When Katz’s Met the DOJ

Anything but a love story

In 1888, Katz’s Deli opened on New York City’s Lower East Side. A century after it adopted its current name, the Obama administration began investigating it and other popular restaurants.

Most people know Katz’s from a memorable scene in ‘When Harry Met Sally’, but earlier generations on the Lower East Side knew it for its ‘Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army’ campaign during WWII when the owner’s three sons were all serving on the front lines. Presidents, from FDR to JFK to Reagan, members of Congress and all sorts of politicians stopped by for a snack and to get a photo at an authentic Jewish deli for their campaigns.

But the Justice Department’s targeting of Katz’s Deli not only lasted longer than ‘When Harry Met Sally’, but it also lasted longer than WWI and WWII combined, and no amount of salami could get rid of the government lawyers who made for a much less romantic couple than Bill Crystal and Meg Ryan, and offered a much less happy ending.

While China, Iran and Russia hacked us, cartel members crossed the border, and terrorists carried out attacks, the Justice Department single-mindedly dedicated itself to the much more vital task of conducting inspections of Katz’s Deli bathrooms in 2011, 2018, 2020 and 2024.

Katz’s Deli is only 18 years younger than the United States Justice Department, but its claim to fame is serving pastrami sandwiches while the federal government’s skill is destroying all that it touches. The old school deli has hosted plenty of episodes of Law and Order, but under Obama, the law showed up not to have a sandwich in between takes, but to drag the deli into court. And finally extracted its pound of fresh hand-cut meat from the neighborhood’s last survivor.

After 13 years, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New Yor celebrated New Year’s Eve with a settlement and a $20,000 penalty because the iconic deli, which has been around in one form or another for 136 years, had not sufficiently adapted itself to the 2010 version of ADA disability regulations

No disabled people had actually complained about Katz’s. The only ones to object to Katz’s entrance, tables and bathroom were Justice Department lawyers. And being a government toilet lawyer is only a moral disability, not an actual physical disability.

Katz’s real problem was that it had been listed as a recommended restaurant by the 2011 Zagat Guide, and some bright suit at the Southern District of New York decided to use it as a guide for finding restaurants for the government to sue. This grand project, announced as the Manhattan Restaurants ADA Compliance Initiative, had DOJ employees going to restaurants at taxpayer expense and then, instead of leaving a tip, suing the restaurant for non-compliance.

The targets were multicultural and iconic, including Carmine’s Italian restaurants in the Theater District, Rosa Mexicano, and Katz’s. Rosa was shaken down by the DOJ’s best for $30,000, Carmine’s for ten big ones and now Katz’s for $20,000. The DOJ’s boastful press release notes that, “a handful of restaurants closed before the accessibility review could be completed.”

That $60,000 would have been a fraction of the cost of the project to taxpayers. And you can buy a lot of turkey sandwiches and matzo ball soup for that kind of bread.

But, as a certain New York Times journalist opined about big government in the USSR, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” And you can’t have big government in the U.S. without closing a bunch of restaurants and dragging the rest through endless litigation.

The restaurants first realized they were targeted when the government sent them a 17-page ‘survey’. Those that did not go along were sued by the Justice Department.

The Southern District of New York’s project to destroy restaurants was associated with the era of Preet Bharara, whose accomplishments included setting off an international crisis with India by arresting one of its diplomats, investigating internet comments on a conservative site and indicting politicians for bragging rights in cases that would later be thrown out.

When Bharara was fired by the Trump administration, it put an end to his ambitions to clamber to public office on a trail of bodies, but the evil that federal prosecutors do lives on after them, and even with Bharara consigned to podcasting and media appearances, the DOJ’s war on a deli dragged on.

Katz’s Deli had survived two world wars and the gentrification that eliminated most other old family businesses across that stretch of Houston Street leaving behind brick, glass and steel condos where studio apartments cost millions. Katz’s also survived a surge in meat prices, the pandemic and the neighborhood deli has now endured a record 13-year federal investigation.

Not for mob ties or racketeering, but for the size of its old-fashioned doors, tables and toilets.

Katz’s is one of the last survivors of generations of Jewish delis and Yiddish theaters at nearby Second Avenue. But those delis, like the more locally famous 2nd Ave Deli, had to battle crime, blight and an influx of housing projects in the sixties and seventies: Katz’s had to fight the DOJ.

According to the DOJ, Katz’s old school double doors are not an “accessible” entrance. In reality the double doors are wide, inside is a gentle slope leading upward past a golden rail to where the counters are, and it’s hard to imagine anyone having trouble making it inside. Everything looks much the way that it would have in the 1950s and hasn’t changed much since those days.

But according to the DOJ, the distance between sidewalk and the entrance is half an inch too much and that half an inch makes all the difference. Worse still, the opening width of the doors is 29.5 inches, which falls short of the 32 inch requirement by a whole two and a half inches.

The same year that the federal authorities found Katz’s wanting by half an inch, the federal budget deficit exceeded $1.3 trillion. If you are half an inch short of federal requirements, you have a major problem, but if the feds spend $1.3 trillion in money they don’t have, that’s fine.

A half inch for us is a major crime, a trillion too much for the feds is a rounding error.

Speaking of money, the DOJ complains that “Katz’s Delicatessen utilizes an uncommon method of payment at the restaurant; when patrons enter, they are handed a blank ticket, on which restaurant staff list the prices of the items ordered. Patrons pay for their meal as listed on the ticket, before exiting through a turnstile, which a patron must pass through to exit the building.”

The method, like the deli, is uncommon today, and is part of the nostalgia of the eatery. The nostalgia comes from inhabiting a world in which the federal government’s inspectors could not randomly show up anywhere on an unconstitutional authority dreamed up by a Kafka novel.

The Justice Department also took issue with the tables which supposedly have “insufficient dining surfaces for persons with disabilities”. The tables, like everything else, look much the same that they did 80 years ago and at the delis of generations past. They can be pulled in and out. There are chairs next to them. And the lines of people crowding outside like it that way.

During the pandemic, Katz’s Deli had to introduce outdoor dining for the first time in 130 years, leaving the interior a strange ghostly assortment of empty tables with no one sitting at them.

The DOJ also poked around the bathrooms and complained that the hand dryers protrude 2 inches too far, the side grab bar is 1.5 inches too short, and, in a masterpiece of legal legerdemain, “the mirror in both toilet rooms is 45.5 inches above the floor, exceeding the maximum height requirement” in violation of the ADA’s 2010 bathroom mirror measuring code standards as determined by the DOJ’s top toilet measuring experts.

American cities, including New York City, may be overrun by criminals and illegal aliens who burn people alive on subway trains, but at least the bathroom mirrors will be at the right height.

Apart from the $20,000 fine, Katz’s will now be obligated to make all sorts of changes, including the old-fashioned ticket payment system that the DOJ’s lawyers objected to, and that will irreversibly alter the look and feel of one of the last remaining Jewish delis in the area.

The consent decree also allows the Justice Department to return at any time to inspect the deli. So if you’re ever at Katz’s and see people in suits and tape measures crawling around on the floor and inspecting the toilets, you know that they’re hard at work for the government.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.