SOUP Kitchen has made valiant efforts to broaden its appeal in recent years, offering an extended menu with daily specials in addition to its trademark soups and opening late in the evenings.
Before writing this review I had been to the place a few times on a Saturday night, and had always enjoyed the vibe. Positioned conveniently across the street from Noho, it attracts a slightly more laid back crowd who can’t be bothered to queue around the block for half an hour. With regular live music, guest DJs and a good selection of beers, it has become a lively and important part of Northern Quarter night life.
On this, my first visit during the day, the atmosphere was decidedly more low-key. Soup Kitchen is, to all intents and purposes, a canteen. The long refectory tables and benches, blackboards scrawled with the day’s specials and salad bar behind a glass screen all point towards the fact. So I was expecting nothing more than good, solid canteen food.
When I saw the prices on the board, however, my expectations were raised. At £4 for a bowl of soup and £6 for a ‘premium’ sandwich, I got the feeling that perhaps I had been wrong to judge the place on first impressions. Encouraged, my friend and I ordered two soups, two sandwiches and one of the specials, and sat back, hungry and full of hope.
For a place whose name would suggest it specialises in soups, Soup Kitchen’s offering is disappointingly predictable: today’s selection consisted of pea and ham, potato and lemon thyme, creamy mushroom, chicken noodle, carrot, orange and coriander, and vegetable mulligatawny. The first thing I tasted was the pea and ham soup. I wouldn’t say it was cold, but it was definitely on the wrong side of hot, and the chunks of ham were rather tasteless. But the actual soup had a nice thick, rustic, homemade flavour.
Tempted by the ‘any soup and house sandwich for £6’ deal, I had also ordered a ham salad sandwich on granary bread. The bread was not fresh, the ham was average and the tomatoes were mushy. And if my bread was bad, my friend’s was even worse – you could have knocked someone out with the roll that came with her mulligatawny soup. The soup itself wasn’t much better: under-seasoned and also verging on cold.