I don’t ask for much in this world.  

I really don’t.  I’m accustomed to living on very little money, so pricey material possessions have never factored into my life.  I’ve known how it feels to completely bottom out on alcohol abuse–right down to having the shakes so badly, I rummage through my bag of empties to desperately drain whatever drops are left in the cans and bottles until the liquor store opens–so sobriety and health are never, ever taken for granted.  I seem to attract nothing but stunted, tantrum-throwing man-children into my life, so a halfway-decent, mature guy is like Jesus wrapping his arms around me and ushering me straight through the pearly gates without my having to.show I.D.  I’ve had good jobs, bad jobs, terrific jobs, and egregious jobs, so anything sort of in between is more than okay.  

What I do ask for, however, is a decent bowl of soup.  And like many things in this city, Vancouver just can’t seem to get this right.  

Okay, perhaps I should be a bit more specific: my neighbourhood of the West End, particularly Davie Street, can’t get this right.  

Soup.  It’s soup!  How can anyone fuck it up, you might ask?  The answer to that question is: they can, and they do, and they will, and they shall do it in a most spectacular fashion.  

Now, I consider myself quite the soup connoisseur / maven / obsessive.  In fact, I make some of the best soups you’ll never taste in your life:

A mouthwatering Moroccan spinach and red lentil soup seasoned with coriander, cumin, cinnamon, smoked paprika, and turmeric, served with fresh cilantro and a squeeze of lemon.  I’ve made this for many people, adjusting the spice levels from “a suggestion of black pepper” to “the scotch bonnets might necessitate a defibrillator” depending on who I’m serving it to;

My delectable “zero soup,” a spicy tomato-and-vegetable stock crammed with nearly every single vegetable in my crisper, and loads of fresh and dried herbs that compliment each other, like dill, rosemary, and thyme.  It is a liquid multivitamin, a phytonutrient jubilee that may or may not have caused a few hairs to sprout on my ample chest in the past;

A sensational cioppino, crammed with mussels, salmon, cod, clams, and prawns, enhanced with chili flakes and a healthy glug of white wine.  This can be costly to make, so it generally remains a special-occasion treat.  Even during the dankest, darkest, most desperate depths of my drinking despair, I never had even a shard of interest in pinot grigios or cabernet blancs or chardonnays, so I never quaffed the stuff as I cooked, depriving the chowder of this important flavour dimension;

Classic Doukhobor borscht, which is almost too complex to be called “soup,” since making it requires at least two hours of prep, all four burners on your stove, and preferably at least one other person to help.  Just a handful of its components include shredded cabbage, sauteed onions, stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes with green onion, boiled beets, shredded and fried carrot, diced bell pepper, diced potato, fresh dill…and that’s just the prologue.

Apart from the cioppino–because I am a greedy pescatarian–you can see that vegetarian soups are where it’s at.  Even when I was more of an omnivore, the idea of eating any sort of beef in my soup was repulsive.  Hunks of chicken, floating on my spoon in hot liquid, held no appeal.  Pork has never, not once in my entire life, been an option for me in any form.  I’m also not at all a fan of cream-based soups, meaning I sometimes find myself staring thoughtfully at bunches of celery at the grocer, wondering if one can actually make a cream-free celery-based soup that doesn’t wind up being sheer gastronomic torture to eat.  No, a lovingly-made, broth-based vegetarian soup, seasoned beautifully, is one of my life’s greatest pleasures.  I’m thrilled that it’s autumn now, leading into winter (as autumn tends to do), because it’s the cozy season for all sorts of hot soups.  I suppose I could still eat soup in the summertime, but it’s too hot, which thus finds me eating:

Kvass, a chilled soup that hits the absolute spot in scorching weather.  Mashed potato, several plops of plain yogurt, green onion, grated cucumber, grated radish, fresh dill, chopped romaine lettuce, the juice of countless lemons, salt, and loads of cold water all mixed together will hydrate and relieve you when you’re sweating in places you’ve never sweat before.  It might sound bizarre, but it’s a delightful concoction.

…y’see?  Soup, man.  I just love the stuff.  I usually have a batch of some kind or another in my fridge.  At this precise moment, I have a sort of spicy chickpea-kale stew happening, which isn’t technically soup, but one woman’s goulash is another woman’s gumbo.  I don’t even know what I mean by that, but I like how it sounds. 

Now, despite being a fabulous, skilled, and humble home cook who makes her own food 95% of the time (I treat myself to Japanese food once a month), there are times a gal just doesn’t want to make a big batch of soup.  It can be time-consuming, and it can be annoying.  Just about every soup I make begins with a mirepoix, that concoction of diced carrot, celery, and onion, as well as my usual bulb of minced garlic, that serves as the flavour base for every pot of the stuff, and it can be tedious to get all of it in order.  If I’m, oh, grumpy–which, being the human equivalent of a young tulip shimmering with fresh morning dew, I assure you almost never happens–I just don’t feel like making a big pot of soup, perspiring and chopping and tasting and seasoning and simmering and ladling it all into containers.  In this instance, I will just forgo soup for a small while and eat almost anything else.  

Last week, I was feeling slightly under the weather, although certainly not incapacitated.  I was just sick enough to not be able to work out, or travel for an hour by transit to visit my parents, but not so sick that I couldn’t think about food.  And you know what food we all eat when we’re sick?  You know what I’m talking about.  Not that I ever need an excuse to eat soup, but in this case, it was absolutely critical for fortifying my system and offering comfort as I lay around, wondering if I might actually have beriberi instead of just a bit of a cold. I almost never get sick, y’see, so I always get paranoid when I’m even slightly off-kilter.

My best pal–basically my brother by this point–Charles came over to help out around the apartment and keep me company as I grouched around, feeling rather crummy, and he mentioned that he was hungry, but wasn’t sure what he wanted to eat.  

I know what men like to eat. Mind out of gutter, s’il vous plait.

“How about a sandwich?” I suggested.  He perked up immediately.

Here’s something very strange about Vancouver: it’s nearly impossible to find a decent sandwich.  Subway is garbage, absolute trash unearthed from the bottom of a third-world landfill.  Never mind the fact that–like McDonald’s, Burger King, and various other not-actually-food rubbish-peddlers who have raised their prices–Subway has jacked up the prices on their retch-inducing fare in recent years. The biggest stinker about this dumb chain is that it doesn’t matter what you order from there; everything tastes exactly the same.  All Subway sandwiches, if I recall correctly, taste the way the place smells, which is like odd, off-putting, synthetic bread.  In fact, it’s not even allowed to be called bread in some parts of the world that insist on dignified loaves.  

The local supermarkets here sell them pre-made, but they are no different from those you’d find at any gas station: triangles of Wonder Bread with egg salad, tuna salad, or processed deli meat placed in between the slices, sold for around six dollars per depressing sandwich.  

A great deal of the restaurants on Davie are of the more ethnic variety, which is nice, but it means you won’t find a sandwich at any of the Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Mexican, Japanese, or Chinese joints littering my neighbourhood.  Shockingly, even the Western-style brunch places don’t sell proper sandwiches.  

What happened to hearty, thick, satisfying sandwiches crammed with generous fillings? Where’d they go?! Here’s a 1992 interview with one of my favourite vocalists and rock stars of all time, where he eats the sort of saliva-triggering sandwich you will no longer find anywhere.  Yes, yes, you can indeed make a loaded sandwich at home, but once you’ve gone out and bought all of the components, it’s sometimes not really worth the whole cost.  And you generally don’t want to eat the same sandwich every day (well, I sure don’t), so there’s a chance the ingredients will go bad in your fridge.  Just go get a sandwich.  But from where?

“From where?” asked Charles.

“From Lucifer’s House of Heat,” I replied.  “I had their smashed-chickpea sandwich a couple of weeks ago, and it was excellent.”

The inimitable Lucifer’s House of Heat is a place just down the hill close to Denman that opened sometime last year.  In fact, coincidentally, they opened in the old location of the hapless, infamous Sven’s Wraps, to whom I have dedicated at least one blog post here.  They are an absolutely wonderful, unique addition to the area, and upon chatting to one of the owners recently, it seems they’re doing very well.  They deserve it.  They specialize in selling every single brand of hot sauce you can think of–I’m not exaggerating, every last ding-dong kind–ranging from scrumptious British Columbia-made goop to each individual bottle of hell that has been featured on Hot Ones over the years (you can YouTube that show; there are too many links in this paragraph for my liking already).     

I went in there for the first time last December for a couple of bottles of hard-to-find hot sauce, and saw that they also served food.  Their menu wasn’t terribly vegetable forward, as some pretentious dork once said on some cooking show, but they had some lovely-sounding sandwiches, the likes of which I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else in the West End.  

Spicy ice cream? Brilliance!

This past February–trudging down there for yet more hot sauce–I decided to sample one of their sandwiches, called Veggies on Fire.  For eight dollars, it was a marvelous surprise: very large slices of what appeared to be homemade bread, mountains of vegetables, and something called Dawson’s Shawarma hot sauce.  Unbearably arrogant in my ability to consume alarming levels of heat, I asked them to make it “extra hot.”  After all, the rare times I go out for Indian food, I always ask for them to do the same, and my curries barely have any kick at all.  I think it’s because the Indians throwing together my grub are used to wimpy Canadians getting runny noses by just glancing at a jalapeno pepper, so they always put the brakes on the chilis despite my request.  Therefore, I staunchly put my hands on my hips and stated that I didn’t want Lucifer’s to hold back on the fire.

“Extra hot? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I replied snootily confidently.

The sandwich experience was a revelation, except I had two challenges: one, the sandwich wasn’t sliced in half, so it was a large, floppy mess that became more chaotic with each delicious bite.  Two, I had to accept my naive idiocy, because this was legitimately the hottest thing I think I’ve ever eaten, and I can tolerate hot, hot heat.  There really isn’t a thing I consume that isn’t spicy. Heck, I top my salads off with hot sauce. I had no idea this particular sauce itself was a fucking nuclear weapon, so asking for “extra hot” meant my entire mouth turned into Hiroshima.  Gasping, dabbing away tears, I lifted up one of the pieces of bread to see how doused it was with Dawson’s Shawarma, and there were perhaps four or five drops. 

It was incredible.  I loved it.  All former addicts pursue something else that will give them the dopamine and endorphin highs they became irreversibly hooked on, and so this became my latest dragon-chase: I desperately bought a bottle.

….I promise this will swing back around to soup.  Charles and I meandered down to Lucifer’s, where indeed I had had the Sizzlin’ Smash not long before.  I was, and I remain, absolutely stoked that a proper sandwich place exists just mere blocks away, where the ‘wiches are loaded and affordable, the service is impeccable, the environment is enjoyable, and the hot sauces are innumerable.  What else do you want?  As I began this piece: I don’t ask for much in this world.  

He ordered what I had ordered all those months ago, the Veggies on Fire, and I warned him not to get extra hot if he knew what was good for him.  Suddenly, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before on the menu: these guys had soup. 

Guess which one I wanted.

Could anything sound nicer?  Particularly when you’re not firing on all cylinders?  I love tomatoes.  I love garlic.  I love soup.  Put it all together, and it sounds like a winner to me!  I imagined it had a slight touch of extra sweetness from the roasted tomatoes; a lovely but subtle note of beautiful fresh garlic; perhaps even some savoury sauteed shallots and clever seasoning.  

“Can I get one of your small tomato soups?” I asked the fella behind the counter.  I didn’t order the large since I wasn’t overly hungry, and I wanted to sample the goods first before committing.

“Of course” he said, grinning.  “Actually, we’re kind of low right now, so I’m going to have to heat up some more if you don’t mind waiting a little bit longer.”

This was promising!  “Not at all,” I said.  “I guess it’s good, then.”

“It’s really good.  I actually use it on my pasta.”  

On his pasta!  I imagined there might perhaps even be, then, a hint of basil in there, surely some heat considering this establishment specialized in it, and the unmistakable taste of buttery, roasted garlic.  

As the sandwich guy made Charles’ food (once again, unsliced) and we waited for my soup to be heated up, I asked who their source was.

“It’s a place called West Side Soup Guys,” he said.  “We’ve done really well with them.” [note: I changed the name of the company for reasons that will soon become evident]

“A local company! That’s great.” I thought I recognized the name, although I couldn’t tell you from where.  Did I see their sign at Melriches, my favourite local coffee shop?  Were they the ones who sold litre containers of their wares at the nearby supermarket?  I wasn’t entirely certain. Nevertheless, it was nice to know Lucifer’s were keeping things within city limits.

“Yeah, except they only make, like, six or seven different soups.  I wish they made more.”

Charles chimed in: “The Stock Pot at Granville Island has been around for decades.  They have something like fifty different kinds of soups, and they change them up frequently.”  How he knew this, I have no idea, but he surprises me fairly regularly.  

The counter guy raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think I’ve heard of them.  I’ll check them out.”

We eventually got our chow bagged up for us, and we headed back to my place.  I was still feeling somewhat rotten, but happy that this awesome local place with its awesome local sandwiches just sent me along with some soup.  Finding a decent bowl of soup in my neighbourhood is next to impossible–I think I forgot to mention this during my sandwich rant above–and I’m not about to pay sixteen dollars for vegetarian pho or bland udon.  Could Lucifer’s be the full package?  Endless hot sauces, the best sandwiches in town, and now: scrumptious soups?

Back at my apartment, Charles tucked into his sandwich, remarking that the heat level was just balanced enough, since–unlike yours truly–he hadn’t been deranged enough to insist on it being cranked up to 11.  I opened up my smallish takeout container of soup, and looked down at its contents.  No bits of basil, no visible bits of garlic, no specks of black pepper.  In fact…

It looked exactly like this stuff, and that’s no exaggeration.

I gave it a sniff.  Nothing, but absolutely nothing remarkable jumped out at me.  So I shrugged and had a spoonful.  

It made this stuff taste like Michelin-starred consomme from a rural village in the south of France.

My heart broke, and then the pieces fell to the soles of my feet.  This was absolutely dreadful.  It was worse than dreadful: it committed the unforgivable sin of being nauseatingly bland.  And when I say bland, I mean this was nothing more than pureed tomatoes, and there’s no way those tomatoes were roasted, either.  Absolutely no trace of salt, no seasoning, no garlic–not even a dusting of garlic powder–no pepper, no herbs, no mirepoix, no shallots, nothing.  Nothing.  I don’t eat canned soup because it’s all largely cornstarch and sodium, but believe me when I say I would have gladly spent that three-fifty on a tin of anything on the supermarket shelf.

It made this stuff seem like gourmet bisque handcrafted by Fraser Valley organic gardeners.

How could anyone ruin–destroy, annihilate, disgrace–soup in such an indescribable fashion?  How could someone call themselves a professional soup-maker, yet have zero concept of seasoning, of flavour, of enhancement, of appeal?  Worse than that: how could a marvelous local shop that specializes in hot sauce, in heat and palate stimulation and flavour, accept this as something worthy of selling?  Perhaps their other soups are great, but West Side Soup Guys, which isn’t your company name because I don’t want to embarrass you, what did you do here?!  Tomatoes didn’t deserve to die for this monstrosity. I wanted to love this. I wanted to love you.

Aggravated and complaining at top volume to poor sandwich-enjoying Charles, I cracked some fresh black pepper into the container.  I added two small pinches of sea salt.  I shook some dried basil in there.  I added a palmful of chili flakes.  I stirred it all up, figuring that this jazzing-up would improve it, but nothing would salvage it.  It was completely, entirely inedible, and I’m usually willing to give any vegetarian soup a chance since I love it so much.  I was working with a useless tomato “soup” base that would absolutely not work, no matter what I did to it.  If this were donated to a food bank? They would give it a serious “no thanks” and quietly deposit it into the dumpster out back. The guy at the shop said he put it on his pasta? If I put this on my four-year-old niece’s spaghetti noodles, she would immediately spit it out and quite possibly start bawling out of disappointment, agony, and disgust.

Three days ago I was heading home from a mammogram (while they have indeed given me years of grief, I must protect and preserve my girls) and swung into Breka for a lovely, affordable Americano. This place is also a local outfit, one of the only places around that is open twenty-four hours, always has a pile of people queued up, and serves up pretty mouthwatering-looking sweet and savoury food. As I waited in line to pay and admired the grub that was displayed in the cases, I suddenly noticed a sign that sent a jolt of horror and dread through my body. I would bet my nonexistent money that I knew exactly who was responsible for it:

 Kale Potato & Chorizo, or the unflushed toilet of Josef Mengele?

I’m not sure how to wrap this up except to say that my hopes were smushed that afternoon, I wouldn’t stop griping about this culinary infraction for the rest of the day (yet Charles stayed on, and was actually amused by my outrage), and I think I might have to go back to Lucifer’s and tell them that if they were interested in some proper soup, I would very happily make them batches of my own stuff for some shekels.  I might actually do that.

Moral of the story?  There isn’t one, apart from the fact that you can’t trust anyone’s soup except your own.

I don’t ask for much in this world.