Some are well-dressed professionals, others appear to have seen better days, but all walk away with a steaming cup of soup at the behest of the wiry, snowy-haired woman scolding someone with a ladle.

Stasia Dabrowski has run her mobile soup kitchen here in Garema Place since 1979.

Ninety-year-old Stasia still peels and cooks 180 kilograms of vegetables on Thursday night to serve up every Friday afternoon.

In the 37 years she has served soup from a foldout table, she has watched Garema Place change around her.

"You have no idea now, there were very bad situations here in Garema Place," she tells me.

"My son, he finds out there were people eating from garbage here, and they sleep here on the benches.

"We had friends who are Italian and they teach me how to cook the best pizza in the world and I was doing pizza here because they were only one shop open on Friday."

Pizza eventually gave way to soup, earning Stasia the nickname of Canberra's soup kitchen lady.

A Canberra icon, she has carried the Olympic torch, been awarded the 1996 Canberra Citizen of the Year, the 1999 ACT Senior Australian of the Year, the 2017 ACT Local Hero of the Year and has even inspired a song.

Stasia was born in a mountain village in Poland, close to the then Czechoslovakian border.

She fled the Ukrainian fascists' ethnic cleansing campaign with her mother, father and sister before the start of World War II and later worked as a maid for a German doctor for two years.

The Second World War ended a day after Stasia's 19th birthday and she worked as a secretary before enrolling in nursing school in 1946.

She emigrated to Australia with her nuclear scientist husband in 1964, and started working in the soup kitchen around 1979.

As we talk, she spoons me a styrofoam cup full of soup; thick, hot and sweet. I ask her what her recipe is.

"Recipe?" she says indignantly. "I told you, it's 100 per cent vegies. Vegies are vegies, there is no recipe for it."

"I've been trying six years to get the recipe," volunteer Chris Osborne interjects dryly, as he lays thin slices of cheese on thick chunks of multigrain bread.

Chris had a career in the army but now works in palliative care, as well as donating his Friday afternoons to the soup kitchen.

He estimates more than 200 people would mill through every week, although Stasia never counts.

"The reason I like it is because it's totally non-judgmental," he says.

"We can get overseas university students who spend all their money on books and study and not enough on themselves. We do get a lot of homeless people, but we also get people who are well-dressed, well spoken and down on their luck and you can see it."

But while the soup kitchen doesn't discriminate, Stasia has been known to give customers a serve if they ask for something off the menu, like coffee.

Stasia is a staunch vegetarian and doesn't drink coffee or tea.

She says her own grandmothers lived to be 100 and she feels like it is her responsibility to share with people what she has learnt over her long life.

"There are millions of people making money off your sickness, off your unhealthy life and because I tell people this, they hate me for it," she says.

"People say 'I don't want your soup, I want coffee' and I say 'listen sweetheart coffee is only good for heart disease' and then the people say I am shouting at them, I make trouble for them, I discourage them from buying coffee.

"People are there, I am here and I must make a little noise. I will not whisper because no one will listen to me. How can I be silent? Impossible!"

Part of the reason why she refuses to be silent is because of the horrors she witnessed in her homeland.

"Poland was destroyed because there were gypsies there, millions of gypsies were killed. I saw it with my own eyes. How I can be different? I need to be different, to tell young people listen, love is the fundamental of our existing," she says.

In her soup kitchen, Stasia has found her purpose, but in running it she has given many others purpose too.

Another long-serving volunteer, who didn't want to give his name, said it made him feel "useful".

"I look forward to Friday, I get up in the morning and say 'ah right, I'm going to be useful today'. That's why I like it. I do it for selfish reasons because I do enjoy it," he said.

Stasia runs her soup kitchen every Friday from midday in Garema Place.