The Best $55 You Will Spend All October

Project Soup is back at The Neighborhood Refuge on October 14. Local chefs make the soup, Ridgefield High School students make the bowls, and every dollar goes to the Ridgefield Family Resource Center.

Soup does not photograph well. Nobody has ever called a soup stunning. It is the least glamorous thing you can put in front of a person, and it is also the food we hand people when they are sick, when they are sad, when it has been raining for nine days and they need a reason to leave the house. October 14, The Neighborhood Refuge, six o'clock. Fifty-five dollars.

Here is what that gets you, because it is more than the number suggests.

What $55 actually gets you

You start by choosing a bowl. Not a bowl off a stack of restaurant dishes — a piece of pottery, thrown and glazed by Ridgefield High School students and local potters who donated their work. You pick the one you want.

Then you sample every soup in the room. All of them. This is the part people underestimate. Local chefs each bring their own, and you are not choosing blind — you taste your way down the line first, then go back for a full serving of whichever one got you. Salad, bread and dessert come with it.

A tasting flight, a full dinner, and a piece of local pottery, for the price of two entrees somewhere with cloth napkins. The math is not close.

A brief and completely unsolicited soup manifesto

I have no idea what any of the chefs are making. Nobody has told me. So in the absence of information I am going to use this space to air some positions, and you are free to disagree with all of them at dinner.

We should start with clam chowder, because I have discovered something about myself out here. I grew up on Manhattan clam chowder. Red, tomato-based, absolutely a soup. Say "clam chowder" west of about Pennsylvania and everyone assumes cream, and if you specify the red one, people look at you like you made it up on the spot. I have come to believe Manhattan chowder is understood by roughly four states and viewed with suspicion by the other forty-six. A thirteen colonies thing, possibly. Clams are clams. The tomato version exists and it is good, and I would like somebody to explain the West Coast's position to me directly.

New England chowder is not my thing, and I recognize this puts me in a minority of one in the Pacific Northwest, where the cream-based case makes a certain amount of geographic sense. Cream soups in general are not where I live. I am not going to defend this. It is simply true.

What I will defend: chicken tortilla, which does more with a garnish than any other soup on earth. Chicken noodle, which needs no argument. Tomato basil, which is both pretty and correct. Anything with orzo in it, on principle. And pho, which is a soup the way a cathedral is a building — technically yes, and also a whole separate conversation.

Gazpacho is a perfect soup and October is not its month, which I have made peace with and would like on the record anyway.

And then there is the tomato soup at The Neighborhood Refuge, which I had close to a year ago and still think about at odd hours. Renee. I am asking sincerely. Do I need to start a petition, or can we handle this quietly.

About the bowls

The pottery is the piece of this that surprises people. High school students and local potters made every bowl on the table and donated them outright — nobody is getting paid for any of it. You will stand there longer than you expect trying to decide, because they are not uniform and some of them are genuinely lovely.

There is an old logic behind fundraisers built this way. You hold an empty bowl, you think for a second about the ones that stay empty, and then you fill yours. It could land as a lecture. It does not, mostly because a sixteen-year-old made yours and you will use it for the next decade.

Where the money goes

The Ridgefield Family Resource Center provides food, personal care items and clothing at no cost to Ridgefield School District students, families and staff, and opens to the wider community weekly. It runs on donations and volunteers, and it is a partnership between the school district, Compassion 360 and the Ridgefield Church of the Nazarene.

There is no gala, no annual report anyone reads, no billboard. It has been doing this for over a decade and most people in town could not point to the building. That is the argument for an evening like this — it puts a number on work that otherwise happens entirely off the radar.

Getting a seat

Tickets are limited by the size of the room, and the room is not large. October 14 is a Wednesday, which means it fills with people who planned rather than people who wandered in.

Buy them now. Then put the bowl somewhere you will actually see it.

Questions People Are Going to Ask

Do I get to keep the bowl?

That is the tradition with events built this way — the bowl goes home with you. Worth confirming when you buy your ticket.

Is there a vegetarian option?

With several chefs each bringing something different, there is usually at least one. If you have a specific dietary need, ask when you book rather than hoping.

Can I bring kids?

It is a seated dinner in a bar and restaurant on a school night. Older kids who will sit through it, absolutely. This is not a run-around event.

What if I just want to donate?

You can give to the Resource Center directly and it counts exactly the same. Come to dinner if you can, though. Half the point is the room.