Escondido’s Gourmet Soup Kitchen : Louie’s Will Still Dish Out Food After Sponsor Pulls Plug

Louie Sanchez, who is sometimes criticized for being too darn cheerful at 6 in the morning, operates this city’s only soup kitchen to feed the poor.

Well, maybe it ought not be called a soup kitchen.

For starters, it’s more than a kitchen. It’s his own restaurant, Louie’s, on South Escondido Boulevard. After the 50 to 75 morning meals are served for free, an equal number of sack lunches are handed out and the place is cleaned up, he opens the restaurant at 11 a.m. for his regular commercial trade.

And while he does serve soup, he also gets a little creative. This morning, he’s presenting roast duck and wild rice to his nonpaying guests.

Some soup kitchen.

He says it is a dream come true, the ability not only to cook good food but to give away as much as possible to help fill hungry stomachs. Even during one of his early jobs as a cook years ago, “on my day off I’d make a big pot of something and share it with the people in my apartment. I love to share. I just wish I had more to share.”

So it is that every morning at 6, Sanchez and his yawning band of 10 or so volunteers start preparing the morning meal--not necessarily a typical breakfast but nonetheless prepared with the expertise of a man who spent four years as one of the chief cooks at La Costa Hotel and Resort.

The other day, breakfast included shredded cheese soup, turkey soup, baked beans and onions, fresh strawberries laced with a touch of amaretto and fresh cinnamon, rice pilaf, doughnuts, fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, chocolate drink and coffee.

“I have this lady--I wish I knew her name--who brings by eight boxes of strawberries. When I empty the boxes, she fills them with more berries,” he said. Local bakeries donate cakes, and he uses donated cash to buy bread and other staples that aren’t donated.

“It’s not steak and eggs but, hey, it’s breakfast,” said one of the men who arrived at the back door of the restaurant at 7 a.m. and got in line for the meal.

Sanchez said: “I wish we had more eggs.”

There is no stereotyping the people who look to the restaurant every morning for breakfast, except that they are hungry.

An elderly couple came by bus from Vista for their meal. Don Andersen said he had been coming nearly every day since the place opened six weeks ago because he is “down and out.”

An old geezer nicknamed T-Bone was working a cup of coffee, sitting alone because he was unable to carry on a coherent conversation and nobody was much interested in hearing about his father the pirate. There were maybe two dozen Mexican laborers quietly enjoying a hot meal and feeling no rush to leave. There was Howard, 34, with unkempt hair and a wild beard, who had been arrested three times in two weeks for vagrancy for sleeping in a car. There was Terrell, a man with two earrings in his left ear who said he was unable to hold a job because of a disability. Another young man said he slept in vacant houses at night and was appreciative of a free meal. “But I don’t burglar homes,” he added. “If I did, I wouldn’t need to be here looking for free food.”

“Don’t ask me how these people got to be in the situations they’re in, but they do, and they need a place to eat,” remarked Joe Craiger, one of the volunteers who comes here daily and whose deep, resonant voice attracts attention when he talks. He is a professional singer and everyone was wishing him good luck during auditions at the Starlight Bowl in San Diego.

Craiger looked at the young people eating breakfast. “There are programs for drug abuse but they don’t put food in their belly, and they need to eat too,” he said.

He talked about how one group of regular customers at the soup kitchen, a scraggly bunch of fellows, cleaned themselves up, got haircuts, found jobs and have stopped coming back.

“They’re not here today and that’s good because that means they’re back on their feet. It was hard for them to come in here in the first place because of their pride, so what you do is treat them with a little respect,” he said. “I’ve been in that situation myself and I know what it means to be at the point where you have to pull yourself up.”

Another emerging success story is a woman named Lorna, who walked in with her three children, ranging in age from 5 to 10. She came to San Diego County from Arizona with her husband, in search of work. They found themselves unable to afford housing and had been living--and sleeping--in a car for two weeks until she stumbled across the soup kitchen.

She was directed by kitchen volunteers to emergency shelter for herself and her children while her husband continued to live in the car; he eventually found work, and now they have found an apartment. Money is still tight, so Mom and the kids still come here for breakfast.

This particular day was the oldest child’s birthday; the word spread and, somehow, three toys suddenly appeared at the table--one for each child. The birthday boy was wide-eyed as he played with his new Transformer.

Louie’s, which has been open about a year, was transformed into an early-morning soup kitchen six weeks ago under the official sponsorship of the North County Interfaith Council (NCIC), a consortium of 25 Christian churches and Jewish temples. The council’s primary activity is the operation of its Crisis Center, which offers emergency food, housing, legal advice and psychiatric help for those in need.

The council decided to offer a hot food program and Sanchez offered his restaurant’s kitchen and dining room. The NCIC coordinated most of the volunteer staffing and provided most of the food that Sanchez prepared. The program was named Bethlehem (House of Bread) and among its Mexican supporters is known as Casa de Pan.

But last week the NCIC board of directors voted to end sponsorship of the soup kitchen at Louie’s, effective after the last meal was served on Friday. An NCIC spokesman said a new soup kitchen would open elsewhere in Escondido, perhaps as early as Monday.

Ironically, NCIC presented Sanchez with a recognition plaque earlier this year “in grateful appreciation for his efforts to help feed the hungry.”

Julia Keyes, president of the NCIC board, said in a prepared statement that, while “we are grateful to Louie for allowing us to use his facility,” a new location would be found because “we are not in agreement on policy.”

An NCIC spokesman elaborated only slightly, saying that a serious disagreement had arisen about the management of the soup kitchen so NCIC decided to part ways with Sanchez and feed the poor elsewhere.

Sanchez said he would continue the soup kitchen, with or without NCIC support of food and manpower.

“I will continue, as long as people help by giving me food to share,” he said.

“You feed the hungry because you love to see them happy. I love to cook, to see people happy, eating the things I make with my hands.

“These people sleep in dumpsters, in parks, in their cars. That’s not right, and when I’m in bed and it’s raining outside, it cripples me, wondering how they are. I know I will never end the poverty, but why not share what we can?”

“Louie’s a giver,” Craiger said. “Look at all the restaurants in town. How many have offered their kitchens and their dining rooms to help feed the hungry? Just Louie.”

Amaretto on strawberries?

“I let them know they’ll have something real good to eat when they come here, because these people, they’re real good too, and they deserve it,” said Sanchez, whose cheeks must hurt from smiling and laughing so much as he goes about his work.

“One man asked me, ‘Louie, why are you so happy all the time?’ I said, ‘I just am. Don’t you like it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but not every morning.’ ”

The only expectation Sanchez places on his guests is that they bow their heads in prayer before breakfast is served. Thanksgiving is offered, both for the food and the morning’s fellowship.

“You must feed the soul as well as the body,” he said. “I’m not preaching. I’m just trying to feed them both ways.”

Sanchez has enjoyed his religion in different ways. He grew up in Mexico, attended a Catholic grade school and remembers “hiding in the closet and drinking the priest’s wine.” He laughs loudly at the memory.