Soup Kitchen Disguised as Cafe Offers Side of Dignity to Kansas City Poor
There’s no waiting in line at this soup kitchen where food is served with plenty of humanity.
The staff takes your custom order right at your table and brings healthy meals even if you don’t have a dime in your pocket.
The Kansas City Community Kitchen feeds the city’s hungry in a restaurant setting. When someone comes in off the street for a hot meal, they’re met by a greeter who takes them to a table where a waiter takes the person’s order.
It sometimes catches the homeless off-guard.
“It’s different,” Brian Oglesby told the Kansas City Star “They’re treating me good, like they don’t know I’m homeless.”
The kitchen staff whips up healthy fare based on the ingredients they have for the day, and the presentation on the plate looks like what something from an upscale restaurant.
Substitutions are no problem. The Kitchen can make changes to meet health, dietary, or religious requirements.
The selections are low in sodium and high in nutrients — an effort to reduce the cases of hypertension, diabetes, and expensive hospital visits for the homeless.
The people behind the project have something more than just food on their menu — they want to find jobs for the homeless.
Episcopal Community Services, which runs the kitchen, offers volunteers a six-month training program in culinary arts. The final two months, they work in restaurants as interns — with requirements that they receive a minimum wage of $13 an hour.
Kansas City isn’t the only American city using this model to feed the hungry. Masbia—which means “to satiate” in Hebrew—is a three-kitchen network in New York City serving healthy kosher food to the poor in a setting that runs exactly like a cafe, except without requiring payment, in Brooklyn and Queens.
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