Soup Kitchen
Address: 2012 1100 East (see map)
422 600 North
1411 South Redwood Road
15 West 3300 South
Telephone: 801-467-0908
Website: the-soup-kitchen-restaurants-catering.square.site
District: Sugar House (see map)
Fairpark
Glendale
South Salt Lake
“We’re all in the Soup Kitchen together. My kids, my family, my customers, we feed one another, not just with food but with heart. This isn’t just soup. It’s love, handmade every day.” Roberta “Robi” Sasse has kept the heart of the fifty-two-year-old Soup Kitchen beating through faith, handmade soup, and community, and now she is determined to make it her own.
In Salt Lake City, many people already call Robi the owner. She runs all four Soup Kitchen shops, trains the teams, minds the broth, and keeps the handmade traditions alive. Officially, however, she is not the owner, yet. In the fall of 2025, she was working to raise the last piece she needs so she can buy the business herself and keep it out of corporate hands. “If you do due diligence with hard work and a good heart, it’s all gonna happen. Everything is possible.”
Robi’s life began in two worlds at once. She was born in Sioux City, Iowa - half Dakota Sioux through her mother and half German through her father - and taken as an infant to a farm in Washington State. Her mother raised her in Dakota Sioux traditions. Robi learned early to braid two identities together. There was the weekend pow wows and ceremonies she would not discuss on Monday mornings at school. The quiet strength of her culture sat beside the polished neighborhoods her family could afford because her stepfather, the man who raised her from a very young age, worked his way from trucking to oil. “He always told me, ‘Roberta, it doesn’t matter what anybody says or thinks. You don’t have to be the nurse; you can be the doctor. You don’t have to be a secretary; you can own a corporation. Think big, and if you build it, they will come.’”
Nature was Robi’s first language. Horses, a Shetland pony, the river, animals - she calls herself a naturalist, happiest outdoors. She loved sports, especially basketball, and by the time her family moved to Montana when she was twelve, her mind was already set on living honestly and on her own terms. At fourteen, she left home. She worked nights in restaurants so she could eat, rented rooms in Bozeman living with college students, took AP classes, played ball, kept her grades high, and kept her head down so no one would send her back. “I wanted to be a naturalist and a realist,” she says simply.
College came next. Robi made her way to the University of Portland and earned her degree in physical therapy in 1992. This was no small feat with two little boys in tow. She had met and married Richard Sasse on the Oregon coast; their son Cory was born in 1987, Zach in 1991. After the marriage ended, she spun a little globe with Cory and promised to move wherever his finger landed. It stopped on Utah, “not too big, not too small.” In November 1993, she arrived in Salt Lake City with a five-year-old and a two-year-old, snow she had never known, a taped-together paper map on the wall of the city that she ripped out of the phone book, and a new job with United Cerebral Palsy. “We’re not desert lizards - we’re wetfoot,” she says with a smile, “but we chiseled our lives out of the salt.”
In Utah, Robi began a second long partnership with Dana Parker. They had two children: Tia in 1995 and Destin in 1996. When she was at term with Destin, however, a call came from the hospital. She had cancer and needed to deliver the baby immediately. After her C-section, doctors removed her uterus to save her life. Her mother named the baby. “He was destined to be here,” she said. To this day Robi calls Destin’s birthday her cancer-free day. “We got life together,” she remembers. On his ninth birthday, her boy shook her awake: “It’s your birthday too today. You’re cancer free.”
Family loyalty runs like a river through every chapter. In 2015, within three months, Robi lost three of the men who had anchored her life - her birth father, her everyday stepfather, and her mother’s eldest son from a previous marriage. Two years later, her mother asked her to come to Sioux City and stay. Robi walked away from her house, her job, her routine, her grown children, and cared for her mother through the last hard seasons. “In our culture, taking care of our elders is not just a saying - it is literal.” Her mother passed away in 2020. Robi came home to Salt Lake and to the work that has always felt like art in her hands: Soup Kitchen.
The first Soup Kitchen opened in Sugar House in 1974, built by John and Betty Aiken and their sons. Robi’s mother befriended the family years ago, and that is how Robi first stepped behind the counter - helping where she could, falling in love with the rhythm of a place that built an empire on one cup of soup and word of mouth alone. Fifty-plus years later there are four locations: the original Sugar House shop, a bustling Redwood Road lunch spot, a 33rd & Main store that “holds its own,” and a commissary in Marmalade with a small storefront. The name confuses newcomers, she admits. People call to ask about volunteering as if it were a shelter. But Soup Kitchen is a restaurant, cherished by old-timers and now being discovered by a new generation.
What has not changed is how the food is made. It is all done at the Marmalade commissary. “This is handmade,” Robi repeats, almost like a vow. “We simmer the chicken and beef bones for two days. We roast our own chicken overnight, then hand-feather it. We make our own pasta - semolina, salt, eggs - by hand. No MSG, no preservatives. We have to make it every day.” The soups are the classics people dream about in winter and order by the quart year-round: chicken noodle, clam chowder, creamy tomato, cheese broccoli, vegetable beef, split pea with ham, and seasonal chili from Labor Day to Easter. And then there is the bread - baked fresh every morning, complimentary with dine-in and carryout soup “as long as it lasts.” She is firm about the count - one breadstick for a cup, two for a bowl, three (maybe four) for a quart - so the last customer of the day has the same experience as the first.
Robi is the keeper of all this. The methods are in her hands, not in a binder. “Nothing is measured, nothing is written down,” she says. She learned at the elbows of the founders and their older sons; she is the one who never wavered when shortcuts might have tempted others. Which is why the next step matters so much. The last family member involved is ready to sell. Robi has been screened and pre-approved through the SBA; what she needs now is a qualified partner to stand behind the loan so she can purchase all four shops and steward the next fifty years. She is plain about the stakes. If a corporation buys it, she worries the recipes will be processed, the food will change, and the community will drift away. “How do you build a community with a cup of soup?” she asks, and then answers her own question, “By living it - day after day, pot after pot, bowl after bowl."
Home, for Robi, is a house full of people who care for one another. Her grown children live together now; they swap duties and look after one another. Among their chosen paths, Cory has become a well-known Bitcoin educator in Utah; Tia and her partner, Alex, are part of the new wave of neighborhood entrepreneurs (Alex runs 801 Coffee Roasters in Marmalade); and any or all of them know how to pitch in with breadsticks and pasta when the kitchen needs more hands. “We feed one another,” Robi says - not just soup, but love, pride, and purpose.
Robi often thinks about her mother’s words: We take care of our elders because they took care of us. To her, that is what Soup Kitchen has always been about - caring for the community that built it, one bowl at a time. Each morning, when she unlocks the door and begins simmering broth, she feels a deep sense of gratitude. This is not just a job - it is a life, a continuation of everything her parents taught her about love, work, and dignity. “I believe the universe doesn’t trick us,” she says. “When you work hard, stay true, and lead with love, everything is possible. As long as there is soup on the stove and people who believe in homemade food, there will always be a place called Soup Kitchen.”
