Carried Away at Katz's

By this point, Katz’s Delicatessen, on the southwesterly corner of Ludlow at East Houston Street, is both a hallowed Manhattan culinary institution and something of a tourist trap. These days, if you want to partake of the fabled pastrami, you’re likely to have to wait on a line comparable the ones that used to form outside of hipper haunts like The Mudd Club and Studio 54. Blame it on the ever-spreading gentrifaction of the Lower East Side or its fabled cameo in “When Harry Met Sally” (the “I’ll have what she’s having” scene), but Katz’s has been very officially “discovered.”

Personally speaking, I believe I started availing myself to Katz’s fare in the early-to-mid `90s, around the same time I was darkening the doors of nearby concerns like Max Fish (rip), The Bank (rip), The Luna Lounge (rip), The Ludlow Street Café (rip), Barramundi (rip), Motor City (rip) and the Mercury Lounge (amazingly still in operation), although, if truth be told, when it came to late-night, post-beer food, I was usually more inclined to go to Turkish joint Bereket just up the block, which vanished for a long spell, but is now actually back in business.

But Katz’s was still a major landmark. One particular event there, I remember, was a record release party, celebrating the “major label sell out” of my beloved – WAIT FOR IT – Cop Shoot Cop. 

It was a beerily festive and food-heavy occasion, culminating with a “pastrami toss,” which is as ridiculous as it sounds. Later on that evening, they would play at The Grand on East 13th Street.

At the time, the boys in Cop Shoot Cop were readying the release of their major label LP for Interscope Records, that being 1993’s Ask Questions Later, a suitably pulverizing slab of rough-hewn industrial clamor that even fleetingly bothered the charts via the inclusion of slightly less-listener-hostile selections than their previous fare such as “Ten Dollar Bill” and “Room 429.”

Regular readers might remember when I sought out the young “cover star” of that album, that being the (at the time) mysterious Crosby. Crosby was the screaming child on both the front cover of the album and the star of the video for “Room 429,” which was directed by Cinema of Transgression mainstay, Richard Kern.

By the late 2010’s, however, shaggy young, feral Crosby had grown into an ambitious young, street-savy artist, selling a series of truly distinctive timepieces. Again, you can read more about that here.

Here in 2024, meanwhile, Cop Shoot Cop is long gone, having acrimoniously split circa 1995 whilst half-heartedly recording what would have been their third album for Interscope (which was later re-arranged and repurposed as the Red Expendables album). If I’m not mistaken, the Ask Questions Later album was later re-released, this time exclusively on colored vinyl, in 2014 by Cleopatra Records. This record and the band’s final 1994 release … titled Release … remain probably the easiest two records by the band to still put your hand to. But while C$C is a memory, both Katz’s Delicatessen and young Crosby are both still thriving.

In fact, Crosby just posted this video below on his Instagram page, finding him rapping and gesticulating accordingly right in front of Katz’s. While it’s musically really not my usual cup of tea (yeah, but what do I know? I'm old and in the way), hats off to the enterprising lad for continuing to pursue his dreams.

...and, just for kicks, here he was as an angry little, stick-wielding, corpse-dragging tot: