Special Report: Food Dynasty - Staten Island, NY

Food Dynasty Supermarkets
Opened: May 2024

Owner: Polo Rodriguez

Previous Tenants: Top Tomato Superstore

Cooperative: Key Food Stores

Location: 1071 Bay St, Staten Island, NY

Photographed: May 8, 2025

Does this store in Staten Island's Rosebank neighborhood look familiar? Well, dedicated readers might remember seeing it way back in 2020 when it was still a Top Tomato. Top Tomato has had a tumultuous history, with several of their locations opening and then closing quickly or being sold or rebranded, and these days there's only one Top Tomato left. This location, which is around 10,000 square feet, was sold several years ago, if I'm not mistaken, but kept its Top Tomato name, then it was sold again in May 2024. At that point, the current owners took over and rebranded it Food Dynasty. Over several months, the store underwent an extensive renovation.

You can tell right away that this doesn't look anything like the Top Tomato it replaced. The Top Tomato wasn't unattractive, but it had a somewhat dated white-and-blue color scheme. The new Food Dynasty feels lively with lots of bright colors and bold signage.

But as we'll see, the store has been changed a bit too. Unlike the Ideal Fresh in Rossville, across the island that underwent a similar transition recently, it wasn't expanded. But Food Dynasty is definitely more of a full supermarket than Top Tomato, which was somewhere between a straight supermarket and a specialty market. It seemed to me that Food Dynasty has blended some of Top Tomato's better qualities with the supermarket know-how that Top Tomato didn't seem to have.

Seafood, which is an outside vendor, is in the back-left corner. Produce is on the left side of the store, in a rather more appealing setup than Top Tomato's. Deli is straight back in the center of the back wall, with meats on the right side of the back wall. Frozen and dairy are on the right side of the store and dairy continues onto the front wall to the right of the registers. The grocery aisles have been switched, so they no longer run side-to-side, and now they run front-to-back.

Looking good!

Food Dynasty has added a large hot food and salad bar, which runs between the produce department and the grocery aisles, along with fresh breads. No in-store bakery, and it definitely seemed that the baked goods selection was a bit reduced from the Top Tomato days.

Deli with a fresh new look and a lot to offer on the back wall. I think there might be a slightly smaller selection of certain specialty items, though, such as specialty cheeses. They're still here, to be sure, but Food Dynasty obviously had to cut something to add everything they did on the grocery side.

And speaking of, the grocery aisles are fully-stocked with all the basics and some more specialized selections.

There's definitely a more complete grocery selection here than Top Tomato had, though, which I would say is likely Key Food's doing. Food Dynasty was, I believe, originally a brand owned by Krasdale Foods but was acquired by Key Food maybe 20 years ago. There are a handful of Food Dynasty locations across the five boroughs.

Meats on the back wall...

Many of the fixtures were replaced in the renovation here.

Beer and dairy in the last aisle. Eight aisles in total these days, compared to I believe four when Top Tomato was here.

Below, we're looking across the front wall of the store towards the front-end. This would've been Top Tomato's first grocery aisle. There are several other supermarkets in this neighborhood, and some of them are also affiliated with Key Food (but under different ownership). There's a Market Fresh about half a mile west -- Krasdale-affiliated at the time of my post but now Key Food-affiliated -- along with an Associated to the west and a Western Beef north on Bay Street. Those are both affiliated with ASG but, again, under different ownership. A Key Food is a mile and a half north on Bay Street.

It's nice to see a big investment in this store, and the truth is -- at least in my view -- the loss of some of the specialty items Top Tomato had isn't even that big of a loss. Top Tomato wasn't run particularly well here, and the selection ended up being rather idiosyncratic rather than consistently gourmet. It's clear Food Dynasty is working a little harder to make the whole store make sense overall.

And a look at the registers, jammed into the small space between produce and dairy on the front wall...

Don't miss this weekend's other newsworthy posts!

• LIDL opens a new Central Jersey store
• An innovative Asian market prepares for its grand opening
• A new neighborhood supermarket opens on Staten Island  as several others renovate and change banners in Rossville, Sunnyside, and Rosebank (this post)