Zabar’s Signature Orange Merch Is the Ne Plus Ultra of Jewish Deli Swag

There’s a lot of good Jewish-deli merch in this world, and I would conservatively estimate that I own about 10% of it. I do my best to seek out a good (a.k.a. medium-bad) cup of coffee, bowl of matzo ball soup, and bagel wherever I go, whether at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles’s Fairfax neighborhood, Schwartz’s in Paris’s Le Marais, or Beauty’s Luncheonette in Montreal’s Jewish Quarter.

But it’s not just the food that I crave when I go to these places—although I’ve found that a stack of lacy latkes is capable of curing more or less any ailment, from a common cold to jet lag to a broken heart. At a complicated cultural moment, I never feel more anchored to my faith than when I’m tucking into the same cabbage soup or tsimmes that my Russian Jewish ancestors must have eaten in their shtetls many generations ago.

When I’m done with my meal at these venerable institutions, invariably groaning from fullness and filling a takeout clamshell with leftovers I don’t really want because I fear the server’s disapprobation more than I do the prospect of bagels going stale in my hotel room, it’s become something of a ritual for me to consider the merch offerings. By now, I own enough Jewish-deli baseball caps from far-flung corners of the world to make Larry David proud—and yet the one I treasure most I picked up approximately 20 blocks from where I grew up: at Zabar’s, of course.

Zabar’s—which made the news this week when its longtime principal owner, “smoked fish czar” Saul Zabar, died at 97, after running the store his parents founded in 1934 for more than 70 years—is a cut above other Jewish-deli institutions in a lot of ways. (For one, they’re a notable exception to the “consistently mid coffee” rule, serving up cups that will keep you going for the entirety of an endless-feeling Passover seder.) But the deli’s signature orange merch has become a bona fide It-girl Thing over the past decade, beloved by the likes of frum-meets-high-fashion designer Batsheva Hay (who has been known to sport a Zabar’s cap herself) and even making its way onto the front of a $500 Coach sweater in 2022.