SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Volunteers Make Meal a Blessing

The soup du jour on a recent Monday at Olamendi’s restaurant was minestrone, complete with zucchini, potatoes, five kinds of beans, onions, tomatoes and Italian sausage. There was a garden salad on the side, along with breads and pastries from the five-star Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

The meal is not on the restaurant’s usual bill of fare. But the meal, or others like it, is available free there every Monday night, thanks to a group of volunteers from the parish of Mission San Juan Capistrano.

“We make enough (soup) for about 50 servings,” said Mario Cuevas, one of the organizers of the weekly free group meal. “Maybe, at some point, we’ll have to make more.”

Cuevas, the soccer coach at Santa Margarita High School, along with San Juan Capistrano resident Gerry Monahan and Jose Duarte, owner of Olamendi’s, launched the free meal program in June. They figure that they served 135 meals that month and hope to soon reach 250 a month.

“Most people are a little bit wary of (the free meals) at first,” Cuevas said. “They think there must be a catch or something, that we are going to preach to them or something. But we just want to feed people.”

The soup kitchen is an outgrowth of Mission San Juan Capistrano’s food bank, Monahan said. With nearly 200 people accepting food from the mission on a weekly basis, it is obvious that there are hungry people in the community, she said.

“We had 197 people pick up food (from the mission) last week,” she said. “I’m always shocked that it keeps going up.”

Putting the dinner together on a recent Monday was nearly an all-day affair. Judy Millar, a registered nurse from Laguna Hills, arrived at the restaurant at noon to start the soup. Millar, who does some catering on the side, has volunteered to cook two Mondays a month.

“We try to serve a hearty meal, with plenty of vegetables and legumes, for a good source of protein and complex carbohydrates,” Millar said.

At about 3:30 p.m., two more volunteers, Paul Duclos of Laguna Niguel and Frank Prenovost of San Juan Capistrano, met at the restaurant and headed off to the Ritz-Carlton to pick up day-old breads and pastries left over from Sunday brunch.

“One of the former chefs at the Ritz-Carlton was a member of the parish, so he helped us at the beginning,” Cuevas said. “And he arranged for us to get bread and pastries.”

After seven weeks of serving meals, a group of regulars has begun to show up every Monday. One group of children arrives early and helps set the table, and a homeless man is always the last to leave.

“He makes it a point to sweep the area and stack the chairs,” Monahan said. “It’s a matter of pride to some, to help out in some way. But we just want them to get a good meal.”