By Lori Zabar In the autumn of 1934, my grandfather [Louis Zabar] had a fateful conversation with a man named Charlie Raffa. A gregarious fellow with a thick Italian accent, Charlie owned the Ideal Fixture Company, which sold supermarket equipment to fellow immigrant entrepreneurs. Affectionately dubbed “Charlie Ideal” by his customers, he was known for providing them with affordable payment terms. (Four decades later, he would become even better known as Matilda Cuomo’s father and Gov. Mario Cuomo’s father-in-law.) Charlie told Louis about an available retail space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The space Charlie recommended was in...