Onward.
I’ve never
been to Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan. I’ve been to Manhattan (wow) but didn’t
get to go to Katz's. But both my sons did. Even better, they went together. Sam was
living in Brooklyn and John was visiting him. So off they went. I believe Sam
went for the Pastrami and Rye and John had the Reuben. Katz’s is a very popular
attraction in New York but it also pulls off the magic trick of apparently being
beloved by many of the inhabitants of that city as well as the blow-ins. Many
people know of it on account of the movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and
particularly that scene where Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal have lunch together and
Rob Reiner’s Mother says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” It’s quite a brag and
lots of visitors probably go there for that reason alone. But, interestingly,
Katz Deli doesn’t seem to trade on that at all. Not one little bit, as far as I
can see. No. They trade on their food, and more specifically their sandwiches. That’s
why my sons went there. They are both ‘foodies’ and they were both keen to
experience the place, the food, and the sizable bill. They both enjoyed it and
when they were home at Christmas, they told me about it and it sounded great
and now I want to go there and try it and if I ever get back to New York again,
I believe I will.
So there.
We come towards the point. Having heard some stuff about Kat’s Deli from my sons, I
must have looked it up on the internet. Or maybe my phone just heard me mention
it and did the rest. Whatever the reason, and the level of justified paranoia attached
to it, my Instagram account sprung into action and showed me a little video of
a person ordering their sandwich at the counter in the Deli, It went on to show
the guy making the sandwich and that was very interesting to me so I watched it
all.
Then another,
quite similar video came up, then another, then another.
Now, some
months later, if you provided me with the raw materials, I feel I could whip you
up a Reuben with Cheese with relative ease. I am continually bombarded with videos
of Katz’s people making their sandwiches. I have seen, literally, hundreds of
them sail across my Insta feed.
I guess the
simple fact is this: when the Insta algorithm figures out that you might like
something, it shows you lots of that thing. Lots and lots of it.
And, in all
fairness, the making of a Katz sandwich makes for a pretty compelling video. A
huge chunk of cured meat is landed on the cutting board and the person making
the sambo trims at least one third of the thing away in very few samurai-like
sweeps of the blade. The cuttings are swept unceremoniously to the floor and
the remaining chunkette is trimmed into slender slices with consummate speed
and then piled extravagantly onto nice bread. A swipe of mustard, a huge gelatinous
blob of melted cheese, if so desired, and up it comes.
Here are three things I learned from my Katz video watching, just in case you ever get there.
Leave a tip and you get a sample of the meat on a plate while your order is being magicked-up.
Go to the further counters for less queue length. (I don’t really know how this works in reality, but it does seem to be a thing.)
There is free drinking water on tap available somewhere in the back of the deli. This is the biggest secret I know.
Of course, Instagram
doesn’t just show me videos of sandwiches being made. Other forced enthusiasms present
themselves regularly, very few of them welcome. I am glad that the AI Cat stuff
has now receded and hate that it has been replaced by copious bearded elderly
men doing chair yoga. Swings and roundabouts.
The latest
Insta Thing, for me at least, is people selecting and showing their favourite
books. This is odd for a number of reasons. Mostly because the people making
the videos don’t seem to generally care very much about the books and also the
vast majority of them seem to select from the same tiny catchment pile of novels.
‘East of Eden’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘Lonesome Dove’, ‘Crime and
Punishment’, and ‘No Country for Old Men’ all keep on coming up and the people
waving them around, after initially hiding the covers like they have some big
secret to tell, don’t seem like people who have read these books at all. I kind
of feel like I am missing something with these book recommendation videos but I
don’t think it’s anything more than that these folk are trying to get hits and
views and will use any device to get them, books being their current side
hustle.
There are
exceptions to every rule and there’s a young person called Rhia who turns up to
discuss her favourite books and she is clearly passionate and clearly knows
what she is talking about. Her books are riddled with little coloured bookmarks
and she always seems honest about what she likes and doesn’t like. Rhia is the
acceptable face if Instagram book reviews and no higher praise can I give.
Instagram
is a good corner of social media, in my opinion at least. I see lots of friends
there and love checking out the photos they share. But the ‘forced stuff’ is a
bit too much sometimes. I makes me scared to glance at a particular ‘thing’ for
fear that a plethora of clone ‘things’ will follow me around for the next six
weeks.
Fourth world
problems… where would we be without them?
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