What Zabar's is known for
A 22-foot appetizing counter in 1934 grew into an Upper West Side institution under Louis and Lillian Zabar. Ninety-plus years later, the family still runs the Broadway corner.
Zabar's began in 1934, when Louis and Lillian Zabar rented an appetizing counter inside a Daitch Market before opening their own 22-foot-wide shop at Broadway and West 80th Street. Louis, born Mordko Leib Zabarka in Ukraine, had come to the US through Canada in the early 1920s; his standard for the shop was blunt — he personally visited smokehouses to sample and inspect the fish, rejecting far more than he accepted, and sold nothing he wouldn't buy himself.
His sons, Saul, Stanley, and Eli Zabar, carried the business forward, expanding what counted as a New York specialty item along the way: Zabar's introduced the neighborhood to Brie in the 1960s, sun-dried tomatoes and gnocchi in the 1970s, and caviar in the 1980s, at prices aggressive enough to trigger what regulars still call the "Caviar War" with competing shops. The store has stayed at Broadway and 80th for more than ninety years — smoked fish, coffee roasted on-site, and a family still behind the counter.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Smoked fish and coffee since 1934, still run by the Zabar family.
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