How Eli Zabar made America more gourmet
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Hi, listeners. This is Laila. I am getting on before we start this episode to share some big news, which is that this show is ending at the end of this year. It has been an absolute honor to host this podcast. I've hosted versions of it for more than five years. That's hundreds of episodes, hundreds more of guests, hundreds of thousands of listeners, if not more. And I just want to thank you.

That said, I'm not here to say goodbye just yet. I'm here because we have a bit more than a month left and I want to ask you something. A lot of you know me by now. You know that I love questions so much. My currency is questions. I work in questions. And as a way to celebrate this show, I'm hoping that you might send me one question that you think I could help you answer before we're done.

I'm asking because I would like our last episode to answer listeners' questions, as the show has really always been about you. Your question could really be anything. As you know, I have access to all of your favorite FT people and more, so you can ask something with a guest in mind, like maybe you have a question for our foreign editor, Alec Russell, or you want advice about film or music or art or food from our critics.

You can also just share a question with me that's been rolling around in your mind that you're looking for a better way to think about. And then I will find someone who I think can give you the most interesting answer.

So send me that question by email. You can email me at lilarap, L-I-L-A-H-R-A-P, at ft.com. That's in the show notes. You can also message me on Instagram at lilarap. I see all of those. And if you want to keep following my work, the best way to do that is to find me on Instagram or Substack and follow me there. I will share what's next as soon as I can. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On to the show.

Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Laila Raptopoulos. New York City is an epicenter of gourmet food shops. I live near a cheesemonger and a larder and a place that sells delicacies that come exclusively from Spain.

But this city wasn't always known for being artisanal. Until maybe 20 years ago, you'd come to New York for a stale black and white cookie or a sausage, egg and cheese on a roll. If you wanted a perfect pastry or a perfectly ripe tomato, you're better off going to Paris.

There has been one family that's been quietly leading the fight for good quality food in this city, and they've been doing it for more than 90 years. It's the Zabar family. They're known best for Zabar's, the famous Upper West Side food emporium. But in 1973, the family's youngest son, Eli Zabar, crossed Central Park and opened his own food store on Madison Avenue.

Eli wanted a place that sold the best quality everything, no matter the price. And he quickly realized that that meant that he'd have to do a lot of it himself. Most American bread used flavorless flour, so he learned to bake his own. He went to France to find the best cheese, and to Piedmont to find the lady with the best olive oil, and to California for a forager of the best mushrooms.

I met Eli recently for a profile I wrote for HTSI about that original store, EAT. It became a classic restaurant and just turned 50 years old. And what struck me when we first met was just how clairvoyant he's been over the years and how great he is at knowing what makes good food good.

Eli agreed to meet me again for the podcast so that he could show me how he thinks about quality and how we could think about quality. We meet outside of his largest market, Eli's Market. He starts by introducing me to the florist. This is my wonderful flower lady. Hi. Sarah. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. I believe it's Princess. Oh, Princess. Sorry. Oh, enjoy your tour. Thank you.

We're in a little flower shop here, which is the first thing you hit as you enter the market. It's not really a thing you need in a gourmet grocery store, but it makes sense to put a flower stall at the front. Okay, so there's a reason that the flower department is the first thing you come to when you come to my store. The reason is that it makes you feel pretty and wonderful and happy because

You know, anyone who sees flowers and their wonderful aromas and doesn't get happy shouldn't be here. Okay? So, you walked past here and it smells nice. It does smell nice. One of the, like, when I first started with flowers,

I went to Holland and I went to the flower market and I realized that my flowers have to come from Holland. Now, you may say, oh, what's so special about that? What's special about that is about 90% of the flowers that are in New York City come from Colombia and South America. And in Holland, they're grown with hundreds of years of...

of understanding flowers. I mean, it's a business, but it's more than a business. As you can probably hear, I'm already running after Eli. He's 81 years old, and he has these glasses perched at the end of his nose, and he's always moving, and he's touching the things he passes. It's like he's thinking with his hands.

Apples are really only good now. Yeah. Okay? Because they have that crispiness and they're not mushy. The market we're in is part of his Manhattan empire that now includes two restaurants, a wine shop, and a bread factory with a rooftop greenhouse where he grows produce.

All these locations make up a little ecosystem for Eli, and balancing that ecosystem is part of his secret. The staff is constantly turning overripe fruit into jam and vegetables into soups and cheese into crackers. After the flowers, Eli takes me down the escalator into the produce department. It's cold down there to keep the vegetables fresh.

And you enter this kind of world of fruits and vegetables and you're surrounded and overwhelmed by it. And that's the idea. That's the first thing. After the flowers, which put you in the right mood, then come the fruits and vegetables with smell and they reflect the season. And Sal is the green grocer here. Hi, Sal. Nice to meet you. Pleasure.

This, every box is looked at, every, everything that isn't really good for the customer, he takes it off the stand and sends it up to the kitchen. Apples, we're going to be making tons of applesauce, let me tell you. And blueberries go to the pastry shop where they make blueberry pies with them, make a blueberry jam and then they make a blueberry pie with it, okay?

Sal understands the fruits and the vegetables. They talk to him. Can I ask you about just like when you started? Can you just sort of explain to listeners like what your philosophy was when you first opened your first spot, EAT? Well, my philosophy... This was in the 70s. Yeah, I opened in 73, in July actually of 73.

I started off with a manifesto even before I opened. I had been working in buildings, so I did a lot of the construction myself. But I had a manifesto on the window. The window was all papered up. It was to find people who still did things the old way. My goal was not to make anything. My goal was to find bakers who still made bread in the old wood or coal-fired ovens and

pastries and salads and vegetables. And what happened, actually, the evolution was, I couldn't find these people. You know, they didn't exist anymore. You know, their children had...

become doctors and lawyers and other things. So I ended up having to learn how to make all of this myself. And then this store, this store, this is like a market that you, it's a covered market that was inspired by the markets of Europe. And the only, the difference is that in markets of Europe, every individual person owns their own stall.

But the really important thing is to have somebody, to have the Sal, to have the Sarah. I mean, when you go to these other stores, people working in the produce department, they probably worked in the Brazil department at Bloomingdale's the last job. You know, this is a very different story. Yeah.

Eli and I are on a full tour of the shop here. We go to the meat counter and meet the butcher and see these beautiful rows of lamb chops. These are Colorado, but we also have... And the thing is, Mark knows most of the people who have the farms that the beef comes from. We also go to the fish department, which just got Nantucket scallops in, and that's a big deal because there are only a few weeks a year when you can harvest them.

This part's especially fun because Eli lets me eat a raw scallop out of the bin. Aren't they beautiful? Aren't they beautiful? Can I eat one? Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah, pick up. Oh, I like the fact you use your fingers. Nobody uses their fingers anymore. Okay. Then this unexpected thing happens and everybody gets all excited. Something very exciting is happening. Come on, girl. Ladies and gentlemen.

And this is in state for your show. Oh great. Okay, we're now entering the cheese section. Oh wow. So what do you think we have here? What do you think these are? Okay, well I'm going to tell you what they are. It looks like cheese. Is it cheese under there? Is it root vegetables? They look like a rock. Have you ever seen a white truffle as big as this in your life? Oh my god. It's a huge truffle. You know the price of truffles? A lot.

Right now it's $6,000 a kilo. Whoa. Okay. So what do we have here? So you just have them in a kitchen rag. Yeah. So you're looking at about $12,000 worth of dusty, dirty. Okay. So anyway, this is amazing. I mean, these are really good. They're really firm. It's really important you understand this.

We sell them. In fact, he sold two this morning. And we use them up in my restaurant. But this is the heart of the season. They come from Alba. That's Piedmont in Italy. And those are the best truffles in the world.

And when you order a portion on pasta or whatever we serve it on, you get a nice size portion. I went to a restaurant last night and they had spaetzle on the menu.

It was a $55 supplement. Fine, that's reasonable. I tell you, there was so little truffle in that dish, I couldn't find it. It was embarrassing. In fact, I will never go back. I will never go back. So what's the right way to use truffle or to serve truffle? You wrap them in paper, keep them in your refrigerator, and they only stay really fresh for about a week.

My favorite way is actually the easiest way. It's good bread toasted with lots of butter and just shave the truffle on top. I mean, everybody can make toast. I mean, it's even easier to make toast than boil water. So everybody knows how to make toast. But you have to have good country bread for it and lots of butter. At this point, Eli has been walking me around for about half an hour.

But the goal here is to get Eli to make me one of his famous sandwiches. Eli is known for delicious sandwiches. He makes a whitefish sandwich and a pastrami sandwich that I dream about. He's also known for expensive sandwiches. If you Google EAT, you will see a lot of complaints about the prices. They sell a grilled cheese for $26.

But being known for high prices really does not bother Eli. In his mind, he's using the best ingredients and it's a better sandwich. A better sandwich is going to cost you more money.

So, okay. So, we should go on to sandwich making. Let's do sandwich. Okay. Well, how about this sandwich here? We have our misshapen tomato. We have this unruly shaped bread. And this is a mozzarella that we make here every day. And you say, well, what's so special about that? We get mozzarella. What's special about it is the curd.

And this curd comes from a very small dairy, family-owned dairy, up in Rhode Island. You're going to hear us moving around a lot at this point.

We're going now from the kitchen to make the sandwich in his adjoining restaurant, which is quieter. But it's hard to keep Eli out of the kitchen, so we end up walking back and forth several times. Okay, so we're going to use this country bread. We import four or five olive oils that we think are absolutely fabulous. The singer Sting makes this in Italy. We're not going to use it because I don't have enough of it. But this is another one that I do love, and it's a Valgiano.

And now what I'm going to do with this bread is I'm going to go inside and slice it on a meat slicer because then I can get a good long slice. I'm sure everybody knows the secret to a great sandwich is proportion. It's a story of life, okay? How thick this bread is sliced, how thick each of this, and how much of all this is put together in the end is what makes a great sandwich.

Do you have a meat slicer at home that you use for bread? I do. I have a meat slicer in my house, which I use for everything. I use it for slicing prosciutto and salami and, uh, yeah. This makes me want a meat slicer. Quite badly. Okay, I would say on the mozzarella,

We also, we really, we want the mozzarella to be at least as thick as the tomato. Do you see how spongy this is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you want to be careful not to squeeze, not to... One of the reasons I use the meat slicer on the bread is you don't want to compress it. The bread has a lot of air in it. Same thing with the... I feel like I'm torturing this piece of mozzarella. These are thicker slices than I expected of mozzarella. Yeah, no, I...

This is so good. Here, try that. Thank you. It's a little salty. Oh, it's so much better than... It's a lot of mozzarella. Yeah. There's a little more salt, I think. So, okay, so we made the sandwich, and then, you know, we could do other things with it. Cut it again. I think the thing I'm learning, Eli, as you salt my sandwich more, is... A little bit more. Thank you. Is not to overpower the sandwich. Like, you can taste everything in this sandwich. Yes.

What makes this tomato sandwich? Because it's not that many ingredients. It's olive oil, bread, salt, pepper, tomato, mozzarella. And no basil. And no basil. And no basil. Why? You know, I passed a whole box full of basil. I don't know if you noticed that. Yeah. Because the basil is too strong for the tomato and it's too strong for the mozzarella. Mm-hmm.

There's other uses for basil, but this isn't one of them. Right. So what makes this sandwich different than any? Well, I think the proportion of everything that you have here. Yeah. That you're going to taste everything. What I'm sure you've seen in Eli is that he is a purist. You probably noticed that fancy cooking has changed from when our parents did it. We used to take ingredients we could get at the grocery store and try to elevate them with stews and sauces, like think beef bourguignon.

But now, we want to take the best ingredients possible and do as little to them as possible. Like radishes with butter and salt. Or perfect in-season scallops just touched on the pan. Eli has been doing this all along. And it makes me want to ask Eli more about what it is he's doing and what it's been like to do this for more than 50 years. So as I said, I always started off with kind of a philosophy. Like, we make a famous shrimp salad and...

The first thing is to find shrimp that haven't been frozen. That's almost impossible. Almost 99.9% of the shrimp that come into New York and most places are frozen. But we were able to find sources and bring in fresh shrimp. After we cooked them, then we could freeze them. Mm-hmm.

but not to freeze them on a boat. And to make what I thought the essence of a shrimp sandwich would be, would be shrimp, a little bit of mayonnaise, a little bit of lemon, and maybe a few sprigs of dill. And I think that kind of essence, you taste everything, and in the end, the shrimp tastes better. Yeah. You know, that's... Your wife is...

The whitefish salad. It's also amazing. Yeah. I love that. Why is it so good? It's not that much. No, it's, again, the proportion of whitefish to... It's like, take the shrimp salad. Go back to that for a second. Everybody's shrimp salad has celery in it. It has this in it. It has that in it. What about just pure shrimp? Yeah. You know, what...

And the whitefish is like whitefish, a little lemon juice, and a little bit of mayonnaise. I mean, that's it. That's the whole, that is it. I think it has a little bit of red onion to bring it out. But it's not a lot of ingredients.

One thing that when I first met you at EAT, we were walking around and you were saying, don't you just want to grab a corner off of that? Don't you just want to bite off of that? And I started thinking, yes, this is a sort of creative mindset of just like, it's so delicious that I just want to grab it. Is that part of your... Okay. And actually, that's very...

An interesting point because I've gotten into more trouble. I would say the most trouble I've gotten into in my life is going through markets, food markets everywhere.

and I want to see if the strawberry tastes good. I want to see if that carrot tastes good. And I walk through the market. By the time we get finished, I'm full. But I'm a real sneak because I've gotten reprimanded, and so embarrassingly so. When you go through a market in France, you don't take anything without asking, and I don't ask. But that, first of all, of course, you want to know how good it is. And secondly, of course, it's...

It's like what you want, what you want to do. And here, the person who comes in should want to try the grape, should want to try, take a bite of the carrot, take a bite of a piece of fruit, you know, and buy it. Buy it and a few more. Yeah, yeah. Is that something that you felt was missing in America? I definitely think so. Yeah. And even when you go to restaurants, I mean, take this to a different place.

slightly different subject. There has to be a generosity in... That generosity doesn't necessarily mean that the portion has to fill the whole plate. There has to be a generosity in how things work, how things taste, and how things look. Yeah, go ahead. That you don't feel that they're cutting corners or trying to... Exactly. They don't feel that they're just in business. Mm-hmm.

Yes, everybody's here. They need to make a living. They need to make a profit. You have to charge enough to do that. But we talked about proportion, but we also talked about kind of the generousness of the portion. You shouldn't feel that there's an economic issue behind it. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, even when you have friends over for dinner, it should feel generous. Yeah, exactly. That same generosity is what you should feel in a restaurant. If they give you bread, you should feel that they give you enough, that it's not rationing. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Eli was really on the cutting edge of the movement that's made our food culture what it is now.

He's mentored the popular chef and cookbook author Ina Garden. He's worked with Martha Stewart. I can see traces of how he thinks in the recipes and the shops of Yotanaralengi.

I have one kind of big picture question, which is as I've been sort of writing the piece about you and thinking about your work, it seems clear to me that you sort of foresaw like an evolution in American taste that was happening in Europe and created a space for it and had to kind of make it. And

I feel like now American tastes are just are catching up, right? Like you mentored Ina Garden. She's very popular. Otto Lenge sort of has your influences, this sort of plenty. And people are going and they're looking for the best truffle and they are looking for a good bottle of wine and they are wondering what kind of flour goes in their sourdough bread. And so I guess sort of like, what are your interactions with customers now versus 40 years ago? Or like...

Where do you think taste is going now? Are you feeling good about it? How do you feel about it? I haven't really reflected on it. I would say there's no question about the fact that the people who are interested in food, there are many, many more of them. I mean, huge populations. I mean, TV and the media have driven an interest in food that didn't exist before.

There weren't any bright people except me when I started. I mean, if there were, I didn't know who they were. And that's another thing. You wouldn't know who anybody was when I started. Today, everybody knows what everybody else is doing. There's personalities and people behind. There's personalities, there's people, there's intelligence. And more so now than a year ago now. One of the wonderful things I can say about Aina...

is that her recipes are essentially very simple. On the one end of the spectrum is Otto Lange. I mean, you know, I mean, I can't even read. But on the other hand is Aino with a half... 10, 15, 20... Otto Lange, pages and pages. But, you know, Aino's recipes work. And they are just fundamental recipes.

And so what are we saying here? We're saying there's more food knowledge, there's more cultural food knowledge, and that's fantastic. There's more ethnic blending. I mean, it's very complicated MIT kind of stuff. But in the end, it's kind of what you make, most people are going to make at home, is what Ina has in her cookbook. Mm-hmm.

We shared the simplicity of the idea. I'm focused on the wine, the ingredients. And I think I was just smarter than everybody else before everybody else. And now everybody else is caught up.

That's the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I've linked to my profile of EAT in the show notes. And as I mentioned at the top, please do send your questions along. I'm on email at lilarap at ft.com and Instagram at lilarap. All of that is in the show notes too.

I'm Laila Raptopoulos, and here's my incredible team. Katya Kamkova is our senior producer and produced this episode. Lulu Smith is our producer. Our sound engineers are Joe Salcedo, Breen Turner, and Sam Jovinko, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forges is our executive producer, and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumling. Have a wonderful week. We're off for Thanksgiving, but we'll find each other again on Monday.

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