the.com/soup kitchen

means A place where free meals are given to people who are hungry or can't afford food, usually run by charities, churches, or volunteers.

from A straightforward compound of 'soup' — long the cheapest way to stretch scarce ingredients into something warm and filling — and 'kitchen.' The phrase took hold in the 1800s, when charitable groups set up public kitchens to ladle out soup and bread to the poor during hard winters and depressions; it became especially fixed in the public mind through the breadlines and relief kitchens of the 1930s economic crisis, which is why the term still carries the black-and-white image of a long, patient line.