By Gus Saltonstall

Saul Zabar, the longtime leader of the Upper West Side’s most famous food emporium Zabar’s, passed away Tuesday morning at the age of 97, as first reported by the New York Times.

Ann Zabar, his daughter, confirmed his death to the Times; she told the paper he had been hospitalized with a brain bleed.

Saul’s parents, Louis and Lillian Zabar, founded the store in 1934. When Louis died in 1950 (at age 49, according to the Times), Saul returned from college at the University of Kansas to help run the family business. He did not plan at the time for Zabar’s to be his lifelong work, he told the Times in a 2008 interview. But he never left, and over the next 70 years of working at his parents’ creation, he helped turn it into one of the city’s most famous culinary institut

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