Clad in green pants, Crocs and a white workman button-down with a pen in the breast pocket as if he was ready to mark the price of a half-pound of lox, Eli Zabar approached the podium at Riverside Memorial Chapel.
“Stanley always told me, ‘Eli, three brothers together is stronger than any one of us.’ Last year we were three. Then we were two. And now,” he said, a crack in his voice, “it’s just me.”
Eli, the 83-year-old baby brother of the famous trio of specialty food stores brothers, was speaking on Wednesday at the funeral of Stanley, who died earlier this week at 94, just over a year after Saul, the eldest of the siblings, died at 97.
The funeral marked an end of an era for Zabar’s, an institution that shaped food culture first on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and then in the country beyond.
It was also a reminder that New York is made up of local, close-knit communities that happen to be situated in America’s largest city. Stanley Zabar’s life was hyperlocal. For most of it, he never lived more than two blocks from the store.
Before the funeral started, about 250 people — family members, Zabar’s employees and the owners of other long-lived local establishments like Town Shop (bras) and Barney Greengrass (sturgeon) — mingled and triangulated to determine who went to school with whose cousin and who, as a 20-something looking for work, was hired by Stanley to cut salmon behind the counter on West 80th Street and Broadway. It was not that everyone knew everyone. But everyone knew someone who knew someone who knew everyone.
Rabbi Benjamin Spratt welcomed the mourners, noting that he was there to comfort the family on behalf of the nearby Congregation Rodeph Sholom, “and so many on the Upper West Side, New York City and the around the world” whose lives were touched by Stanley Zabar through familial love and good food.
Rabbi Spratt set the table for a service where Stanley’s surviving brother, children and grandchildren would expound on the interconnectedness in Stanley’s life of family, business and Jewish culture.
On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the rabbi said, he had grown accustomed to seeing Stanley in the synagogue’s front row. Hewing to the solemnity of the holidays by wearing a blazer (never a suit), Stanley still could be seen in his “old tattered Zabar’s hat,” he said, “because, as he told me, it’s perfect advertising when the house is packed.”
Zabar’s was about six blocks from the synagogue, and Stanley ran the store for more than 70 years, with his older brother, Saul, and until 1994, a partner named Murray Klein. A lawyer by training, Stanley managed the market’s finances as well as an associated Upper West Side real estate portfolio. Stanley, who had been in decline in recent months, was last at “the store” (as the family calls Zabar’s) just two weeks ago. He was joyfully greeted by employees, his son, David, said in an interview.
His loved ones shared stories: about a young boy who counted pennies from the cash register at his father’s market. About a father who always said “I love you,” and who gave jobs to his children (selling coffee cake), grandchildren (sweeping floors) and even a great-grandchild (using the pricing gun). About a loyal husband of more than 70 years. About a grandfather who doted on his grandchildren but never let them win at Ping-Pong. About a businessman who, over the years, responded to those who asked for money by offering them a job.
Willie Zabar, one of Stanley’s grandsons, said that in 2022 he had been asked to put together a panel to discuss Zabar’s history at an event. Willie excluded Saul, then about 94, from the proposed line up, “because the last time I put him on a panel, he accused a business associate of being in the Mafia,” Willie said.
When Stanley learned of the slight, he burst into Willie’s office — “this is a 90-plus-year-old man bursting into an office” — and told him that excluding Saul was unacceptable and could lead to “termination of employment.”
Incredulous, Willie, now 33, recalled asking his grandfather, “You’re worried Saul is going to fire me?”
Stanley replied, “No, I’m worried Saul is going to fire me.”
Stanley was proud of Eli’s decision to cut his own path away from the family business, however complicated it might have been. “He understood why I had gone out on my own and had broken away, and he said that he admired that I did that while staying connected emotionally to the family,” Eli said in an interview. He started his own business by opening E.A.T., a modern take on the deli, on the other side of Central Park.
But for Stanley, Upper West was best. “He was always proud that Zabar’s created an anchor in the neighborhood that was his home,” David said in an interview.
“We used to joke that he was the mayor of New York between 79th and 86th Streets,” said Sandy Zabar, Stanley’s youngest daughter.
Sandy remembers walking up and down Broadway, with her father, her brother and her sister Lori (who died in 2022). “He knew every person, every retailer, every undomiciled person who was hanging out,” she said in an interview. “He cared so much about the neighborhood and the well-being of everyone.”
Stanley may have spent every day surrounded by some of the best food in the city — he loved Zabar’s coleslaw most of all. But when it came time for lunch each day, he left the store and walked the few blocks to his apartment.
There, he would sit at his kitchen table for a homemade lunch.
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