Soup Season Is All We Have

It's also all we need

According to Eater, lunchtime soup is back in Manhattan. The peg for this idea is that Hale and Hearty has opened back up and it’s basically the 1990s all over again. I’m all for this, but there are those of us who worked in the service industry and who still have PTSD from opening up coffee shops or restaurants in the early morning and the first thing we had to do was carefully open up the Hale & Hearty plastic sacks of lentil chili or split pea, and then slowly dump it into a big warming pot. Do you know what doing that at 6 in the morning does to a person? It’s like some Edgar Allan Poe story where you’re constantly hearing lumpy drip drops of cold soup hitting metal for the rest of your life. Still, I’m happy to see the brand making a comeback because I believe a city can be measured by the amount of good soup a person can find in it, and Hale & Hearty was easy to find and always hit the spot. The soup was good, and it’s not appreciated enough how New York City runs on soup as much as it does coffee or buttered rolls from carts.

I can probably name about a dozen things that are probably common all over the country, but ended up on Seinfeld and became New York things. I know for a fact that they have cinnamon babka in other cities and George could live in Chicago or Philly and still have issues finding parking, but somehow the act of ordering soup in New York City does feel like its own thing. You can go literally anywhere in America right now and find soup, but your favorite restaurant in Iowa City isn’t famous for some guy called the Soup Nazi yelling “No soup for you” and if you’re in Phoenix and some guy tells you he’s “shifting into soup mode,” you’d probably ask him why. But because of episode 116 written by Spike Feresten, if you find yourself standing on line waiting for a hot cup of lentil or chicken noodle, you’ll likely think of or hear somebody mention that episode.

We’re well into Soup Season here in New York City, and I have indeed shifted into soup mode. My general rule of thumb is it’s Soup Season the first time I see somebody post a picture of their pot of Roberto, my friend Helen Rosner’s creation that I swear she could become a billionaire off of at this point if she started canning the stuff. What generally follows is a craving for grilled cheese and tomato soup, but I want to make the sandwich and the soup must come from a can. As we get deeper into the season, I will accept the combination from diners I have vetted, but that’s it. I have tried more than a few grilled cheeses from fancy sandwich places and they’re bullshit. Sorry, but that’s the only way I can describe it. Grilled cheese needs to be a little sloppy and slightly burnt; if the slices of bread line up perfectly with each other like some guy used a ruler to make sure it was a perfect square then I don’t want it. As for the canned tomato soup, I don’t know what to tell you about that one. I’ve had some incredible, vibrant, tangy, delicious bowls of homemade tomato soup and…I just like canned more. My damn American tastebuds will always keep me honest when it comes to that.

Ordering soup is a whole other thing. I don’t do it enough, partially because my wife is a God when it comes to going “I’ve got these four ingredients, some stock, and a big idea” and it ends up blowing my mind, but also because if I’m disappointed by the soup a place makes, it greatly diminishes my view of the establishment. I generally withhold that opinion for diners, especially if they make sure to tell you on the menu the soup is “homemade.” If I see that there’s a soup of the day and one soup that they always have, then I’m going to bet that there’s a special recipe there and even if it’s basic chicken noodle or something then it’s going to at least be unique. My favorite example is the split pea at Cozy Soup & Burger in Manhattan. Split pea is generally a soup I’m never going to order, but when we were working on the New York Nico book, Nico told me I needed to try it. If somebody I trust tells me I need to try something, then I do. And let me tell you: it’s very good.

The thing about very good soup is that it can elevate a place even if everything else on the menu is subpar—the pair of Chinese places I’ll order from simply because they have insane egg drop soup and everything else is mediocre, and the OK Bay Area-style Mexican place I won’t name because I find myself ordering from there too much when I just don’t give a shit makes a really good chicken tortilla soup come to mind—but then there are the places where you’ll get their soup and think, “This soup doesn’t need to be this excellent.” The paper cup of marag (lamb broth) that they give you complimentary at Yemen Cafe is an elixir. It will save you from whatever. When I order takeout or deliver from there, I always gladly pay for extra marag so I can put some in the freezer for when I need it.

In a perfect world, you would never need to order soup. If things were right, and we had enough time and energy, we’d all make our own soup. Emily and I made a thing out of always taking home the bones from chicken or duck dinners we’d eat at restaurants so we could make stock with them. Sure, it made the freezer look like we were serial killers who preyed on foul and kept their remains as trophies, but the soups we made was always a hundred times better than anything you could get almost anywhere else. These days, between Lulu taking up more of our time and the baby’s milk occupying most of the real estate in the freezer, we have to rely on other people to make us soup. Once the season officially started, I kept track of how many times it took before I found one place that delivered soup to my door that had me going “Oh hell yes,” and the number was six. We’d had the Guatemalan cafe Ix on our list for about five or six years, but we had a lot of things on various To Do lists for the last five or six years (survive a pandemic, write a novel, have a baby, etc…), so it slipped. When we finally ordered from there, our apartment was a chorus singing "Hollllly shiiiit” to the tune of Messiah. I got the caldo tlalpeno rojo, and it took one look at the brownish red broth and with the chickpeas and corn floating around for me to know; Emily ordered pepian, and the kick of cinnamon and some pumpkin seeds that mixed with the broth of roasted tomatoes, toasted guajillo and chiles was one of the most comforting thing I’ve ever tasted. Not all soup should have that complex mingling of flavors, but I do believe soup should always bring you comfort. If not, I don’t understand the point of it.

But the best thing about Soup Season is the random, quiet moments between you and a bowl or cup. This is the time of year when I find myself rushing around doing this and that, and my age starts getting to me. I’ll start understanding why so many of my family members moved to warmer places, about how my grandpa would talk about feeling the cold in his bones, and I’d just pass it off as a figure of speech. But it isn’t—it’s a real thing. That ache from moving when the wind is blowing is a psychological as it is physical, and the only thing that truly rejuvinates me is soup. And in those situations, I generally go for either chicken noodle or borscht. I find chowder too untrustworthy (cream and clams just sitting around? Nope) and whenever I’ve attempted to enjoy beef barley from a diner—I’m sorry—it always smells like a hot bowl of flatulence. When done wrong, French onion soup can also end up smelling and tasting like what comes out your other end; nothing beats it when done right, however. That’s why I’ll go out of my way if I’m in Manhattan to walk to La Bonne Soupe. I almost always time it so I get there just as lunch is ending at 3:30, get my soup, a bottle of Pelligrino, and if I’ve got nothing else to do, they have a nice little wine list. I’ll sit there as long as I can, working slowly on the soup, making sure I break through the Gruyère ceiling just slightly so I can equally distribute the cheese and broth in every bite. I try to do this at least once a month during Soup Season as a way of recalbrating myself. It reminds me that all soup experiences should be contemplative ones, that you need to take soup slow so you don’t burn your mouth or get broth all over your shirt. I lose sight of that sometimes, but I always know how to straighten myself out.