Audio By Carbonatix
When autumn is unseasonably warm, ski areas can at least make enough snow to satisfy hardcore skiers, and retailers counting on Christmas sales know that the holiday spirit has to hit sooner or later. But how do you get people to eat a steaming-hot bowl of chicken noodle soup in 80-degree weather?
“Fortunately, September had some cooler days than usual, so business was better than I expected then,” says Richard Gamsen, owner of the Soup Kitchen, a New York-style soup spot just off the 16th Street Mall. “And October was okay, too. But November was mostly like summer, so it slowed down quite a bit.”
Gamsen knows all about businesses that run hot and cold, though. After working in New York’s club scene for decades, he says, “I was tired of having no life, and my wife said, ‘If we don’t get out of New York, we’re going to die.'” So they got out of New York and moved to Colorado, where Gamsen hoped to find a club job that would give him enough time to hike and climb. But then fate stirred the pot. “I was walking down the mall one day,” he remembers, “and came around the corner and saw this space, and I wondered why there was nothing in it. So I looked into it, and the owners of the building said they’d rather have a travel agency but that I could go ahead and try food here.”
Then the question was which food to try. Since Gamsen was over those eighty-hour work weeks, he wanted to do something that would allow him to keep a relatively normal schedule. “I knew that I couldn’t do anything full-service and get my life back, and I knew I should concentrate on one thing that I’d do really well,” he explains. “Without sounding modest, I can cook, but at first I thought of doing a cookie store. I couldn’t figure out how that would get me to the Promised Land, though, so finally I decided that there were already enough sandwich-type lunch places down here, but really not enough soups. Most places offer one or two a day, and I think people want more choices than that.”
And so Gamsen offers eight soups daily (nine in the summer, three of which are cold to beat the heat). One is always his signature, a thick, hearty potato version with chiles and cheese ($4 for twelve ounces), and while it wasn’t exactly ideal for Indian-summer eating, I still scraped the bottom of the cup dry. His cream of vegetable ($3.50 for twelve ounces) was fabulous. Although it hadn’t been ultra-puréed, which would have made for a more elegant soup, the thicker blend was just fine for the lunch crowd. The soup’s pinkish-orangeish color hinted at red peppers and tomatoes; its taste suggested that many more vegetables were involved — and fresh ones at that. “My mom grew up on a farm,” Gamsen says. “And I learned early on about using fresh ingredients and really good produce.”
The seafood gumbo ($5 for twelve ounces) was another well-melded marvel, a super-thick stew packed with rice, shrimp and a touch of sausage heat. The sausage was stronger in the Italian tomato soup ($4.50 for twelve ounces), a brew so tomato-rich it would have been at home on pasta but had just the right consistency for slurping. Still, our favorite was the chicken noodle ($4.50 for twelve ounces), whose broth was so chickeny that a sip was like gnawing on a thigh. While the fettuccine noodles in that broth weren’t traditional, they’d been cooked until perfectly soggy and went well with the tender chicken chunks and soft pieces of carrot and celery. This is the soup Gamsen runs out of most often — and with good reason.
“Even though the weather hasn’t cooperated, I still have sold out of some things most days. That’s the inherent problem with not making it ahead and with using fresh stuff, because when it’s gone, it’s gone,” Gamsen says. “But that keeps me from throwing away big buckets of it when people aren’t buying. And it has to snow here sometime, right?”
No doubt the recent snowfall inspired an avalanche of customers at Gamsen’s place. You can eat crammed onto one of five stools at the counter — and augment your soup from a lineup of bottled sauces — or take it out. Either way, the soup comes in a to-go container, accompanied by a hunk of good soup-dipping boule from the Denver Bread Company, fresh fruit and a piece of hard candy. Prices are based on the type of soup, which Gamsen has broken down into vegetarian, meat and seafood; they’re offered in 12-, 16- and 32-ounce portions — but the small size is just about right for one person.
Gamsen’s soups are good food.
More warming comfort fare is dished out at The Ladle, a fast-food-type joint that opened mid-July in a strip mall along Arapahoe Road off I-25. The Ladle’s chef is part-owner Jeff Paliwoda, the only self-described “passionate foodie” among a handful of mostly local businessmen who’ve owned everything from liquor stores to a pet-insurance company. This is their first restaurant, and they’ve chosen their debut venture well: The concept is simple and straightforward, focused primarily on “meals in a bowl,” which include but are not limited to soup.
Paliwoda, a Culinary Institute of America grad, had been working for Whole Foods and Wild Oats for years as an executive chef — he’s credited with taking Wild Oats from ten stores to its current 95 — but was starting to burn out. “I needed to find my soul again,” he says. “I was looking around for something else.” That’s when the New-York-based part-owner convinced his Denver partners “that something like the soup kitchens there would definitely fly here,” Paliwoda says.
Paliwoda agreed. “Looking at what was available in fresh, fast food around here, I knew we didn’t need any more Mexican or Asian,” he says. “So soups fit the bill for me, since it would be less intensive than a full-scale operation but would also match my needs cerebrally and morally.”
Yes, soup is good for the soul, and Paliwoda tries to bump that goodness up a notch by using only hormone-free meats, free-range chicken and whatever organic produce he can get his hands on. The recipes are his, and so are the approaches: no bases, lots of reductions, and many meals made with an eye toward complete proteins, such as beans and rice, and keeping the fat content low.
As with many foods that are low in fat, the flavors here can be pretty subtle. In order to appeal to folks on special diets — Paliwoda touts the fact that vegans, macrobiotics and carnivores can all find something at the Ladle — he also goes easy on the salt, and sometimes we found that all we needed to bring up the flavors was a gentle wave of the shaker. I know that makes purists shudder, and I can certainly appreciate leaving good flavors alone, but Paliwoda’s wonderful ingredients often didn’t translate into big taste. Case in point: Cam’s clam chowder ($3.99 for a “big,” or twelve ounces), a medium-thick take on the traditional, with skin-on spuds and fresh clams, still came across bland. So did the puréed base of the chicken black-bean chile ($3.99 for a big), although the soup sported a heavenly texture: The beans were actually soft, which is rare.
Other meals were more intense, such as the spicy Cajun gumbo ($4.79 for a big), with plenty of andouille sausage, brown rice and okra. The chicken mish-mosh ($3.99 for a big), a celery- and chicken-heavy broth with noodles (you can also choose matzoh balls, couscous or rice) and plenty of carefully cut pieces of bird, was a big hit with the kids. And while the burgundy beef tips ($4.79 for a big) tasted more like beef stroganoff — there was just enough red wine to convince us otherwise — the dish contained enough pepper to blow off the tops of our heads…in a good way. The pork green chile ($3.99) was more sedate, although it contained plenty of pork shreds and the sharp but welcome bite of tomatillos. We hear the biscuit-topped chicken pot pie is great, and it must be, because the place is always out of it.
All of the Ladle’s “meals in a bowl” come with a wedge of bread from Rudi’s Bakery and a cookie, in our case unbelievably sinful peanut butter ones. Salads are also available, but I’d pass on those: The balsamic vinaigrette on the house version ($1.99) had the consistency of Jell-O and was so tart it was like sucking a lemon; the Caesar ($1.99) dressing contained so much anchovy that I wondered if someone other than the salt-phobic Paliwoda had made it.
Stick to the Ladle’s more liquid assets. Paliwoda’s soups, stews and chiles are such a hit that he’s already hoping to take the concept further. “We’re working on a deal where we’d have our ready-made soups in grocery stores and juice bars so that people could just pick one up and heat it at home or the office,” he explains. “These meals are so handy, with everything already in them, and so convenient, you have to wonder what more you could ask for from a fast food.”
Hey, how about another cold front?
