Is St. James Soup Kitchen Still Open? Restaurant: Impossible (FN) Update

On Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network), Robert Irvine departed from the show's usual for-profit format to renovate St. James Soup Kitchen, a program of St. James Social Service Corporation (SJSSC) in Newark, New Jersey, run by executive director Vesta Godwin Clark. According to the episode and SJSSC's own materials, the soup kitchen served roughly 150 people a day, most of them homeless, with no one turned away, making it one of the larger food providers in the surrounding community. Six months before filming, a fire had damaged the building and much of the kitchen equipment, leaving the volunteer-run operation struggling to keep pace with demand on a facility that was already worn and under-resourced.

Irvine's team spent two days and $10,000 replacing damaged equipment, cleaning and repairing the kitchen, and redesigning the dining room so it could better serve both the daily feeding program and the community it depended on. The episode, which aired November 23, 2011, framed the renovation as one of Irvine's most demanding given the facility's charitable mission and its reliance on donations and volunteer labor rather than paying customers. Since the episode, SJSSC has continued operating at the same Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard address.

The organization's own website describes its daily feeding operation, now branded the Soulfood Cafe Soup Kitchen, as continuing to serve meals alongside an Emergency Food Pantry that distributes groceries to thousands of families a year, and states the agency serves more than 60,000 individuals annually across its food, clothing, and housing-assistance programs. A food-assistance directory listing for the St. James Social Service Corporation pantry and soup kitchen likewise shows the program still listed at the same address, though that listing notes it has not been recently reverified by the directory itself. No reporting was found of a closure, relocation, or name change for the soup kitchen or its parent nonprofit since the renovation; the 'Soulfood Cafe' branding referenced on SJSSC's site appears to be the program name for the daily feeding operation rather than a rebrand of the organization.