Updated:2024-11-20 01:37 Views:149
Eli Zabarmilyon88, the longtime king of a Manhattan food and delicatessen empire, teamed up with the online newsletter platform Substack on Tuesday night to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his Upper East Side cafe E.A.T.
As a jazz trio played, servers moved across the checkered floor carrying trays of mini brioche egg salad sandwiches and chopped liver on raisin nut bread. The place filled with writers who specialize in all kinds of topics, from politics to sex, from food to finance.
Mr. Zabar, 81, snatched an egg salad sandwich from a moving tray and tasted it for quality control. He explained that he had decided to throw the party with Substack as a throwback to the cafe’s early days, long before a turkey club at E.A.T. cost $32, when it served as a canteen to the neighborhood’s creative crowd.
“Back then, this area of the Upper East Side was an underdeveloped wasteland,” Mr. Zabar said. “My early customers were writers, artists and gallerists. People like Richard Avedon, Wayne Thiebaud, Leo Castelli and Nora Ephron.”
“William Shawn and Lillian Ross, they were here every afternoon,” he said, referring to the fabled former editor of The New Yorker and one of the magazine’s star writers. “They’d sit in a corner talking for hours. I called them Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”
“This crowd here tonight,” he continued, “they remind me of the same people I had back when I started.”
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