New Restaurant Planned For Soup Bros Space

Clarke Street Sausage, a pop-up deli known to frequent Riverwest, is planning its first brick-and-mortar location in Walker’s Point, at the former home of Soup Bros, 209 W. Florida St.

The Soup Bros space, once overcrowded with an eclectic collection of knick-knacks, is now bare. In lieu of the previous ‘for lease’ message, a cheerful sign in the front window announces “Hen’s Deli Coming Soon.”

Clarke Street Sausage has been a fixture at the Riverwest farmers market for the past two years, with attendees flocking to the vendor table piled high with bagels, sausages, pastries and homemade pickles. Beyond deli fare, co-owners Lucas McDonald and Vivian Sotolongo prepare a wide variety of dishes, including ramen, banh mi, tacos and barbeque, for weekly dinners at The Daily Bird.

In marking its departure from Riverwest, the operation will rebrand as Hen’s Deli. But Sotolongo reassured customers that the staples and specialties will remain unchanged, even as the business continues to evolve.

McDonald and Sotolongo both come from restaurant industry backgrounds, specifically at delis, which instilled a respect for truly homemade foods, Sotolongo said.

“It means a lot to us to have quality food made by people who thought about it and executed it and serve it,” said Sotolongo in an interview.

That philosophy carries over to her own work, which includes hand-grinding meat for sausages, boiling and baking scratch-made bagels and experimenting with pickling brines to achieve a perfectly-balanced flavor.

Since its beginning, the business has been an exercise in resourcefulness. After leaving their full-time service industry positions in the early months of the pandemic, McDonald and Sotolongo launched Clarke Street Sausage at the West Allis Farmers Market. During the winter, they transitioned to a delivery operation.

Throughout the past two years, the business has found community in Riverwest, operating pop-ups and frequenting the farmers market. But it hasn’t been without challenges. This past summer was the most difficult yet for Sotolongo and McDonald, who experienced a robbery and lost their commercial kitchen space in a June fire at the Common Cookhouse in Oak Creek.

“We didn’t know what to do for the winter,” she said. “We just started really looking at our options and how much money we were able to save this summer.”

But Sotolongo said she refuses to give up. “My mom’s always been a hustler, I’ve always been a hustler, too. So we were just like, we can do this. We have to stop thinking that it’s too big for us,” she said.

“What I really want out of this is for people to know that we’re all-inclusive, and this is a true, family-owned, half Latino-owned business. And I want my people to know that,” Sotolongo said.

McDonald and Sotolongo have organized a fundraiser to help cover expenses of opening the storefront. The fundraiser went live Aug. 23 with a $10,000 goal, and has raised $2,155 at the time of publication.

Hen’s Deli is still in the earliest planning stages, said McDonald. Updates are posted regularly to the business’s Facebook page.

Soup Bros was the most recent tenant in the Walker’s Point space. Richard Regner operated the quirky, soup-focused cafe for 23 years until it closed in August. Just around the corner from Soup Bros was Regner’s other restaurant, Boo Boo’s sandwich shop, which closed at the end of September.

The building that contained both Boo Boo’s and Soup Bros is owned by Carol Rubitsky. Rubitsky’s business, Caroline’s Jazz Club, is located between the spaces the two businesses occupied.