STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Since March 2020, this week is never easy to revisit. Six years after the dining‑room shutdowns that reshaped our borough, I don’t want us to relive it—but I do want us to remember it clearly.
On March 26, 2020—with dining rooms already dark since March 16 and no end in sight—I started a “Food Service Diary.” It was grueling to keep— and I will not pretend otherwise—but it preserved what mattered. What follows comes from those pages.
Back then, Staten Island’s food world slipped into a kind of suspended animation—all of us holding our breath as kitchens, markets and dining rooms went dark one by one. Looking back now, the details feel unreal, yet they were the texture of suffocating daily life. What follows is a walk through that week, the moments that reshaped how we ate, worked and cared for one another.
Entry I—March 26, 2020: The first cracks
That Thursday, the split between home and the outside world was stark. The sun was out, our house was settling into a routine, but the borough was already fraying. Shelves were thinning—no paper towels at ShopRite, no pasta at Key Food—and neighbors were joking about making their own noodles…