Queer Soup Night
how community and solidarity bloomed from a cataclysmic election
Do you remember where you were on the night of November 8, 2016? Do you remember the disbelief, the denial, the despair that followed the groundbreaking election results? Do you remember feeling powerless in the face of the knowledge that the course of American history was about to take a turn for the worse? Liz Alpern does.
Liz is an acclaimed chef and cookbook author based out of New York. She founded The Gefilteria in 2012 with the mission of reimagining eastern European Jewish cuisine, and published an accompanying cookbook, The Gefilte Manifesto, in 2016. After the election, she recalls feeling numb with fear; like many queer folks, she was afraid of having her hard-fought rights rolled back. As people around her sprang to action, joining activist groups and getting involved in local politics, Liz wondered how she could leverage her skill set to support her community. She decided to contribute in the most comforting and characteristic way she could: through soup.
The first thing you should know about Liz is that she loves soup. She views it not only as a source of comfort and nourishment, but a powerful medium for sharing stories, because of its ubiquity across cultures. In her long career as a chef, and even longer one as a soup aficionado, Liz has seen so many variations - Mexican, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino - on the same theme of “This is what I’m going to serve you and it’s going to feel really good and it’s going to make your house smell like comfort and you’re going to slurp it and it’s gonna stick to your clothes in a good way.”
For the longest time, Liz had wanted to form a culinary venture around soup, but struggled with the question of how to formulate a compelling narrative that revolved around the food group. The answer came to her in the wake of the 2016 election, when the owner of a cafe she frequented offered up her space in the evenings for a potential event. Liz decided that she would take over the coffee shop and throw a soup party for queers. “Soup made sense to bring people together in this time of feeling vulnerable.”
At the inaugural Queer Soup Night, Liz cooked three soups. She threw an intimate party for her friends and their friends. The timing was serendipitous: that weekend Trump had instated a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries and many people who protested at the airports rolled through at the end of the day, seeking the comfort of a warm bowl of soup. After a successful first event, it was clear that this was something they could replicate.
The organization grew slowly and with great intentionality. From New York City, it first expanded to Gainesville, Florida when one of the organizers moved there. Before long, a chef friend of Liz’s from Portland, Oregon reached out to host an event in their city. This initial growth was carefully curated and carried out by Liz’s personal friends, who were professionally trained cooks and took the time to learn the organization’s mission and the model at depth.
Soon after, Liz started getting contacted by strangers, and the network grew one rung out at a time. On the whole, the profile of the kind of person who would start a Queer Soup Night chapter in their place is somewhat similar: they’re usually in their late 20s to early 40s, live in a queer center, are trained in the hospitality industry, and have relationships with chefs. “The queer world is small so there’s some established trust,” Liz shares. However as the movement grew ever larger – Queer Soup Night is currently in eleven cities across America – she had to establish guidelines and rules.
The organization has a three-fold mission:
Strengthen the local queer community
Raise money for local charitable organizations
Lift up local chefs
Anyone can attend, but they are very clear about the fact that these are queer community events, by queers and for queers. There is also a clear focus on the collective and local. In 2023, they raised over $50,000, which Liz points out came from thousands of $12 donations, emphasizing the importance of collective impact. They are selective about where they donate the funds to, with a strong preference for local grassroots movements where $500 could make a huge difference.
This can be a difficult line to toe (for example, a lot of attention is currently on supporting Palestinians abroad), but they have always aimed to uphold their goal of keeping funds within a community as defined by geography boundaries. Ultimately, it’s in service of trying to build something that strengthens local, IRL connections. That’s why the team crafts each element of their events to be thoughtfully directed toward connecting their guests where they are, at this present space and time.
Eight years in, Queer Soup Night is purely a passion project for Liz. She has never made money from it, rather she is extremely motivated by sharing nourishment, comfort, and culture through the soups that she and other chefs make. One of the most rewarding aspects of throwing these parties is the ability to connect people: “Soup is a lot more relatable than a lot of foods. It’s easy for people to talk about even if they’re not culinary-minded.” Liz has seen how soup gives guests an automatic inroad to chat with each other, and the conversations and connections that form over soup is yet another layer of nourishment for all involved.
If you asked Liz a few years ago what her goal for Queer Soup Night was, she would have told you that it was to expand the movement as much as possible. Now, staring down the barrel at another potential Trump presidency, her goal is simply to keep organizing, to keep showing up, to keep raising money, to keep building community. “To me the only antidote to the horrors of the world is to be connected to each other. It is literally the only way that we are going to collectively change anything, and it’s great to donate from your home, and it’s even more powerful to donate collectively with other people and see where that money goes.”
Thank you so much to Liz for taking the time to chat with me, and for all the work you do to uplift your community. Stay up to date with Queer Soup Night (Instagram/website) to learn about events in your city and how you can get involved! For my fellow New Yorkers, the next event will be a pride celebration on June 26th at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens 🌸