Soup night at the bar: The rules are simple
I’d been hanging around the Hideout, a small bar in Chicago on an aging industrial strip, for more than a decade when I made the leap from patron to bartender in 2008. At that point, work in journalism had become hard to find. A book project I’d started floundered and then stalled. Staring down the barrel of another Chicago winter at age 40 and trying to figure out what to do next, I was, I admit, a little freaked. And then I started to serve soup.
Soup & Bread, the free community meal I launched in January 2009, didn’t start out as anything terribly ambitious. I was tending bar Wednesday afternoons and, frankly, it was a dead time. We don’t have a lot of happy-hour traffic. Things at the Hideout—a music club—don’t really get going until after dark.
Free food seemed like a way of bringing people into the bar that would benefit both its bottom line and my own. The recession was hitting hard. More and more of my friends were losing their jobs. At times, it seemed like the whole city could just use a nice bowl of soup.
