In 125 Years, Much Has Changed, but the Pastrami Is the Same

“I’m from out of town, and I like a good pastrami sandwich,” said Jeffrey A. Devore, a lawyer from West Palm Beach, Fla., who was sitting in Katz’s, the Lower East Side delicatessen that, like the neighborhood itself, has become a study in contrasts.

Mr. Devore had driven into Manhattan in his rental car after a court hearing in Newark and had taken a seat amid what a critic once described as the “terrazzo-and-Formica ambience, with a cafeteria counter along one side and signs instructing you, as of yore, to ‘Send a salami to your boy in the Army.’”

Beneath the long, bright fluorescents that illuminate that comfortably old-fashioned backdrop, Mr. Devore opened his iPad and began reading The Wall Street Journal.

It was enough to make one wonder how to say “plus ça change” in Yiddish.

But even Katz’s, at 205 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, has adapted as the landscape has been remade.

In the very next block is an apartment building with a Web site that says two-bedroom apartments start at $5,500 a month; a gelato store and a nail salon occupy the first-floor storefronts. Katz’s is now open 24 hours a day on weekends, in part to accommodate younger, hipper customers who are out later than late. In the old days, no one risked being on the street on the far side of midnight.

“It was a very tough neighborhood,” said Alan Dell, 65, one of the owners of Katz’s since 1988. “Drugs and that kind of thing. You felt nervous about coming.”

His son, Jake, 25, added: “You ran in from the car and ran out. This was a safe place, always, but not the neighborhood.”

Now, Alan Dell said, the neighborhood has multimillion-dollar condominiums.

“Who’d have thought?” Jake Dell said.

The pickle barrels no longer line Ludlow Street (they now occupy a storage room inside Katz’s). The corned beef and the pastrami are still cured the same way they always were, using airtight barrels and a salt solution with a formula that remains a secret (as do the formulas for the wood chips in the smokehouse where the pastrami is cured and the rub that is applied to it).

But Katz’s has served Reubens for a decade â€" corned beef, sauerkraut, homemade Russian dressing and melted Swiss cheese. Reubens have become best-sellers at Katz’s, but when Alan Dell was young, it was unthinkable that a Jewish deli would serve meat and cheese together.

“Enough people started asking for it, customers, regulars, people we know and liked,” Jake Dell said. “It’s not like we were going to take away the old stuff, but we could add a Reuben. The same thing happened with a pastrami Reuben. For some reason, everyone wants a pastrami Reuben now. We’re in the business of pleasing.”

In a typical week, the counter staff goes through 20,000 pounds of meat, half of it pastrami; 3,000 to 4,000 hot dogs; and 12,000 pickles. But the makeup of the staff has changed over the years. “It used to be Eastern European Jews, mainly from the neighborhood,” Jake Dell said.

Now, he and his father said, the employees behind the counter and in the kitchen tend to be from the Dominican Republic.

Katz’s has become a survivor in a neighborhood that had long-established delis. It began 125 years ago under a different name, Iceland Brothers. They took in the first Katz, Willy, as a partner in the early years of the 20th century. Eventually, he bought out the brothers and changed the name from Iceland & Katz to Katz’s.

The Dells, who bought into Katz’s in 1988, say the first big change came in the mid-1940s, when the restaurant, originally on Ludlow Street, expanded, taking the corner storefront at Houston Street. The new storefront needed a new sign. “The sign maker asked Harry Tarowsky” â€" one of the owners at the time â€" “what he wanted on the sign,” Alan Dell explained. “He said, ‘Katz’s Deli. That’s all.’” The sign arrived with those four words on it, and has been in the front window ever since.

Nowadays, the crowd at Katz’s includes tourists who have discovered the Lower East Side â€" Jake Dell says that New Yorkers “don’t necessarily eat in the store. They take it with them or they get it delivered.” And as the neighborhood has changed in recent years, one refrain at Katz’s has the rumors that it was for sale. “It’s not,” Alan Dell said. “It’s history. You don’t sell history.”

Another refrain has come from what Mr. Dell calls “re-enactors,” people who recognized Katz’s as the setting for the scene in the film “When Harry Met Sally” in which the punch line is “I’ll have what she’s having.”

It was probably no surprise that Katz’s made a cameo appearance. “Billy Crystal and Rob Reiner are regulars,” Mr. Dell said, referring to one of the stars of the film and its director.

“But our name was not listed in the credits, and unless you knew, unless you recognized it, you wouldn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t see a measurable increase” in business as soon as the movie was released, he said, but later articles that mentioned Katz’s “put us on the map.”

But perhaps not the way he expected. Consider a segment he videotaped with Sherri Shepherd, a co-host of the daytime talk show “The View.”

“She starts recreating the scene,” Alan Dell recalled. “The director, who was sitting out of range, said, ‘Look surprised.’ He really didn’t have to say that. I don’t get uncomfortable easily, but that one…”

His voice trailed off, uncomfortably.

A version of this article appeared in print on 05/15/2013, on page A23 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Neighborhood Changed, But the Pastrami Hasn’t.