Saul Zabar, who across more than seven decades as a principal owner of the Upper West Side food emporium bearing his family name kept New Yorkers amply fortified with smoked fish, earthy bread and tangy cheese, not to mention pungent coffee, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 97.
His daughter Ann Zabar, who confirmed the death, said Mr. Zabar had been hospitalized with a brain bleed.
The oldest of three brothers, Mr. Zabar did not intend to go into the family business, which his parents, Louis and Lillian (Teit) Zabar, started in 1934 as the smoked-fish department of a Daitch supermarket on Broadway. Saul had visions of becoming a doctor. But when his father died in 1950 at 49, Saul left college and returned home to help out.
“I really came into Zabar’s as a temporary assignment,” he told The New York Times in 2008. He never left. Instead, he became one of New York’s leading lox-smiths, partnering with his brother Stanley, and for many years with a marketing maven, Murray Klein, to turn a 22-foot-wide shop into a world-renowned enterprise.
Early on, the Zabars had five small stores, scattered along Broadway from West 80th to 110th Streets in Manhattan. Over time, they consolidated the operation into a single market commanding nearly $55 million in yearly sales and sprawling across roughly 20,000 square feet at Broadway and West 80th Street.
A broad assortment of delicacies, including some 800 types of cheese and various breads to go with them, covered the ground floor. One flight up was an array of cookware. A small cafe was later added next door.
The youngest brother, Eli, 15 years Saul’s junior, saw no place for himself in that setup and carved his own path in 1973 with the first in a chain of food shops bearing his name, Eli Zabar, principally on the East Side of Manhattan. The brothers played down any suggestions of a family schism.
“I acted as Eli’s surrogate father,” Saul said in 2011. “Eli has always wanted to be able to control his own destiny and has always enjoyed the East Side, whereas we had more of the social ethic of the West Side.”
Saul, usually dressed in a polo shirt and khaki trousers, kept his eye on the Zabar’s operation for more than 70 years. In particular, he had dominion over the counters where an estimated 2,000 pounds of smoked fish and 8,000 pounds of coffee were sold to the 40,000 customers who filled the store in a typical week. (Those numbers dipped in 2020 and 2021 as Zabar’s, like other retailers, struggled through the Covid-19 pandemic.)
The store roasted its own coffee, and Mr. Zabar’s office doubled as a tasting room. He visited fish wholesalers who allowed him to sample the latest catch. One supplier told New York magazine in 1992 that once he saw Mr. Zabar get so angry about a whitefish that didn’t taste right when it was delivered to the store that he threw it on the floor and stepped on it.
What did he look for in a fish? His response to The New York Sun in 2007 was worthy of a cryptic Zen master: “It’s got to have taste. Not too this, not too that.”
But he was clear about his store’s iconic status. “There’s a romance about what we do,” he said in 2012. “We have a modern appearance, but we really do things the way they were done 40, 50, 75, even 200 years ago.”
As for being a cultural landmark on the Upper West Side, he told a CUNY-TV interviewer in 2005, “That’s where we are. I mean, when Willie Sutton was asked why he robs banks — ‘That’s where the money is.’ We’re on the West Side because that’s where our customers are.”
Part of the Zabars’ success lay in understanding and adapting to New Yorkers’ increasingly sophisticated tastes. They benefited from having had Mr. Klein as a partner for three decades.
A pugnacious man who had survived the Holocaust, Mr. Klein assumed Lillian Zabar’s share of the business and drove many key decisions about what to buy and how much to charge. He relished price wars, whether over Beluga caviar or Pommery mustard or Cuisinarts. He had, to put it mildly, a turbulent relationship with the Zabars; Saul didn’t like even being around him.
After Mr. Klein retired in 1994, control of Zabar’s remained with Saul as president and Stanley as vice president and chief financial officer.
Saul Zabar was born on June 4, 1928, in Brooklyn and moved to Manhattan when his family opened a smoked-fish outlet there. In those days, so-called blue laws restricted commercial activity on Sundays. The young Saul was posted as a lookout for approaching police officers. “But when I saw a policeman, I could not make myself run,” he told The Times in 2008. “I walked right back to the store, and the policeman followed right afterwards.” His father, unsurprisingly, was not pleased.
Saul attended Stuyvesant High School for two years, then transferred to Horace Mann School on the recommendation of a Zabar’s customer. After graduating in 1946, he attended the University of Kansas until his father died.
A marriage in 1949 to Rosalie Rothstein did not last. In 1968, Mr. Zabar married Carole Ann Kishner, who was a Hebrew teacher when they met; she later became a lawyer. They lived in Manhattan.
In addition to their daughter Ann, she survives him, along with two other children, Aaron and Rachel Zabar; four grandchildren; and his brothers. Two of Mr. Zabar’s children went into the family business: Aaron Zabar is a senior manager at Zabar’s; Ann Zabar is an assistant vice president.
Now and then, a Zabar’s controversy arose. One, in 2011, involved a discovery that the lobster salad contained no lobster.
There was no intention to deceive, Mr. Zabar said, and he cited a Wikipedia entry that defined crawfish, which the salad did contain, as “freshwater crustaceans resembling small lobsters, to which they are related.”
Nonetheless, he changed the name of the dish to “seafare salad.” But that didn’t work either, because crawfish aren’t saltwater fish. Thus was “zabster zalad” born, the first word a portmanteau of Zabar’s and lobster, the second Z tossed in for fun.
In the 1980s the Zabars, stressed out by their uneasy relationship with Mr. Klein, were reportedly ready to sell the store. Concerned customers at the cash-only register would break into a chorus of “don’t sell” when Mr. Zabar passed by. In the end, Zabar’s remained with the Zabars.
“We get asked often why we don’t franchise, because we have a lot of branded products,” he told the magazine Edible Manhattan in 2022.
“Money is not why we do this, not why we’re here seven days a week,” he said. “It’s a way of life for us. It’s kind of old-fashioned.”
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