Where the Army Got Its Salami

The neon sign hanging over the entrance ahead still barks an order the deli never bothered to take down, Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army. Katz's has been slicing meat on this corner since eighteen eighty eight, when it opened under different owners on Ludlow Street before settling into its current spot and its current name. A man named Willy Katz joined the business in the early nineteen hundreds, and when his cousin Benny Katz came aboard a few years later, the deli finally became Katz's in full.

That salami sign dates to the Second World War, when the sons of the owners were serving overseas like so many other young men from this neighborhood. Families up and down the block were mailing food packages to their boys in uniform, and the phrase is usually credited to Rose Tarowsky, whose own son was a bomber pilot. It stuck as the deli's slogan for the rest of the century and still hangs there today, a promotional line turned permanent fixture.

Decades later, the deli found a second kind of fame it never advertised for. In nineteen eighty nine, a film crew shot a scene here for a movie called When Harry Met Sally, in which an actress fakes a loud and very public moment at one of these tables, prompting another diner, played by the director's own mother, to turn to the waiter and deliver the line, I'll have what she's having. Katz's still marks the exact table today with a small sign noting where the scene was filmed, sitting a few feet from the counter where the salami sign has been barking its wartime order for more than eighty years.