Soup on Sunday is back this year in Charlotte. Here’s how to order and pick up
Here’s a heavenly way to celebrate the legacy of Charlotte food icon Catherine Rabb: Purchase homemade soup and support a ministry that serves the seriously ill and dying.
“Soup is comfort, and hospice is comfort,” Pete Brunnick said. “That’s really what this is all about.”
Brunnick leads Hospice & Palliative Care Charlotte Region, whose signature Soup on Sunday returns each January to whet our appetite. This year’s event on Jan. 30 is virtual and features soups from 22 chefs.
This 22nd annual devouring of chowders, bisques and the like is especially poignant.
Rabb was 64 when cancer took her on Dec. 8. She and her husband, Don, opened Fenwick’s in 1984, one of those cozy restaurants where everyone knows your name. After 37 years, it’s still going strong on Providence Road. Catherine also ran a catering business, wrote a wine column for The Charlotte Observer, taught at Central Piedmont Community College and Johnson & Wales University, and mentored who knows how many up-and-coming chefs.
Longtime Charlotte food journalist Kathleen Purvis wrote this in Unpretentious Palate upon Rabb’s passing: “Even when she was teaching a full load of classes, she was still running Fenwick’s, ball cap covering her blonde hair while she wielded a spatula at the burger grill. She’d tell me funny stories about the travails of running a small restaurant, like fielding customer complaints or the glamour of getting down on her knees to clean out the grease traps. Sara Guterbock (a friend of Rabb’s) remembers her making hundreds of pies for her Thanksgiving catering operation: ‘The number of things she did and yet, she managed to smile all the time. Damn, how that woman could smile.”
Rabb was there at the start of Soup on Sunday, helping recruit chefs and grow it into what it has become today: “A monster,” Don Rabb said. The event has raised $725,000 to help HPCCR offer free bereavement care. Each day in Mecklenburg and 29 other North Carolina. and South Carolina. counties, HPCCR staff and volunteers visit 3,000 patients.
Rabb’s belief in the power of food to warm our souls was one inspiration for her involvement in Soup on Sunday. Her father benefiting from hospice before he died was another.
“I absolutely adored working with Catherine,” said Nancy Cole, HPCCR’s Soup on Sunday organizer. “She trained me on everything soup years ago. I was in awe of her attention to detail.”
Catherine embraced the cause of caring for the sick and dying. She appreciated that Soup on Sunday offered a day’s respite from the gray of winter. After all these years, she and Don learned that every Soup on Sunday gathering had to include Fenwick’s signature tomato bisque —his year most of all.
Need more wooing? The complete list of soups is online. Where else can you purchase okra soup from Mert’s, shrimp bisque from Johnson & Wales, roasted red onion bisque with smoked bacon from the Fig Tree and more?
How to order
How to order: Order online by 5 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 27 to get your soup and pottery bowl.
Cost: Soups – fresh, not frozen – are $20 a quart. Pottery bowls are $15 each.
Pickup hours: 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 30
Pickup location: CPCC’s Philip Van Every Building, 425 N. Kings Drive, Charlotte, NC 28204 (A drive-thru pickup to rival Chick-fil-A is promised.)
Former Charlotte Observer reporter and editor Ken Garfield is a freelance writer and editor in Charlotte, mostly for charitable causes. He also writes obituaries. Reach him at garfieldken3129@gmail.com.
This story was originally published January 25, 2022 at 1:40 PM.