A Kickstarter campaign seeks funding for a creative way of recycling Federal Donuts' leftover chicken
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
When the first Federal Donuts opened in 2011, partners Steve Cook and Mike Solomonov decided that 15 chickens per day would be more than enough for their Pennsport fried-chicken-and-doughnut shop. “Now, depending on the week, we’re up to 1,500 chickens a week,” Cook explains.
Since opening their largest-yet FedNuts at 7th and Fairmount, they’ve been able to start breaking down their own chickens. Of course, this isn’t any old chicken. They’re Amish-raised, Indiana-bred free-range birds that are antibiotic-free and given all-vegetarian, non-G.M.O. feed. “We have this chicken that tastes amazing and we’re super excited to be in the chicken business and we feel great about,” Cook says. “But now we have 1,000 pounds of backs and bones every week that we have to deal with. The problem is literally on our doorstep.”
FedNuts had been trashing the leftover chicken up until now, but when Cook and pastor Bill Golderer of Broad Street Ministries got together and started thinking, those backs and bones became the business plan for Rooster Soup Co., which is currently seeking funding via Kickstarter.
“What if we took all of this leftover chicken and used it to make the best chicken soup in Philadelphia?” Solomonov asks in the Rooster Soup Co.’s Kickstarter video, dressed in a bright yellow chicken suit.
The plan is to open a Center City fast-casual restaurant that serves, you guessed it, chicken soup made from FedNuts seconds. Lunchtime soup from the folks that brought us Federal Donuts and the modern Israeli cuisine of Zahav sounds pretty great, right? Well, it gets better. Cook and Solomonov are teaming up with Broad Street Ministry and hoping to make Rooster Soup Co. a nonprofit restaurant with the proceeds benefiting the charity’s hospitality services.
Golderer likes to tell Cook that they’re both in the business of feeding people — they’re just working at different price points. Unlike other soup kitchens in the city, the Broad Street Ministry operates with more than a modicum of humanity. Homeless or hungry diners sit at tables in a lovely old church and are given a healthful meal prepared by an actual chef and served tableside by volunteer waitstaff. It’s all very civilized compared to most soup kitchens.
“We came up with this idea of a restaurant that you and I would go in,” Cook says. “We’d drop our $8 or $10 on lunch and know that by doing that we were doing something that actually makes a difference.”
