Across the Universe | Katz's Delicatessen — pastrami under the tin ceiling of Jude's New York

You get a paper ticket at the door. That small ritual has not changed since long before the film, and it is the first thing that tells you Katz's is not a set. Someone hands you a slip, you carry it to a carver, he shaves a corner off the pastrami and passes it across the counter on butcher paper while you decide, and at the end of the meal the ticket is the bill. Lose it and the sign on the wall tells you exactly what that costs.

The delicatessen opened in 1888 and has stood at 205 East Houston Street since 1917, when the widening of Houston pushed it across from its old Ludlow Street doorway. The room is long and bright and loud. Formica tables, salamis hanging in the window, a hand-lettered banner that still reads Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army — a line written for the Second World War that the Vietnam years, the years this film lives in, never quite retired.

Julie Taymor's production filmed here, and it is easy to see why. Across the Universe needed a downtown New York that predated the sixties and would outlast them, a place where Jude and Max could sit with trays and argue while the decade came apart outside. Katz's supplies that without any dressing. The fluorescent tubes, the tile floor, the crowd noise bouncing off the ceiling: it is the same sensory soup a 1968 customer would have waded through.

Go on a weekday, before noon, and take the counter service rather than the table side. Order the pastrami on rye and eat it standing near the carvers if the room is full. The tip you slide across for the free taste is part of the transaction, and so is the wait.