Life’s Funny
LIFE'S FUNNY
Lovin’ Spoonfuls
How a well-known Greensboro chef changed his menu and his life
By Maria Johnson
January is a good time to talk about John Drees for a couple of reasons.
A freshly unwrapped year is all about new beginnings, which Drees, 60, knows something about.
Also, January is National Soup Month (sorry, Souptober), and that points to Drees in his latest incarnation as Chef Soup, boss of a small-batch business that sells frozen quarts of savory spoonfuls from The Corner Farmers Market, the open-air bazaar where, most Saturday mornings, Drees pitches his canopy in the parking lot of St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Greensboro.
If you had a really good arm, you could throw a rock from here and hit the vacant single-story building where Drees first made a name for himself in the Gate City 40 years ago. Many people fondly recall the scrumptious meals he dished out at Southern Lights Bistro on Smyres Place in Sunset Hills.
“I have a whole different perspective now,” says Drees, who looks to be permanently flushed from decades of stovetop steam baths. Surrounded by the coffee-sipping, fleece-and-jeans crowd at the market, it’s notable that he does not look pretentious in a white apron and black skull cap. He looks relaxed and well practiced. He ought to.
“I was the fool that worked seven days a week for 35 years,” he says. “You weren’t gonna outwork me. I didn’t know better at the time.”
A native of Greensboro, Drees popped up at Southern Lights as a cook in 1985. Soon, he bought into the business, which flourished with stylish farm-fresh food, a chummy chalk-board atmosphere and reasonable prices.
Chef J.B.D. had a hot hand.
He was a regular on WFMY-TV’s morning-show cooking segment with the late Lee Kinard.
He played a part in launching Prizzi’s, an Italian cafe in Quaker Village; The Edge, a Tate Street bar; Nico’s, a fine Italian place downtown; and 1618 West Seafood Grille, which still reels in diners on Friendly Avenue. He also spun off a satellite of Southern Lights in Winston-Salem.
In time, Drees clung only to Southern Lights in Greensboro, which he moved to a Lawndale Drive shopping center in 2010. Business was skinny but sustainable until COVID body-slammed restaurants in the spring of 2020. Drees closed his doors to diners and snapped off the lights for good that summer, ending a remarkable 35-year run.
The hard stop did him good. He was surprised at how much he enjoyed taking long walks and having time to chat about topics unrelated to business.
“I didn’t realize until the pandemic that there was so much more to life than working,” he says. “I was having flashbacks to when the kids were little, and I had Sundays off.”
He took a year to stir the question of what to do next. With three adult children, he didn’t need as much income as before, but he needed to beef up his retirement account.
He’d lived long enough to watch friends and family die sooner than expected, so he knew that time was his most precious commodity. But he wanted to spend some of it working. Nobody needed to tell him that he was really good at what he did.
He thought about opening a soup-salad-and-sandwich shop downtown in 2021, but foot traffic still lagged, and reliable employees were hard to come by.
He pared down his idea.
“I wanted soup to be the star of the show,” he says.
He explored the idea of selling soup to retirement homes, and that’s when he learned that most of the seniors’ soups were bought frozen and warmed to life again.
“A light went off,” he says.
He whipped up 80 quarts of soup — six flavors led by his signature tomato basil — poured them into cardboard take-out cups, stuck them in a freezer and carted the frosty blocks to the Corner Market in February of 2022.
He sold 60 of them.
“I said, ‘OK, this is a thing,’” he recalls.
Six months later, he added online ordering and home delivery. Today, internet sales have almost caught up with face-to-face sales, thanks to a social media presence driven by his fianccée, Nancy Cunningham, who handles marketing for Grandover Resort.
Orders spike when she teases “Souper Tuesday” — buy three quarts, get a fourth free — on Facebook and Instagram.
Drees will keep his market table for the revenue and in-person feedback, but he’s keen to grow the delivery side.
“I think [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos was on to something, starting with, I get paid before I even pull out of the driveway,” he says. “I’m modernizing myself, but keeping it as basic and simple as I can.”
Relishing his elastic schedule, Drees cooks and delivers three to four days a week, more or less if needed. He hovers over every batch with help from two part-timers at Short Street Gastro Lab, a shared kitchen space in Kernersville.
With a repertoire of 80 recipes, he offers eight to 12 flavors at the market every week. He posts four online. Standing over a tilt skillet, basically a flat-top grill with straight sides and a crank to tip the bed, Drees makes cooking for the masses look easy. Ten gallons of cheesy potato-and-ham soup coming up.
He fires up the skillet and slicks it with glugs of olive oil. In goes a bag of bacon bits; anyone who eats ham isn’t going to fuss about bacon. Next up: chopped cooked ham, onions, celery and carrots, which Drees flips and scrapes with a giant spatula until both the meat and veggies wear a shiny brown crust. He douses the sizzle with water to deglaze the pan.
A fragrant, hissing fog rises. Dried dill comes to life. Pails of quartered red potatoes simmer to softness. A blend of cheeses — cheddar, Monterrey Jack, American and cream — relaxes into a velvety matrix.
With both hands, Drees grasps a 2-foot-long immersion blender — it looks more like a gardening tool than kitchen utensil — and starts rowing. The cheese and potato lighten the mixture as he churns. Finally, he dips a spoon and closes his eyes so that he can read the taste and texture with his mouth, not his eyes.
“Needs more water,” he says.
Thinned to his satisfaction, Drees hands off the vat to a helper while he leaves to make a delivery nearby.
Four days later, at market, the rib-sticking soup goes for $13 a quart.
Drees’ youngest child, Jonas, rings up customers on an iPad.
Standing behind Jonas, Drees is fenced by a ring of ice chests holding his wares. He faces in the direction of the original Southern Lights. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed since he started there, he says. It was like another lifetime.
What would he tell his younger self, knowing what he knows now?
“Don’t take yourself so seriously,” he says, pressing his lips into a Mona Lisa smile. “Life is too short to worry about work and making money all the time. Work will take care of itself.”
