It’s chilly in Melbourne today. 10.9c at 2:30, by the official weather people indicator. Being that it’s Friday, and I have lunch out on Fridays, I walked down the Windsor end of Chapel Street in search of some food. Specifically, I was looking for soup. Soup soup soup. I’ve got a cold, and it’s a cold day – nothing better than a nice cream-of-something-nice soup to soothe the throat and nourish the body. With the amount of cafés per capita approaching 1:1, it shouldn’t be that hard to find some soup.

Stop number one: IGA. While IGA might seem like a strange first stop, I was actually hoping they would have my new favourite instant food: Pitango Soup. They make soup in little plastic baggie things and sell them in supermarkets. They are all organic, they have no weird numbered ingredients, and they taste fantastic. I happened to meet the owner/chef guy at the Melbn Good Food And Wine Show a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m a customer for life (or at least during the winters of my life). Fantastic soup. Anyway, IGA didn’t have any, so I went back to the street again.

Stop number two: Teegee’s. I don’t like the place much – something about it just seems to precious and not authentic enough. Anyway, I figured they’d probably have soup, and I was kinda right. They had a container for soup, but it was empty. “Sorry!” said the cool chick behind the counter. I smiled and left.

Stop number three: Buddha’s Belly (otherwise known as “Ten owners in the past two years”). The service was great, one of the identical boys behind the counter asked me what I’d like. I said “Soup”. He said, somewhat apologetically, “It’s bacon and mushroom”. I thanked him and left. Unless it’s a Japanese restaurant, or I’m paying $50 for the bowl, mushroom soup uses those awful Bolshevik mushrooms that were grown in underground Soviet missile launching sites, and are still being sold as surplus around the world. Yuuuuch.

Stop number four: Café Orange. Generally good food, rushed service and cute waitresses. And, in this case, inedible soup. It was bacon and brussel sprout. Ummmmmmmmmmm no. Would anyone eat that soup? Is this a contest to make inedible dishes? I asked a little while ago if there’s a Melbn Bad Food And Wine Show, and it looks like there would be. Bacon and brussel sprout soup would have a booth all to its own, right next to Red Rooster.

Stop number five: After walking up and down the street, I went into the place I was consciously avoiding: Café Zen. They changed owners a few weeks back, and I was a fairly regular customer before the change. A week after the change in ownership, I went in for lunch, ordering a caesar salad. It was unbelievably fishy. I know that one of the ingredients is anchovy, but it needs to be used as a flavour enhancer, to bring out the tastes of the other ingredients, not dominate. If I wanted anchovy salad, I would have ordered anchovy salad. Anyway. I was planning to give them a month or so to sort things out and get going. But their footpath signboard said “Minestrone Soup $7”. Hello, that’s for me. So I went in, grabbed a copy of The Age and asked the cute French waitress for soup and a glass of red something. I read the newspaper. Presently, it dawned on me that I was waiting quite a while for my soup. If it’s on special, shouldn’t there be a pot bubbling away on the stove, ready to be spooned into bowls for waiting customers? Apparently not. It took twenty minutes, and a reminder from the customer (me) to get my soup. When it arrived, it was too hot, the contents were too crunchy, and I’ll bet it was made to order – which, unless the food is soup, is generally a good thing. Because it was made so quickly, it was very thin and there was little or no taste. I like Slow Food as much as the next snob, but waiting 20 minutes for so-so soup? That’s not on. It’s Minestrone! It should have been made weeks ago, and be left to slowly bubble on the far back burner of the stove before being served to customers. Strike two, Zen.