the specific appreciation of a man from Kansas City who understood barbecue and applied the same framework to cured meat. His Katz's writing is affectionate, precise, and focused entirely on what matters: the pastrami.

David Chang — the chef and restaurateur who opened Momofuku Noodle Bar a few blocks away on First Avenue — has cited Katz's as a formative influence, particularly the hand-carving and the uncompromising approach to a single product done to the highest possible standard.

Anthony Bourdain brought his camera to Katz's multiple times across his television career, most extensively for No Reservations and Parts Unknown, and wrote about it with the specific mixture of reverence and irony that he brought to all the foods he loved. Bourdain's relationship with Jewish deli food was personal as well as professional — he had grown up in New York eating it — and his treatments of Katz's rank among the more emotionally direct things he wrote about food.

The list of celebrity visitors — photographed, documented, rumored — is long enough to fill its own book: film directors and actors and musicians and athletes and politicians from every decade of the past century, all drawn to the same corner of the Lower East Side for the same reason, which is the pastrami and the history and the thing that happens when both are combined in a particular room.

The Cultural Meaning

Katz's Delicatessen is, in one sense, simply a place that makes very good pastrami sandwiches and has been doing so for 136 years. In another sense — the sense that the photographs and the slogan and the When Harry Met Sally table and the crowds on a Saturday afternoon all point toward — it is something more than a restaurant.

It is a document. The Lower East Side of 1888, when the Iceland brothers opened their deli, is gone as completely as the Lower East Side of 1945 or 1975. The tenements have been renovated or demolished; the pushcarts are long gone; the neighborhood that was, for a generation, the most Jewish square mile in America has been replaced by something that bears only the faintest historical traces of what it once was. Katz's is one of the few continuous physical threads connecting the present to that past — a place that was there when the immigrant ships were arriving at Ellis Island and is still there now, serving the same food, in the same building, on the same corner.

The Jewish-American delicatessen as a cultural form is in decline. The number of full-service Jewish delis in New York has fallen from hundreds in the mid-twentieth century to a handful today. The Second Avenue Deli — which closed its original location in 2006 after a rent dispute and reopened in a less historically charged midtown location — is perhaps the closest competitor to Katz's for the title of most significant surviving institution of the tradition. Most of the others are gone: Lindy's, Ratner's, Leiber's, the Stage Deli, and dozens more that served the immigrant community and its children and grandchildren through the middle of the twentieth century and did not survive the neighborhood’s transformation.

Katz's survived because of its location — a corner building whose lease could be maintained — and because of its management — a succession of owners who understood that the worst thing you could do to a deli of this age and reputation was to improve it. The survival is not accidental but neither is it inevitable. It required, across 136 years, a series of decisions to keep doing exactly what was being done, which is harder than it sounds when the neighborhood is changing around you and the economic pressures are pointing in another direction.

What the survival has produced is a place that is simultaneously a working restaurant and a cultural institution — a living museum of a tradition that is otherwise nearly vanished, operating not in the mode of a museum (preserved, curated, explanatory) but in the mode of the thing itself (noisy, transactional, smelling of meat and brine, full of people eating lunch). The combination is remarkable and, in New York's current restaurant landscape of tasting menus and cocktail bars and rotating pop-ups, genuinely irreplaceable.

Essential Information

Address: 205 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan

Hours:

• Monday–Wednesday: 8 AM – 10:45 PM
• Thursday: 8 AM – 2:45 AM (open through the night)
• Friday: 8 AM – continuous through the weekend
• Saturday: continuous from Friday night through Sunday morning
• Sunday: open continuously until 10:45 PM

(Hours are subject to change; verify on the Katz's website before visiting)

Subway: F, J, M, Z to Delancey Street/Essex Street; B, D to Grand Street

Payment: Cash and major credit cards. An ATM is on-site. Tip the carver in cash.

Reservations: Not taken. Walk-in only. Lines can be significant on weekend afternoons; arrive early or late.

Mail order: Available through the Katz's website. Pastrami, corned beef, salami, and other deli items can be shipped nationally. The salami, as generations of American soldiers can attest, travels well.

The ticket: Get it at the door. Keep it through your entire visit. Present it to the cashier when you leave. Do not lose it.

Katz's Delicatessen has been on the corner of Houston and Ludlow since 1888, which means that more than a century of New Yorkers have sat in that room with a pastrami sandwich and a plate of pickles and a Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray and eaten what they were eating and felt, in some not entirely explicable way, that they were somewhere that mattered. The sandwich is the reason you go. The room is the reason you go back.