West Side restaurateur Quinten Love isn’t going to let his city go hungry as the Trump administration freezes funding for food assistance to millions of Americans.
Love will begin serving free meals at The Soul Food Lounge, his restaurant at 3804 W. 16th St. in North Lawndale, from noon to 3 p.m. every Tuesday starting this week. The Soul Food Lounge will offer meals to “anyone who’s hungry,” Love said.
“It’s about uplifting people through food,” he said in an interview with Block Club.
Love is launching the initiative as the federal government has cut off funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, due to the prolonged government shutdown. The chef is calling on more restaurants to open their doors to the thousands of Chicagoans left without food assistance benefits.
“I’m taking a step of faith out there … to say that I think that all restaurant owners should do this,” he said. “Until this crisis ends permanently, we should all close our doors on different days once a week [to paying customers] and open them up to give away free meals for at least three hours a day.”
On Saturday, nearly 2 million Illinois residents lost SNAP benefits, according to an Illinois Department of Human Services news release. SNAP payments are distributed monthly and are scaled up depending on household size.
In a fast-changing situation, the Trump administration on Monday responded to a judge’s order that November SNAP payments must be made from an emergency fund for SNAP. The administration said it would fund partial payments for November.
Nonprofit food pantries, many of which have already been stretched thin by rising demand in recent years, may not have enough food and resources to meet the extra demand from SNAP households, pantry officials have said.
Gov. JB Pritzker signed an executive order last Thursday that funnels $20 million in state funding to food banks across Illinois. But the need for restaurants to fill in those gaps in food assistance is dire, Love said.
Soul Food Lounge’s operation will be “all hands on deck,” and all who come will be served without having to provide proof of SNAP status, Love said. A mix of volunteers and Love’s own employees will prepare and serve the meals every Tuesday.
“People will donate their time, and we’ll just cook,” he said. “We’ll keep cooking, cook, cook, cook. Then we’ll plate those meals up and keep serving them out the door until we exhaust all the food that we have.”
Love has long been a proponent of food drives and provided free meals to the food insecure at his previous restaurant, Turkey Chop, every Monday. The chef opened Soul Food Lounge in 2022 as a joint venture with the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation.
When people starve, violence has a tendency to spike — and without SNAP, those with means carry a responsibility to uphold the nutritional health of marginalized communities, Love said.
“If you’re not eating nutritious meals, you have more of a propensity towards violence,” he said. “It’s not just a bad environment, but it’s also how you eat. That’s why SNAP has been so important, because that was the structure that tried to ensure that people ate properly – and it’s now gone.”
Love announced the program in a video posted to social media, where he encouraged donations for the operation through his nonprofit’s GoFundMe page, which raised nearly $2,000 as of Sunday.
“Everyone deserves a nutritious meal. It’s time for us to take action and serve our communities,” Love said in the video. “If all of us are feeding 500 to 1,000 people, we can help fix this problem.”
