Feeding Hungry New Yorkers With a Big Dollop of Love
When life chugs along in a same-old, same-old way, it can feel like nothing is ever going to change. Until something blows in out of left field that makes you swerve into new directions. That “left field” sensation hit Nancy Burgos-Jackson about eight years ago when she stepped into a soup kitchen run by the Church of the Village in New York City.
What she found there made her heart sink.
At first blush, the kitchen sounds exceptional, and so necessary. Countless hard-strapped people around New York come to the kitchen, known as The Red Door Place, for a meal on Saturdays. Red Door transforms into a pantry, doling out bags of donated groceries, on Tuesdays.
Nancy had come there in her role as an executive chef at JC Foods, which provides independent schools with meal services. One of the schools Nancy was working with is right down the block from the church, and she needed to use its kitchen to train staff.
“Sometimes we’d come in on Mondays and see that the kitchen wasn’t all that clean. We would see leftover food from the soup kitchen. It was really gross,” Nancy recalls. “I said to myself, ‘I can’t believe they’re giving this kind of food to people.’ It was so sad.”
HUNGRY FOR HELP
When the chef running the soup kitchen quit, the church’s head pastor turned to Nancy for support. She helped him find some workers and also stepped in to volunteer herself on a temporary basis. But when she met the new director of Red Door, Teresa Concepción, they really hit it off. Nancy had all kinds of ideas about how to serve hearty food that doesn’t cost a lot. She’s been volunteering ever since.
Previously, people who came to Red Door were used to receiving cheap tuna or pasta over terrible marinara from a can, Nancy relates. Now, diners are treated to menus like baked ziti, garlic bread, Italian salad, a dessert and one or two beverages. “I want to give them good, good food,” Nancy says. “I would never serve something that I wouldn’t give to my own family.”
A FAMILY LOVE AFFAIR
In fact, her whole family has become involved at Red Door. Nancy sometimes brings her twin daughters — Sophia and Sienna — to help out. Even Nancy’s young nephew, Grayson, and husband, Vernon, have volunteered in various ways.
Needless to say, it takes a certain amount of creativity to work with the money Red Door receives from grants and donated surplus food. Once in a while, it has been given some shrimp, but not enough to feed a whole crowd. When that’s happened, Teresa freezes it up. At one point, when enough shrimp had accumulated, Nancy made penne pasta with dill cream sauce and shrimp.
One recent Saturday, the kitchen served cheeseburgers with sliced tomatoes and roasted red onions on an everything roll. Sides included a potato salad and heirloom grape tomatoes with balsamic vinaigrette dressing. They had to stop serving at 440 people, because they ran out of food.
Needless to say, those are the kinds of meals served at any number of fine restaurants in Manhattan. But the feeling of “just scraping by” can certainly rear its head at Red Door. One day, Teresa told Nancy that she had no money in the budget. But she did have some cases of canned chickpeas. “What can you do with that?” Teresa asked.
“Well, there’s this curried chickpea stew that I make at work for the kids,” Nancy said. In addition to the chickpeas, the stew is a tasty mélange of carrots, kale, coconut milk, butternut squash, and curry.
She wasn’t sure how it would go over. The people who come to eat at the soup kitchen are used to meat or fish with their meals. She was prepared for a bad reaction, but the crowd loved it. “I just cook with love,” Nancy says. “It’s a vegetarian meal that even a meat eater will enjoy.”
NEW YORKERS SPREAD THE WORD
When Nancy first started volunteering in the kitchen, it typically served meals to about 75 people. But word got around about how good the food had become, and the number of diners grew to as many as 800 some Saturdays. They come “from all walks of life,” Nancy says. The lines of people waiting have gone all the way down the block.
Nothing slowed down during the pandemic. In fact it intensified — with more New Yorkers than ever needing a good meal to keep them going during harder times. Instead of sitting down at tables, the Red Door crew boxed up the food, and diners picked it up and ate elsewhere. That is still the way Red Door serves meals, although there is hope it will go back to sit-down dining in coming months.
Nancy’s giving hasn’t stopped there. I know, because I lived down the hall from Nancy and her family in a Harlem apartment building for years. When COVID was at its peak, and it was hard for anyone to shop, Nancy would knock on our door. She looked so tired, after a long day of volunteering, but there she was with a big bag of groceries from the pantry for my husband and me. She spread that “wealth” to other people in our building as well. And one day, she gave us some of that amazing chickpea stew. So I’m especially glad she’s allowing me to share the recipe here.
I’m not the only writer and foodie who noticed what Nancy is doing. One of the people she met along the way became the Editor in Chief of Bon Appétit magazine, Dawn Davis. She featured Nancy and her work at Red Door in a February 2021 article about essential workers. To top it off, she also mentioned Nancy in an interview during a CBS This Morning segment.
While that certainly added some glam to Nancy’s work at the time, I had to wonder why it is that she keeps doing this. Her twins are now teenagers, and her day job sounds pretty demanding, too.
“I get up in the morning on a Saturday, and I just think, ‘Yes! I’m going to the Red Door.’ I get the energy. I want to do it,” she explains.
“I have a volunteer who’s 80. She started volunteering right before the pandemic, and she hasn’t left. She goes in there like it’s her job. So if she can do it, I can do it. It just makes me feel good, going there.”
