Soup & Bread Forever

We kicked off this year’s soup season on December 3 at the Hideout, on a bitterly cold and vaguely snowy day that had me wondering if anyone would actually turn out. Earlier that day I had ferried Crock-Pots and tablecloths and breadbaskets and ladles out of my basement and into the back of the car, tromping and slipping back and forth across the icy driveway. Why, I asked myself, was I doing this again?

And then of course a few hours later I got the answer: A crowded bar full of happy people, eating delicious soup prepared by our volunteer cooks and sopping up the broth with hunks of bread donated by our friends at Publican Quality Bread and Middlebrow. On the stage, DJ John Soss spun records, while in the front bar Liz McCarthy, owner of GnarWare Workshop, loaded up a table of handmade ceramic bowls of all shapes and sizes, made by GnarWare students and sold to benefit our food pantry partner for this month, Pilsen Food Pantry. Like the soup, the bowls were pay-what-you-can, and you can imagine my surprise when one man, holding a large bowl more suited to a family-style salad than a single cup of soup, handed over a $100 bill. It’s worth it, he said.

At this first Soup & Bread of what is already turning out to be a very wintry winter, we raised around $1,400 for PFP, from the combined soup donations and bowl sales. But, as ever, it was so much more than that. This will be our 18th year of Soup & Bread. We began weekly winter meals in January of 2009, and were abruptly interrupted on March 11, 2020. The next year, there was no soup. The year after that, we reconfigured Soup & Bread as a takeout situation, and while I did love thinking about people all over Chicago sitting down at home with quarts of soup they’d picked up from behind masks at the Hideout, it was such a relief to come back to in-person events in 2023, even if only once a month.

When I started Soup & Bread I was 18 years younger and deeply underemployed, and I lived a 15 minute drive from the bar. These days, I look back on the early years with wonder. How did we DO that every week? We for real don’t have the energy for weekly meals any more. I have a full-time career, and it takes me over an hour to get to the Hideout from my new home in Waukegan. But still, once a month we’re committed to making it happen.

When I wonder why we keep going, I remember that this year has been heavy here in Chicago. Now more than ever it’s important to come together in common spaces, to remind ourselves why we do all the things that we do. It’s important to eat good food prepared with love, out of bowls created by crafty hands. It’s important to listen to music shared by a human, not an algorithm. It’s important to just give ourselves a breather, and to give each other some grace. Because the year may have been brutal at times, but it’s also been full of beauty – no more so than when I’ve seen the city rise up in solidarity, in real life, in real time, no algorithm needed, to tell the world We’re not giving up. We’re never giving up.

I don’t know if we’ll never give up Soup & Bread, but right now I’m saying we’re at least going to make it to our 21st birthday. Because right now we’re old enough to vote, but  in three years we’ll be old enough to throw a truly excellent party. And just maybe, by January of 2029 the world will be a little brighter.

In the meantime, the next Soup & Bread happens January 7, 2026! Join us at the Hideout from 5:30-8 pm; our guest DJ is Kenn Goodman, of Pravda Records and our partner food pantry is Chicago HELP. We still need a few more cooks, so if you are interested please reach out by emailing soupnbread10@gmail.com.

Thanks and see you in the New Year!

Martha