Food review: Urban Soup Kitchen

When I was eight I wanted to be a teacher, when I turned twelve I wanted to be a marine biologist, when I was in high school I wanted to be a lawyer (mostly because of Ally McBeal) and ever since I turned 21, I've wanted to be a food critic. I love food, I love getting paid, professional critisizing combines my two interests. What could be better? Unfortunately, a ton of other people think the same thing and have higher culinary and writing credentials than I.

Since moving to China, I've weaseled my way into the good graces of the Dining editors of City Weekend, a local expat listings magazine. It's no New York Magazine or Sunday Times. Actually it's not even a Creative Loafing, but it lets me entertain my fantasy of being a food critic. While real food critics get large columns and ample word counts, I struggle with quarter page blurbs trying to compact my thoughts into a pithy 150 sound bite and by struggle I mainly mean ignore. The pattern goes a bit like this: They give me word limit, I ignore word limit, they cut and splice through my review until it's a pale semblance of the original writing.

Thank goodness for personal blogs where I can ramble on to my heart's content taking up valuable pixel space with my inability to write concisely.

Below is my review of Urban Soup Kitchen in it's full, verbose glory:

Cold comfort
Who doesn’t like soup? It warms you up on a cold day. It picks you up when you’re down. Truly, there are few foods in life that are as universally comforting as soup is.

Soups come in abundant variety - stews, chowders, bisques, thick soups, thin soups, soups with meatballs, with cabbage, with won tons, the list never ends; however, despite the infinite varieties of soups I find that most tend to fall in either one of two catagories. The first catagory of soups are forgiving dishes. At their best it’s something you’ve thrown together because you want a simple, hearty meal. At their worst it’s a stew of leftover ingredients, things that you’ve left too long in your fridge but are too cheap to waste. These soups are simplistic, easy to make, edibles that even a monkey (albeit probably a highly trained one) with a blender could do. The end results are nice, filling, comfortable.

The second catagory of soups are those that serve as a testament to the cook's talent. Instead of masking flavors, this soup puts them on full display, coaxing them out in the slow simmer so that every spoonful tantalizes your taste buds, making you want to savor it in your mouth til you sip it down slowly like you would a fine wine. Have soup from the second category and it'll shake you, coating your insides. It'll make you recall what it feels like to fall in love.

One weekend the sun was shining and the sky was blue. It was an idyllic day for a light lunch, a perfect day to check out this gourmet soup and salad place we heard about near Xin Tian Di. We arrived at Urban Soup Kitchen with high hopes and empty stomachs. Soups started at (YY28) and combos (soup and salad or sandwich) are a fairly reasonable (YY40-60). We were ready to dive and drink in the love.

Right off the bat a caveat to hungry diners, get ready to get your food to go - operating mainly as a delivery service, the only seating offered in this severely tiny nook of a restaurant are four bar stools set along a high narrow bar...facing the wall. Ever undaunted, we ordered two combos and took our food to Fuxing Park where we eagerly chose a bench and tucked in for an impromptu picnic. Before we left, the owner warned us that the shop was just starting out so they were still finalizing some of the recipes and for us to go onto their website to give them our feedback.

Initial feedback: please get better bread to dip into the soup. Our soup bread had the consistency of dry cotton and tasted of wood chip. Additional feedback: for the love of God take seafood bisque off your menu until you've managed to make it edible. Salty without having much flavor, the bisque tasted distinctively of not very good tomato paste and generic seafood. “This bisque tastes like dirt,” griped my picnic buddy, his lip curling, “I’m going to just pick out the meat.” In all fairness, the seafood bisque had a healthy portion of shrimp and he spent the next fifteen minutes fishing it out of the broth, his aggrieved air of someone who had been wronged by life dissipating slightly.

Despite the bisque and soup bread, the rest of our food wasn’t bad. The wild mushroom bacon soup was rich and fairly creamy, the massive chicken breast wrap was flavored well and the smoked duck breast salad finished with a lovely citrus twang but it didn't make us remember what it was like to fall in love, it didn't even remind us of a playground crush. It reminded us of an all-right date. Not bad but not something you absolutely can't wait to do again. The whole meal was something akin to what you’d make in college if you wanted something nice for lunch and had an hour or so of free time.

That being said, most of us have left college and don’t have that hour of free time (and just think about how you’ll have to clean up afterward!) which makes Urban Soup Kitchen is a serious competitor if all you want is a soup and sandwich. That being said, given the size of the market in Shanghai for exclusively soup and sandwhich places, they are also pretty much the only ones in it.