Katz’s Deli is a mecca for food influencers — it kills me to see them butcher its good name
Some of the most-viewed videos of the New York institution bungle their delivery
Katz’s Deli is an institution. Food TikTokers should get its name right. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar July 18, 2025
Given the opportunity to spam your inboxes as part of a rotating group of Forward staffers, I spent a good while pondering what I would devote the first of my columns to. I had a lot of ideas, but decided that it would be on brand for me to complain — and try to explain — something ostensibly trivial that’s been bugging me, but that I think deserves to be investigated.
I’m a lifelong New Yorker, but for reasons known only to the Chinese Communist Party’s patented algorithm, TikTok feeds me a lot of food content aimed at tourists.
OK, maybe I did it to myself. Once, a few years back, I watched a creator named Early Pete, who issued Solomonic verdicts about elaborately made dishes, ruling them as either “Good Food” — an item where the preparation or ingredients make sense as a meal and flavors complement each other — or “Stunt Food,” i.e. something disgustingly indulgent made for the ‘gram.
On one occasion, he did something different, responding to a video where another TikTok creator referred to Katz’s Deli’s pastrami as “infamous.” He took the opportunity to explain the definition of this pejorative and why it was inappropriate. But in response to his pedantic correction, I had one of my own: Early Pete, repeating the error of the original post, referred to Katz’s as “Katz,” eliding the possessive “’s’ suffix. (I think it’s called a Saxon genitive.)
I didn’t think much of it, until the algorithm gave me more Katz’s videos.
There was a couple from Brooklyn, shocked they were taking their first visit to “Katz Deli.” An apparent New Yorker explained how to take a ticket and tip the cutters — at “Katz Deli.” Popular creator Jack’s Dining Room posted his review of the eatery’s small-child-sized heaps of spiced brisket, correctly calling the deli an institution, but incorrectly referring to it as “Katz.” The video has 1.3 million likes.
On YouTube, Keith Habersberger, founding member of the Try Guys, sampled everything on the menu at “Katz Deli,” to the tune of 2.1 million views. (Habersburger also got the year of the founding wrong, saying “1988” instead of “1888.”) Even an account called NYC Food Blog, whose host bills himself as a “born & raised New Yorker,” butchered it.
These food influencers had me questioning my sanity. Had I been somehow saying it wrong my entire life? As a reality check, I called Katz’s (1-800-4HOTDOG) to confirm I had it right. Sure enough, a voice oozing with Lower East Side character thanks you for calling Katz-suhs Delicatassen.
This bothered me. On the one hand, these content creators were evangelizing a smoked slice of Jewish history that’s been curing since the immigrant Iceland Brothers hung their salami shingle over 130 years ago. (The restaurants current namesake, Willy Katz, joined them in 1903, buying the business with his cousin Benny in 1910.)
On the other hand, these video bloggers were performing the aural equivalent of schmearing mayo on pastrami, and, what’s worse, signalling to their millions of followers that it was correct. Katz’s passed up a chance to address whether or not this quirk of mispronunciation bothered them, but I wanted to know why it was happening. I had to ask linguists. They didn’t really know either.
“I have no understanding of the phenomenon,” said Dovid Braun, the academic advisor in Yiddish Language, Pedagogy and Linguistics at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Watching one clip, Braun believed it could be the mistake of an out-of-towner.
“I don’t know anything about English or Jewish English or Yiddish, that would make anybody drop a possessive ‘s,’ which is not even a possessive ‘s,’ because it’s a full syllable,” Braun said.
If it was a phenomenon that was linguistic, Braun reasoned, it would show up in other words. It isn’t a trend on the lexical level, meaning one related to words, he said, or a phonological level, meaning one concerned with sounds.
Isaac Bleaman, an associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, has a theory.
“The ‘suh’ sound at the end of Katz and the possessive suffix, which is either a ‘suh’ or a ‘zuh,’ they fall into the category of speech sounds that linguists call sibilants,” Bleaman said. Most English speakers add a vowel with a possessive after a sibilant.
But “it’s not inconceivable that some people might just drop the ‘suh’ because the sounds are so similar to each other.”
A set example of this phenomenon, Bleaman said, “which puts Katz’s in good company,” is the Christian tag to prayers “in Jesus’ name,” where the last syllable, indicating a possessive, is unvoiced.
Unlike Jesus, “Katz” isn’t a well known name throughout the entire country, let alone the world. It’s possible, Bleaman thinks, the people filming their visit don’t realize it is a deli that belongs to someone named Katz. Indeed, in some of the videos — though by no means all — the caption or hashtag is simply “Katz Deli” or even, inexplicably, “Kat’z.”
“If it becomes widespread, I can certainly see it being similar to the ‘Houston-Houston,’” Bleaman said, referring to the New York street where Katz’s is located, pronounced “House-ton” versus the city in Texas (they were named for different men.) “It becomes a marker of whether you’re in the know or you’re not in the know. I don’t know, marker of Jew or not Jew.”
Thankfully on social media, some notable Jews, including Hank Azaria and Adam Richman, all know whose house they’re eating in.
But Braun said that in Yiddish, one would say “Dos iz Katz Delikatesn” (“This is Katz’s Delicatessen”). I didn’t hear him voice another syllable.
“If it’s one syllable or the stress is at the end, you add the ‘s’ in writing, but you don’t hear it,” Braun explained.
Unwittingly, these influencers, who can’t seem to get it right, kind of, sort of do. Only not really.
For the sake of Jewish deli, I implore these online creators not to lop off that sibilance. By all means, order your pastrami lean, but don’t cut the Katz family out of their rightful legacy.
