Salt-beef delirium

Katz’s Delicatessen, established 1888, is a theme park of Jewish-American food, with tribute gift shop, on the lower east side of Manhattan. There is nowhere more Jewish than Katz’s except Haredi Brooklyn, but if you go there you don’t come back. Katz’s offers a gentler Jewish experience, if you can conceive of such a thing, or it at least attempts it; it offers a kind of Judaism you can enjoy over lunch, which I find amazing because I have never managed it. (No one, for instance, talks about the Holocaust in Katz’s, not because they don’t want to but because they can’t. Try saying Treblinka with a dumpling in your mouth.)

Its tourist value was proven when Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in Katz’s in When Harry Met Sally to prove she was deserving of a Jewish man (Billy Crystal) with a serious case of ghetto madness, simply by sampling the cuisine; and yes, I think she was. That a tribe of this tenacity and intellectual rigour went for fish balls, salt beef (here called pastrami) and the dumplings that I suspect killed Nazis during the Warsaw ghetto uprising by sheer density remains a mystery to me; perhaps it is inverse vanity. I don’t know why the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement isn’t all over Katz’s. Perhaps they like the food. Perhaps Jews appropriated the food from someone else, but I can’t think of anyone else who would admit to inventing it.

The exterior is red-brick and one storey: a diner from myth. The window display is as screamingly self-regarding as any anti-Semite would wish; Katz’s doesn’t do self-hatred and I understand this, because with a salami, where would you start? Katz is written every-where in neon, in differing sizes and fonts.