Saul Zabar
Saul Zabar is not a romantic.
“There’s nothing poetic about this business,” he told The New York Times in 2008.
Try telling that to the crowds swarming his Upper West Side store each Friday: grandmas shoving yuppies, yuppies shoving grandmas, everyone salivating over the lox.
Zabar’s turns 80 this year, and Saul Zabar, its 86-year-old co-owner and lifelong employee, is the store’s face. He’s come a long way since his first job as a [lookout]( His father flaunted the so-called blue laws that forced stores to close during church hours on Sundays, and so Saul Zabar was tasked with letting his dad know if the cops were coming. ‘lookout’): His father flaunted the so-called blue laws that forced stores to close during church hours on Sundays, and so Saul Zabar was tasked with letting his dad know if the cops were coming.
Zabar attributes the store’s iconic status to its longevity. “If you stick around long enough, and you stay in business, and try to do what we’re supposed to be doing, I think you get a reputation,” he told CUNY TV in 2012.
Just don’t mention brother Eli Zabar, who split with the family and headed to the East Side, where he heads up his own gourmet empire. (The brothers insist, in press accounts, that there’s no more bad blood. “He’s the most special man,” Eli Zabar said of Saul Zabar in the 2008 Times story.)
Meanwhile, there’s no one nearly as attuned as Saul Zabar to the rhythms of the Jewish food cycle.
“Rosh Hashanah is a brisket holiday,” he told the Forward’s Abigail Pogrebin, when she interviewed him recently. “Then, when we come to Yom Kippur, then we are in a fish world.”
Pogrebin asked if Zabar fasted on Yom Kippur. “I eat light,” he said, laughing.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
