How Katz’s Deli’s Legal Woes Started With the 2011 Zagat Guide

New York|How Katz’s Deli’s Legal Woes Started With the 2011 Zagat Guide

Being a New York City institution has its benefits. It can also have its downsides.

Consider Katz’s Delicatessen on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 2011, the Zagat New York City Restaurants guide ranked Katz’s, a palace of pastrami that opened more than a century ago and still draws long lines today, at No. 42 on its list of the city’s 50 most popular restaurants.

The honor would come back to bite.

The Zagat guide, the brainchild of the married couple Tim and Nina Zagat and a trailblazer in everyone’s-a-critic reviews long before the rise of Yelp, called Katz’s a “‘quintessential Noo Yawk’ fixture” with “‘mouthwatering’ sandwiches, latkes and kosher dogs.”

“Despite ‘zero décor’” and “‘Army-boot camp’ service,” the Katz’s entry that year continued, “fans of this ‘lovable dump’ say ‘there’s nothing else like it in the world.’”

Now, the lovable dump — famously the setting for Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally” — will be getting a makeover after the owner agreed in December to bring the deli in line with federal rules governing access for disabled people.

In a news release on Monday, Edward Y. Kim, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said his office and the owner of Katz’s had settled a lawsuit in which the Justice Department, under an initiative begun 13 years earlier, accused the deli of violating the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Most significantly, Mr. Kim said, the main entrance, at Houston and Ludlow Streets, was not accessible; the dining area lacked tables appropriate for people with disabilities; and the restrooms did not comply with the decades-old disability law despite having been renovated in 2018.