Some films use New York as a backdrop. When Harry Met Sally… uses it as a character. Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s 1989 romantic comedy treats the city the way Harry and Sally treat each other — circling, returning, finally settling in. The locations Reiner picked aren’t postcards. They’re rooms with sightlines and stools and corner booths where two people can carry on a twelve-year conversation without ever quite finishing it.

This walking tour is for the pilgrim who wants to sit where the film sat. It’s not a tour of “I’ll have what she’s having” novelty signs and selfie ambushes. It’s a tour of the actual blocks — the deli that’s been there since 1888, the Upper West Side brasserie that opened six years before the cameras arrived, the museum gallery built around an Egyptian temple, the marble arch dedicated in 1895. These places existed before the film and will exist after the next remake. The film borrowed their rooms for a few weeks. The pilgrimage is about returning them the favor — sitting in them as rooms, not as set pieces.

Before You Start: A Word on Pilgrim Etiquette

Every location on this tour is a working business, a public park, or an actively used cultural institution. Katz’s serves roughly thousands of pastrami sandwiches a day. The Boathouse seats lunch and dinner. Cafe Luxembourg is a neighborhood brasserie that’s been feeding the Upper West Side since 1983. The Met is a museum.

The pilgrim rule is simple: order something, tip well, and don’t reenact the famous scene. If you’ve come to Katz’s for pastrami, get pastrami. Sit at the table with the sign if it’s open, but order food. Don’t perform. The staff has watched it happen ten thousand times and it stopped being funny in 1990. Same at every other stop — be a customer, not a tourist. The city tolerates a lot, but it does not tolerate gawking.

Stop 1: Washington Square Arch — The Drop-Off (Greenwich Village)

Where: Washington Square Park, the arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village.

The scene: Harry and Sally finish their cross-country drive from the University of Chicago and Sally drops Harry off at the arch. He carries his luggage through it. They say goodbye, certain they’ll never see each other again. The arch frames the moment — a portal between two lives.

What’s actually here: The Washington Square Arch is 77 feet of Tuckahoe marble designed by Stanford White and dedicated in 1895. It started as a temporary wood-and-plaster arch in 1889 for the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration. The temporary version was so beloved that a citizens’ committee raised funds for the permanent one. Two sculpted figures of Washington flank the north face: Hermon Atkins MacNeil’s “Washington as Commander-in-Chief” (installed 1916) on the east, and Alexander Stirling Calder’s “Washington as President” (1918) on the west. Calder, incidentally, was the father of the mobile sculptor Alexander Calder.

How to be here: Walk through the arch from north to south, the way Harry walked. Don’t stage a photo. Just walk. The whole point of the scene is that Harry and Sally don’t know they’re starting anything — they think they’re ending something. Walk through and keep going. Sit on a bench. Watch the chess players. The park is one of the best in Manhattan for simply existing in public without a purpose.

Transit: West 4th Street–Washington Square (A/B/C/D/E/F/M) is two blocks south. The 6 train at Astor Place is six blocks east.

Stop 2: Katz’s Delicatessen — “I’ll Have What She’s Having” (Lower East Side)

Where: 205 East Houston Street, at the corner of Ludlow.

The scene: You know this one. Sally demonstrates to Harry that women can convincingly fake what men think only happens authentically. The woman at the next table — played by Estelle Reiner, the director’s mother — delivers the line that ended up on the AFI list. The scene is one take of pastrami diplomacy and one of the most quoted moments in American cinema.

What’s actually here: Katz’s has been on East Houston since 1888. According to the deli’s own published location and hours, it operates Monday through Thursday from 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM, with extended weekend hours that now run 24 hours from Friday morning through Sunday night. The phone number on the website is (212) 254-2246, and the 1-800-4HOTDOG mail-order line has been running for decades. The system is the same as it’s been: get a ticket on the way in, order at the counter, tip the cutter, hold your ticket all night, surrender it on the way out. Lose the ticket and you owe the house penalty. This is not a bit. This is the rule.

The table where the scene was shot is marked with a small sign on the ceiling: “Where Harry Met Sally… Hope you have what she had!” It’s near the front, against the wall, on the right as you walk in. If it’s free, sit there. If it’s not, sit anywhere — the pastrami is the same in every booth.

How to be here: Order pastrami on rye. Mustard, no mayonnaise, no exceptions. Get a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray or a cream soda. Tip the counter cutter at least a few dollars when he hands you the sandwich — he’s been slicing all day and he watched you decide. Eat. Do not perform. Do not loudly say the line. The people around you came for lunch.

Transit: Second Avenue (F train) is one block west. The J/Z at Essex Street is two blocks south.

Stop 3: Cafe Luxembourg — The Double Date (Upper West Side)

Where: 200 West 70th Street, between Amsterdam and West End.

The scene: Harry, Sally, Marie (Carrie Fisher), and Jess (Bruno Kirby) sit at a tiled bistro table while Harry and Sally try to set each other up with their best friends. Marie and Jess promptly fall for each other instead, leaving Harry and Sally to discover, slowly and over years, that the people they brought to dinner are now together and they are still not.

What’s actually here: Cafe Luxembourg has been an Upper West Side American brasserie since 1983 — meaning it was already six years old when Reiner’s crew arrived. According to the cafe’s own website, it’s still serving classics with a nod to French cuisine: breakfast, lunch, brunch, dinner, and a full brasserie menu. The white subway tile, the mirrors, the pressed-tin ceiling — they were there when the cameras were there. The room has aged, but it has aged the way the film aged: gracefully, in place.

How to be here: Make a reservation. This isn’t a sit-at-the-bar-and-soak-in-the-vibe kind of place — it’s a working brasserie in a residential neighborhood where the regulars include people who genuinely live around the corner. Order steak frites, or the roast chicken, or the burger. Sit at a banquette. Don’t request “the Harry table” — the staff knows, and they don’t.

Transit: 72nd Street (1/2/3) is two blocks east. The B/C at 72nd Street is also two blocks east, on Central Park West.

Stop 4: The Central Park Boathouse — Sally’s Lunch (Central Park)

Where: East 72nd Street and East Drive, on the eastern side of Central Park’s Lake.

The scene: Sally has lunch with Marie and Alice and tells them she’s broken up with Joe. Meanwhile, Harry is running through the park, passing the lake, oblivious that Sally is twenty yards away. The Boathouse hosts the kind of lunch that ends a relationship and the kind of run that doesn’t notice it’s happening.

What’s actually here: The Loeb Boathouse — now called simply the Central Park Boathouse — sits on the eastern shore of the Lake, just north of the 5th Avenue and 72nd Street entrance. According to listings on the Central Park Conservancy’s and centralpark.com pages, the Boathouse closed for a period and reopened in 2023 under new management by Legends Hospitality, which operates a café, full restaurant service, and the rowboat and gondola rental system. The dining room sits over the water. The rowboats launch from the dock below.

How to be here: If you can swing it, lunch. If not, rent a rowboat — it’s one of the great cheap pleasures of New York. You can row past where Sally sat. You can also just walk the path that loops the Lake. Either way, this is the most cinematic stop on the tour because the location itself looks the same as it does in the film. The trees grew. Nothing else moved.

Transit: 68th Street–Hunter College (6) is the closest stop on the east side; enter the park at 72nd and walk in. From the west, the B/C at 72nd Street will put you a long but pleasant walk away through the Ramble.

Stop 5: The Met — The Echoes in the Temple (Upper East Side)

Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue. The Temple of Dendur stands in Gallery 131, in the wing built around it.

The scene: Harry and Sally wander the Met. Harry does the Pseudo-Brooklyn-Accent bit at Sally — “Waiter, there is too much pepper on my paprikash” — and Sally cracks up. They are friends. They are not yet anything else. The light through the great window flares behind them.

What’s actually here: The Temple of Dendur is a real Roman-period Egyptian temple from the bank of the Nile in Nubia. According to The Met’s published collection page, it was rescued from the rising waters of Lake Nasser after the High Dam at Aswan was built in the 1960s, and Egypt gave it to the American people as a thank-you for the rescue effort. The temple was reassembled inside a purpose-built wing — Gallery 131, formerly known as the Sackler Wing — and opened to the public on September 27, 1978. The wall of glass faces east, toward Central Park, hinting at the Nile bank where the temple once stood.

How to be here: Pay what you wish if you’re a New York State resident; pay the full admission if you’re not. Spend an hour. Don’t just visit the Dendur gallery. Wander the Egyptian wing the way Harry and Sally wandered. The museum is built for it.

Transit: 86th Street (4/5/6) is the closest stop; walk down Fifth Avenue to 82nd. The 77th Street stop (6) is also workable.

How to Walk the Tour in One Day

The geography is awkward — these locations span Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, Central Park, and Upper East Side. Doing all five on foot is roughly seven miles and a lot of subway. A reasonable order if you want to do it in one push:

Start with Katz’s mid-morning, before the lunch rush. Walk west through Soho to the Washington Square Arch, maybe 25 minutes if you don’t stop. Take the A/C/E from West 4th up to 72nd Street. Lunch — or coffee, if you ate pastrami — at Cafe Luxembourg. Walk east across Central Park West, enter the park at 72nd, and find the Central Park Boathouse on the east side of the Lake. From the Boathouse, walk south along the East Drive and exit at 79th Street to reach the Met. End at the Temple of Dendur as the late afternoon light comes through the glass.

A slower way: do this over two days. Lower East Side and Village one afternoon (Katz’s, then the Arch, maybe coffee at a Bleecker Street café). Upper West Side, Central Park, and Met another day, with the Boathouse for lunch. The film unfolds over twelve years. You can take two.

What This Tour Is Not

It is not a list of every minor exterior in the film. Reiner shot widely — there are sidewalks, brownstones, side streets — and some of those have been catalogued by other guides. This is a tour of the rooms that gave the movie its weight: the deli, the brasserie, the boathouse, the museum, and the arch that opens the story.

It is also not a tour where you should expect to “feel” anything other than what the rooms themselves offer. The Katz’s pastrami is excellent. The Boathouse rowboat is a real rowboat. The Met is the Met. The film attached itself to these places because they were already worth attaching to. You’ll feel something because the rooms are good, not because Billy Crystal once sat in them.

A Note on Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron, who wrote the screenplay, was a New Yorker who treated New York as a moral framework. She didn’t write the city as glittering or romantic in a vague tourism-board way. She wrote it as a place where adults eat lunch, change their minds, run into people they used to know, and decide too late or just in time that they loved them. Every stop on this tour is one of those rooms. Walk it in that spirit.

The film closes with documentary-style interviews of older couples telling the stories of how they met. Some of them mention New York; some don’t. None of them mention famous restaurants. The point of the film is that love stories happen in rooms you can sit in, in cities you can walk through, on days that didn’t seem like anything special when they happened. Katz’s, Cafe Luxembourg, the Boathouse, the Met, the arch — they’re not famous because they’re famous. They’re famous because they were already there.

Primary Sources Consulted

• Katz’s Delicatessen, Location and Hours — katzsdelicatessen.com/address
• Central Park Conservancy, Central Park Boathouse — centralparknyc.org/locations/central-park-boathouse
• Cafe Luxembourg, Hours & Location — cafeluxembourg.com/location/cafe-luxembourg
• NYC Parks, Washington Square Arch — nycgovparks.org/parks/washington-square-park/monuments/1657
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Temple of Dendur — metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/547802