Mother Marianne’s West Side Kitchen opened its dining room for limited dining-in last week while continuing to provide meals to go.

The soup kitchen served a total of 53,173 meals for the past year, somewhat keeping pace with annual totals for the previous two years, even though the numbers dipped during the pandemic crisis, Director Ed Morgan reports. (The soup kitchen’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30.)

He attributed the short-term decrease to several factors – providing “only take-out meals,” “an uptick in food giveaways throughout the city,” and people still being “very much afraid to be out in public.”

Meals served in June totaled 3,278. That breaks down to 298 children, 754 senior citizens, and 2,226 other adults, Ed notes.

The previous month of May saw a total of 3,344 meals, of which 274 were for children,  634 for senior citizens, and 2,456 other adults.

The partially open dining room can accommodate up to 30 people. The first week of the reopening saw a daily average of 14 people dining in, Ed reports.