The Capuchin Soup Kitchen has fed Detroit’s east side since 1929. Next year, its original Meldrum Street dining room will do it differently. The Capuchins are renovating the building at 1264 Meldrum into Refettorio Detroit. There, guests will sit down at a table, and volunteers will serve them a starter, an entree, dessert and coffee instead of handing them a tray in a cafeteria line. Donors are paying for the $2.4 million project, according to the Capuchins and CBS Detroit, and it is scheduled to open in early 2027.
What Refettorio Detroit will look like
The word refettorio is Italian for a dining hall, the room where monks eat together. The model comes from Food for Soul, the nonprofit founded by chef Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore. It runs dining rooms in cities including London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney. Two are in the United States, in Harlem and San Francisco. Detroit will be the third.
The Meldrum site is 8,000 square feet. BridgeDetroit reported that the design, by Constantine George Pappas AIA Architecture/Planning, uses long rectangular tables meant to get strangers talking. Volunteers will clear plates between courses. Local artists, including muralists, tilemakers, potters and woodworkers, are contributing to the room, according to the Refettorio Detroit site. The plan builds in food recovery as well. The kitchen already composts scraps at its Earthworks Urban Farm and grows produce for the soup kitchens.
Alison Costello, the soup kitchen’s director of food service and hospitality, will run the menu. BridgeDetroit reported that the plated dishes will include Moroccan chicken with preserved lemons, and that the site expects to serve 200 to 250 meals a day once it opens. Gary Wegner, the Capuchin brother who serves as executive director, told BridgeDetroit: “None of us are just walking stomachs and neither are our guests.”
Service has not stopped for construction. Since June, guests at Meldrum have been eating in a climate-controlled tent on the property, according to WJR.
A soup kitchen that started at a monastery door
The Capuchin friars built St. Bonaventure Monastery on Mount Elliott Street in 1883. In 1924, Father Solanus Casey arrived and took the job of porter, the friar who answers the door. When the Depression hit in 1929, hungry neighbors began knocking at the back of the monastery. According to the Capuchins’ own history, Solanus told the other friars, “They are hungry; get them some soup and sandwiches.” The line eventually grew to more than 2,000 people a day. Father Herman Buss, lay members of the Third Order of St. Francis and a volunteer named Ray McDonough organized the soup kitchen in the hall next door.
The Capuchins say the question of who founded the kitchen is complicated, and they credit all of them. Solanus Casey was beatified on Nov. 18, 2017, the step before sainthood in the Catholic Church. The Solanus Casey Center next to the monastery draws visitors from across the country.
What the Capuchin Soup Kitchen serves today
In 2024, the two meal sites served 236,787 meals, about 1,000 a day, according to the Capuchins. That was a 20 percent increase over the prior year. The food pantry at the Capuchin Services Center handed out nearly 3.4 million pounds of food in the same year. Meals at Meldrum and Conner are free and open to anyone who walks in.
Refettorio Detroit is meant to keep that open door and add a chair, a plate and a second course. As Wegner put it to BridgeDetroit, the hope is that the art and the room “will also feed those spirits as well.”
Refettorio Detroit is at 1264 Meldrum St., Detroit, at St. Paul Street. The Capuchin Soup Kitchen accepts donations and volunteer sign-ups at cskdetroit.org, and project updates are at refettoriodetroit.org.