Saul Zabar, who across more than seven decades as a principal owner of the Upper West Side food emporium bearing his family name kept New Yorkers amply fortified with smoked fish, earthy bread and tangy cheese, not to mention pungent coffee, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 97.

His daughter Ann Zabar, who confirmed the death, said Mr. Zabar had been hospitalized with a brain bleed.

The oldest of three brothers, Mr. Zabar did not intend to go into the family business, which his parents, Louis and Lillian (Teit) Zabar, started in 1934 as the smoked-fish department of a Daitch supermarket on Broadway. Saul had visions of becoming a doctor. But when his father died in 1950 at 49, Saul left college and returned home to help out.

“I really came into Zabar’s as a temporary assignment,” he told The New York Times in 2008. He never left. Instead, he became one of New York’s leading lox-smiths, partnering with his brother Stanley, and for many years with a marketing maven, Murray Klein, to turn a 22-foot-wide shop into a world-renowned enterprise.

Early on, the Zabars had five small stores, scattered along Broadway from West 80th to 110th Streets in Manhattan. Over time, they consolidated the operation into a single market commanding nearly $55 million in yearly sales and sprawling across roughly 20,000 square feet at Broadway and West 80th Street.