Why Hot Soup Is Suddenly Cool

“Who the hell even makes soup these days?” asks New York City chef Russell Markus. It’s a good question—and one that begs an answer. At the Downtown-cool men’s clothing store Colbo, in New York’s Lower East Side, I found myself on a recent weeknight wedged in a sea of well-dressed shoppers clamoring towards a giant silver stock pot propped up on the checkout counter. Frightfully out of place in the minimal-chic store, behind it stood Chef Markus. Peering down at the crowd below, he ladled out paper cups of green-flecked rice in herby broth to outstretched, wanting arms. I watched as the crowd happily joined in a chorus of slurps, impressed at how Markus had managed to get so many fashionable people hooked on soup.

According to Markus—who works at the intersection of art, social practice, and food—soup has unexpectedly become the “hot” food of the moment. When he started his project Hot Soup last October, he had little understanding of how wildly popular it would become. “I wanted to be able to engage with every person that came,” he says. “If you have a vat of very well-prepared mush and you're literally spooning it into a cup and cutting them a piece of bread, you get to talk with every single person that comes up to you.”

Community is Markus’s modus operandi. Over the last few years, Markus had been hosting ticketed dinners at his expansive Brooklyn loft, bringing together friends and strangers in an eclectic, informal setting under the auspices of great food and drink. “Someone can always have nicer plates,” he says. “Someone can always have nicer lighting. There’s always going to be a sexier space to eat dinner in. I wanted to remove all of that and [find] the simplest way to deliver something flavorful.” When a friend called and asked Markus to make sorbet for a Halloween pop-up event at Honey’s in Brooklyn, Markus countered the offer by offering to make soup instead—and thus, Hot Soup was born.

After his proprietary blend of miso, yuzu, koshu, rice, and chicken soup sold out in just over an hour, it was off to the races: Hot Soup beget Soup Tour, a multi-stop pop-up of soup at some of the city’s most fashionable hotspots, such as Public Records, Colbo, Lichen and Frog Wine Bar. “I kept doing it because it was the first time that I cooked food for people where I was getting messages like, ‘that felt like a warm hug’,” he says.

With back-to-back “tour” dates over the last few months, Markus has since done events at Sincerely, Tommy, Che, Hudson Wilder, and Vitra, raising soup’s standing from mushy gruel into an elevated artform that has the art and fashion set lining up. (A recent event for the artist and designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen transformed the first strawberries of the season into sorbet form.) What’s most striking about the trend, perhaps, is that given the made-for-Instagram food trends that typically flood social media feeds, soup is comparably low on the aesthetic scale—in fact, the mushy, liquidy puree is staunchly anti-aesthetic. “It’s the least pretentious food you could give people,” Markus says. “One comment I had from a friend was, ‘I don't even know how to take a picture of this, because there's nothing to take a picture of.’ It's just mush in a cup.” Perhaps the need to constantly keep up with what Markus describes as, “a bit of show and tell, look where I've been. Look at the cards that I've collected,” has led to a sense of visual food fatigue.

Markus also notes the irony of his ingredients. For what is seen as a meager dish, he sources his produce from the same places that fine dining establishments such as 11 Madison Park use. He frequents the Union Square Greenmarket to source what’s in season, letting the market dictate his menu. Some of his soups can take up to three days to make. A miso-chicken soup starts with Markus brining the chicken, then roasting it, separating the meat from the bones, and slow-boiling it for 18 hours to make broth. It is then served with sourdough bread that Markus makes from scratch using a 13-year-old starter he inherited.

Theresa von Wangenheim, who runs the Instagram account @SSSSSOUPSSSSS, also emphasizes the relative un-chicness of soup. “I think the soup as a concept was out of fashion for a while,” she says. “It was unfairly associated with being sick or on a diet, or considered an afterthought, not a real meal. I think Asian soups like Pho and ramen have helped its comeback, and allowed soup to live up to its full potential.” Von Wangenheim notes that soup is somewhat part of the zeitgeist, at least in pop culture: think George Costanza “shifting into soup mode,” Adam Driver’s Good Soup, “Gorgeous gorgeous girls love soup,” and John Mayer’s response to “just a girl eating soup alone.”

Is soup the “quiet luxury” of food? “People continue to be receptive to such a simple concept in a food scene where everything is fairly convoluted,” Markus says. Interestingly, it seems both fashion—and food—have made a shift towards the unkempt as of late. Fashion editor Rachel Tashjian wrote in a recent edition of her Opulent Tips newsletter, “I really believe in these polished times, the sign of real style is at least a touch of sloppiness. Because it’s real, and that means it’s as essential to the wearer as water, flowers, and food.” (To wit, Von Wangenheim was commissioned by M Missoni in 2020 to create a soup inspired by their knitwear collection.)

Similar to fashion brands such as Bode that have a handmade, DIY aesthetic, or the return to craft across the worlds of culture and design more broadly, for a certain set of people, soup represents a type of luxury that emphasizes high-quality ingredients, without the need to shout. In today’s nonstop, frenetic world, slowing down and serving a dish prepared with love and care has become a valuable commodity. “Whether you are a model walking Saint Laurent, or you are someone who's picking up the soup in a One Love Community Fridge, I think the continuity is: there's a level of comfort that you're receiving that transcends any aesthetic,” Markus contends.

All of this comes down to one essential ingredient: love. “Soup is one of the most nostalgic and emotional foods out there—most of us will remember one specific soup comforting us when we were younger,” von Wangenheim says. Still, Markus never loses his sense of humor around it all. “I show up to these events and I'm completely shocked that people are coming to eat soup at a bar,” he adds, with a laugh.