Saul Zabar, of Zabar’s Fame, Passes Away at 97

Saul Zabar, who helped turned the smoked fish-and-cheese emporium that bore his last name into a veritable Upper West Side landmark, died on Oct. 7 at the age of 97. Zabar’s, of course, will go on.

His family said that he had been admitted to the hospital for a brain bleed, and passed away shortly thereafter. He leaves behind his wife, Carole, daughters Ann and Rachel, his son Aaron, his brothers Eli and Stanley, and four grandchildren.

Stanley, who has served as vice president of the business for decades, will assume the role of president. Meanwhile, Ann currently serves as an assistant vice president at Zabar’s, while Aaron is a senior manager.

”Our family has been deeply touched by the outpouring of love and cherished memories shared by so many since yesterday,” Zabar’s said in an online statement on Oct. 8.

Saul and Stanley took over the family business from their parents, Louis and Lillian Zabar, shortly after Louis’s death in 1950. Both parents had immigrated from Ukraine and met in New York City, . Saul left college to assume his father’s role, though he had initially hoped to become a doctor, and was joined by brother Stanley. His much-younger brother Eli opened his own set of stores on Manhattan’s East Side, including Eli’s Market, on Third Avenue.

The Zabar family initially operated the smoked-fish counter of a local grocer on Broadway, and eventually expanded Zabar’s to five stores spanning the Upper West Side. By the time Saul and Stanley’s reign began in the 1960s, Zabar’s footprint had been consolidated into its current 20,000-square-foot location, at Broadway and 80th Street.

The brothers worked alongside Murray Klein, with whom Saul had a famously testy relationship, until the Klein departed in 1994. Klein oversaw the store’s marketing and pricing.

Yet it was Saul who helped pioneer Zabar’s distinctive culinary quirks. The store is beloved by Manhattanites near and far for its lox and coffee, the latter of which is made using a proprietary roast; they sell 2,000 pounds of lox and 8,000 pounds of coffee during any given week, according to the latest estimates, which go down the gullets of 40,000 customers. The store sees $55 million worth of yearly sales.

Saul was renowned (or feared) for his discerning takes on the latest catch of smoked fish, sourced from nearby. In 2007, he told the New York Sun what makes for a worthy haul: “It’s got to have taste. Not too this, not too that.”

He also transformed Zabar’s into the genuine cheese powerhouse that it is today. The store boasts a remarkable array of 600 different cheeses, sourced from around the world, some of which are sorted into collections.

Zabar’s was confronted with what passed for a scandal in 2011, when an enterprising New York Times reporter determined that the store’s lobster salad didn’t contain any lobster, interestingly enough. Instead, it was jammed with crawfish.

In an attempt to bat away his critics, Saul craftily cited a Wikipedia article that described crawfish as “freshwater crustaceans resembling small lobsters, to which they are related.” Failing to quell the uproar, he then changed the name of the salad to “seafare salad”—which only further inflamed self-appointed carcinologists (experts on crustaceans), as crawfish do not hail from the sea, but from freshwater lakes.

Finally, Saul capitalized on the ridiculous nature of the entire scuff-up, renaming the dish “zabster zalad.” It has stuck to this day.