Jean Webster

Jean Webster (January 7, 1935 – January 10, 2011) was an American cook who operated Sister Jean's Kitchen, a soup kitchen in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Webster began serving free meals to the poor of the city out of her own home in 1986, cooked in her personal kitchen. Eventually her informal charity expanded into a substantial operation that moved to Victory First Presbyterian Deliverance Church. Food was available to any and all who came. At its height, Sister Jean's Kitchen served over 400 people per day with hot meals.

Life and career Jean Webster was born in New York City in 1935. She moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, at age 4 or 5 after her father switched jobs. She attended culinary school after graduating from the school system. Even before completion of school, she was working on the side to help her family's finances. From a young age, she worked as a cook at nursing homes to help support her five sisters and three brothers. She had a job at the kitchen of the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel as a dish-washer at the age of 18; she learned to cook from a chef there. Her employers included the Playboy Hotel and Casino, Caesars Atlantic City, Atlantis Hotel and Casino, and the Trump Taj Mahal. She said that she felt called by God to start a mission of feeding people, and made it known that she would feed anyone who stopped by. Lines formed outside her home once word spread through the Atlantic City community. During the early phases of her operation, she fed around 100 regular attendees two meals a day, and spent nearly all of her free time cooking, while she held down a regular job at the Taj Mahal. Her charity eventually drew attention outside her own church. While she had initially used her own funds to pay for food, the popularity of her food distribution rendered this unsustainable. She obtained funding from local churches, the Taj Mahal, as well as other casinos to continue her work. Webster's old employer, the nearby Taj Mahal, furnished much of the kitchen equipment. On holidays, attendance would surge; in 2001, the kitchen served over 1,600 people on Thanksgiving.

Webster disliked the term "soup kitchen" for having a quick-and-dirty connotation, and her kitchen served more than soup. She preferred to emphasize the community and spirituality aspect, describing the operation as a "house of happiness" or "mission", as well as referring to attendees as "guests".

Health issues and age impaired Webster's ability to continue working in the late 2000s. Economic issues, such as the declining profitability of Atlantic City casinos and the recession of 2007–2009, put pressure on the funding of the kitchen, and Sister Jean's Kitchen had to lay off staff in late 2008. She was survived by her daughter Cecelia Woodard, a grandchild, and two great-grandchildren. Victory First was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. As a result, the urgency in searching for options to move out increased. In 2017, the organization purchased space at St. Monica's, a former Catholic church on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks away from Victory First. The Friends of Jean Webster planned to renovate St. Monica's kitchen and use it as the new home of the soup kitchen with support from the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA), a public agency that uses taxes from the casinos for projects to improve Atlantic City. However, these plans largely fell through. The St. Monica's building was deemed unsafe in its current condition, and fixing this would require a larger grant than the CRDA was willing to provide after estimates of the cost of the renovation climbed to 2 million dollars.

City inspectors considered Victory First still too damaged to continue to host the soup kitchen. Sister Jean's Kitchen shut down in February 2019 after continuing concerns about safety and fitness for purpose of Victory First.

In November 2020, Sister Jean's Pantry was opened by the Friends of Jean Webster. Rather than the soup kitchen of before that served hot meals daily, something made infeasible both by budget and by the coronavirus pandemic impacting in-person dining, the Pantry is instead an emergency source of non-perishable food boxes. It operates out of St. Monica's, which while not fully renovated for kitchen use, was approved for the simpler pantry distribution purpose. While the renovations of the building remain stalled, the Friends of Jean Webster organization eventually brought back the full soup kitchen with hot meals in the summer of 2024.