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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 greedy government lawyers who made for a much less romantic couple than Bill Crystal and Meg Ryan, and offered a much less happy ending than the classic movie.
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 York, which had also taken the lead in spurious investigations of Trump, 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. While some eateries, especially on the other side of the country in California, have been plagued by serial ADA litigants, 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 destructive project to taxpayers. The price of 13 years of federal litigation would likely be in the hundreds of thousands or millions.
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 Americans With Disabilities Act, one of the worst legacies of the first Bush administration, allows the DOJ to go after restaurants “even if no one has complained about or has been injured” which turned the ADA into the Evil Power-Hungry Lawyers With No Disabilities Act.
The restaurants first realized they were targeted when the government sent them a 17-page ‘survey’. The DOJ “inspected” some locations in the style of old Mafia goons and crooked cops.
Those that did not go along were quickly sued by the Justice Department.
The Southern District of New York’s project to destroy restaurants was associated with the era of Preet Bharara, one of the worst ambulance chasers and worst men to ever occupy a role as a federal prosecutor, 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 cleaned some of the stench out of the SDNY office, and put an end to Bharara’s 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.
That will be one more accomplishment of Barack Obama and the Justice Department.
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.
Important story. I’ve seen similar in the San Francisco Bay Area, small businesses with excellent local reputation hit with huge fines. Small businesses have little recourse or protection and are liable to be driven out of business, leaving the local community without their services. Or else forced to raise their prices, which the local consumers end up paying for. So many nitpicking government regulations strangling the economy.
Or else forced to sell the business to a cheapo new owner, who provides lower quality to the local consumers.
Government intervention is like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Often the officials doing the crackdown know little or nothing about the local situation.
Much of the “disability rights community” consists of zealots with no sense of proportion. Nice people but, as to accommodations, no sense of proportion whatsoever. I worked for over five years in the disability rights office of a federal government agency and saw it both from the advocacy groups and my colleagues who came out of that community.
Not nice people. People filled with anger. Whatever their disability might be, they are not healthy.
Yes, the DOJ staked out a toilet in a deli? Did they sniff the steam off the shit in it? Did it smell like bagels and lox or pastrami? Weirdos.
Just when I thought I couldn’t hate state and federal governments any more. They’re not getting near my toilet.
Ah yes the good ol’ Southern District of New York.. a snollygoster to Leticia James….. she fits the mould of that outfit to a tee.
Just think.. if da eds had simply scribbled a note on the back ofthosefood tickets advising management of the items needing their attention, i all would have gone away quietly with minimal disruption.
Bt pigheaded feds had to make a scene.
That ADA folly needs to be changed. Remove the driving mechanism of pverpaud overstuffed goon fat cats deciding what has to be changed. Put it to a “complaint” basis.. irst step, if someone is inconvenienced, advise management. If not dealt with in thirty days, formal complaint. No action in ninety days, unshackle the goon squad and force the matter.
Then half the gooon squad could be “repurposed or, perish the thought, “let go”. Maybe Katz’ could hire them to wait tables…..
One chief characteristic of a totalitarian government is in how it legislates new crimes into existence and creates new criminals in the process. Not saying that’s what’s happened here, but if the shoe fits…
James Comey and his daughter, what a cess pit…
Not irrelevant that it is a Jewish deli. They are rare treasures these days and could be preserved as historic sites but no, Ms. Comey and others like her have to persecute. We all know they thoroughly enjoy persecuting. .
Maybe DOGE can axe the ADA?
Naw, they don’t have the guts to. The screams of ‘bloody murder’ from the left will make even the most conservative government run for cover I’m sad to say!
the greatest country in the world …. bah , humbug .
We do have the greatest toilets, maybe.I know I like mine.
I’m content with a five gallon bucket. No one NEEDS more.
I prefer something that flushes. Just saying…..:)
That sounds suspiciously like Bernie Sanders talking.
So, either leave or go bad-mouth your mother.
Now we know why Terrorizing Americans is easy when the DOJ is concerned with Deli meat products not criminals.
True but the quality of individual that is a lawyer for the government requires some sort of public salary or they would be mowing grass in Texas and we can’t have that!
The feds must have to scour the law schools to find the dregs of these lawyers.
I bet they didn’t even have the decency to buy some sandwiches while they were sniffing around the toilets.
Hopefully crap like this ceases in three weeks. The money should be returned to Katz’s Deli and every other biz that has been harassed and grifted by the government.
Good article, good writer.. These ADA laws started back in the 1970’s with good intentions. At least in California then it was supposed to provide designated blue painted curbs for disabled parking. Yet it has morphed into a monumental and complex set of laws and regulations which are almost impossible to defend. Many times now it has become an extortion racket against unsuspecting business and property owners. As described ths case seems even more difficult and longer than most.
good intentions, my behind
The dirty Obama Feds would not do this to a Black Muslim eatery.
But a Jewish deli…. THAT causes Black Muslims — like Farrakhan, Obama and that Jabbar POS who murdered all those innocents in New Orleans for the New Year — to see red 🔴.
Would love to see the Trump DoJ disband that entire unit, including termination for all involved. A signal to others abusing their authority.
Hear, hear! 🍻
Fire as many burocrat pricks as possible.
Remember like the great sage Lenny Bruce (Leonard A. Schneider ) said: if you can’t say fuck you can’t say fuck the government.
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Ronald Reagan 1986
Brilliant, and true.
Thanks Daniel, I found it hard to believe, I really thought that I was reading a “Kafka ” novel where the lunatics are
ordering the normal people to comply to near madness. The kick they get is their lust for power to order people around to comply or else ! To me this is evil & they take a big delight in doing it.
The government creates these systems of oppression in the name of liberation that then become Kafkaesque nightmares.
I’m glad Daniel mentioned the awful Preet Bharara. I hope he stays out of the public eye. He is an ambulance chaser and a menace as well as a blowhard. He must never be allowed to return to public life.
New Jersey just brought him in to investigate the police. So not quite done yet.
About 30 years ago NYC had a fantastic program for simple sidewalkd restrooms for Manhattan that would only take one person and were SAFE. This was modeled on Europe’s WC facilities. The handicapped Nazis were frothing at the mouth because these were not large enough to access wheelchairs. Only a SMALL FRACTION of handicapped people are actually in wheelchairs… the elderly, those with ‘control problems’ and just the countless thousand on the streets of Manhattan with no restroom available were shafted. Nevermind that ‘wheelchair accessible sidewalk restrooms were IMPOSSIBLE because TOO LARGE and ALSO they would be VERY unsafe because of size. That doomed many millions of visitors, shoppers, elderly etc. to decades of suffering and no end in sight.
This is government + social justice advocacy in a nutshell.
Somehow Jr was sold to American people as conservative president. Yeah right. Is Brookline bridge for sale?
Ive been in that great Deli when I lived on 9th and 2nd Ave in 1982.
There were other great Eastern European Delis in the area.
It was just the East Village back then but now even Alphabet City is high end.
Alphabet City used to be dangerous, then became gentrified and expensive, now it’s both dangerous and unaffordable
“And being a government toilet lawyer is only a moral disability, not an actual physical disability.”
Daniel, you have an incredible writing skill that exposes the shocking truth with unmatched humor.
thank you, wondered if anyone would spot that one
BTW, I sent your brilliant article titled, “Jimmy Carter was never a good man” to over 40 friends and relatives. Many were shocked to read the facts on how dangerous and evil he was. Thank you for all you do Daniel.
My all time fav nyc deli💞
I can see the DOJ apparatchik with a tailor’s tape entering the deli and the owner expecting a new suit finding he is in a barber chair getting a shave.
would be a good Marx brothers routine
Excellent essay, Daniel; as per usual. Thank you.
This type of maddening and frustrating overreach by intrusive govt departments and bureaucrats is one reason DT has been reelected (against all odds). I can only imagine how infuriating this has been for the Katz’s Deli people. A never-ending nightmare scenario. Enough!!!
IT WAS
BUT 50 YEARS OF BS KILLED IT