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