Our story

The Widdi family runs Foodtown of Park Slope and Foodtown of Prospect Heights. Widdis Food Market is a Palestinian family-owned business. In 2024 Shady Widdi opened Foodtown of Noll Street in Bushwick, a 15,000-square-foot market he designed more like the supermarkets he had seen overseas than like a standard American box: oval produce fixtures, a floating ceiling, a floor that feels like it is moving.

Rossville gets that instinct under his own name. Widdis Food Market is the renovation of the neighborhood supermarket at 1006 Rossville Avenue. The sign is his. The leaf in the W is his. The circular ceiling going into the store is the same idea as Bushwick.

“In all the stores I have built, I have always wanted to go beyond what everyone else does.”
Shady Widdi, BK Reader, on opening Foodtown of Noll Street

1700s
Blazing Star
The ground under Rossville was a ferry landing and a tavern called the Blazing Star, long before it was a zip code.
1830s
Sandy Ground
Free Black oystermen from the Chesapeake founded Sandy Ground nearby, one of the oldest continuously settled free Black communities in the country, and a stop on the Underground Railroad.
1990s
The market on the corner
Mignosi’s Supermarket opened here and stayed the South Shore’s neighborhood market for a generation. Neighbors still call it Miggy’s.
2022
Ideal Fresh
New owners expanded the store into the next storefront and renamed it Ideal Fresh. The corner kept its job: the place Rossville buys dinner.
2026
Widdis
Shady Widdi took the store, put his name on the facade, and started the renovation. The grand opening is October 30.

A Brooklyn grocery family, on a Rossville corner.

Blazing Star

Sandy Ground

The market on the corner

Ideal Fresh

Widdis

Further reading