Zabar's

Zabar's has anchored the corner of Broadway and 80th since 1934, and the Upper West Side would be a different neighborhood without it. It is a food store the way Grand Central is a train station — technically true, spiritually insufficient. Under the orange signage: a smoked-fish counter where slicers work lox by hand the way they have for generations, walls of coffee roasted on-site, a cheese department with its own gravitational pull, and the dense, elbow-to-elbow choreography of New Yorkers who know exactly what they came for.

Go upstairs. The mezzanine housewares floor is one of the city's quiet legends — copper pots, knives, gadgets you didn't know existed, stacked to the ceiling at prices that routinely undercut the design stores downtown. Between the fish counter's theater and the kitchenware maze, Zabar's manages to be both a tourist destination and a genuine working grocery, often in the same aisle.

Even empty-handed, it's a show: the smell of coffee and rye, the counter banter, the sense of a store that has outlasted every food fashion by simply never changing what it does well.