Saul Zabar (died October 7th 2025, aged 97) was the proprietor of Zabar's, New York's most famous delicatessen, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Zabar was born to Louis and Lilly Zabar, Jewish refugees from pogroms in Ukraine. He hoped to become a doctor and went to Kansas to study, but returned in 1950 when his father died, taking over the family business. He described the experience as "diving in the deep end before he learned how to swim."
With his younger brother Stanley handling the books, Saul built Zabar's into the finest deli in New York. He was fanatical about quality. Each Wednesday he toured the smokehouses of Brooklyn and Queens, inspecting smoked fish by pressing the flesh and tasting samples with a paper clip. He discarded almost half of deliveries that failed to meet his standards, once stamping on a batch of substandard whitefish.
He insisted that Zabar's roast and cup their own coffee beans in his office, with him as judge. Light roast was his ideal. His motto, inherited from his father, was "Highest quality at the lowest price."
His Jewishness was, by his own account, more social and gastronomical than religious or cultural. He kept kosher only at home but placed traditional Jewish foods at the store's core, including his mother Lilly's recipes for chicken soup with matzo balls and gefilte fish.
He twice considered selling the business but each time concluded there was nothing else he should be doing.
Saul had a younger brother Stanley, who managed the store's finances, and a youngest brother Eli, inventor of the Signature Sourdough Rye, who decamped to serve customers on the Upper East Side.
Accuracy, n.: The vice of being right