Tucked into 29th Street Mall, San Francisco Soup Company offers soups, salads and sandwiches.
The seven different kinds of soup come in small, medium or large bowls. Customers are encouraged to add a side salad or half a sandwich to their soup for only $2.50, rather than $7-9 for a full salad or $7.50 for a full sandwich.
The 12-oz. soups are around $5, which seems like a lot for a small bowl, but they’re filling. The menu is labeled with various letters, which tell customers which dishes are vegetarian, low fat, spicy, dairy free, low carb and gluten free.
Signage outside the San Francisco Soup Company on the 29th Street Mall. (CU Independent/Kai Casey)
Each soup comes with a piece of bread, and it’s no a skimpy portion. One hefty chunk of sourdough bread lasts for an entire bowl of soup. If it does run out for you or you just really like the bread, additional pieces are only 50 cents. CU students also get a free drink with the meal, which saves $1.79. The drink fountain had the standard Coca-Cola products but it also had Mello Yello and Seagram’s Ginger Ale, which is a bit unusual for Boulder.
Customers order their meal at the counter and take their loaded tray back to the tables or booths. The booths are close to the counter, and balancing a tray isn’t too difficult when it’s only for a few steps.
The restaurant, which is the first San Francisco Soup Company located outside of California, uses compostable silverware and napkins, and many of the menu options are organic, which seems to be a requirement for restaurants in Boulder.
The employees were helpful and friendly, but they seemed to understaffed. They encouraged my friend and me to sample as many soups as we wanted, but there wasn’t a clear line for the counter, and people were ordering at random which made sampling difficult. I had to wait to order my soup while one of the two staffers made a salad for another customer. There also isn’t a permanent cashier, so after I got my soup, I had to wait to pay until one of the employees was free.
I got the Mexican Chicken Tortilla soup and a spinach and mushroom side salad. The soup was labeled as low fat, spicy, dairy free and gluten free (LSDG). The spinach salad came with balsamic dressing, but the cashier offered to substitute it for something else.
The soup was very hot, something we’d noticed when we tried samples. I got chips, cheese and cilantro on top of my tortilla soup, because when I sampled it, it was a little bland, and almost everything tastes better with cheese. The soup was thick and good, but it wasn’t anything special. It was labeled as spicy but I didn’t think it was spicy at all. In retrospect, I should have added hot sauce or asked for more cheese, but it was still good.
The salad was bigger than I expected, especially for a side salad. It had baby spinach, mushrooms, chopped egg and crumbled bacon in it, and there was almost too much in the container to mix the dressing in without making a mess. The spinach tasted fresh, and the balsamic dressing wasn’t overpowering. With the filling soup, the free bread and the salad, I couldn’t finish it all. I brought home my leftover salad to eat later, which was easy because it was already in a portable plastic container. In total I’d only spent $7.70.
My friend got the Organic Smoky Split Pea soup, which was labeled as vegetarian, low fat, gluten free and dairy free (VLGD). She’s a vegetarian, and San Francisco Soup Company was one of the first restaurants she had been to that didn’t put ham in the soup.
“This definitely lived up to pre-vegetarian memories of split pea and ham soup sans the ham,” she said.
My friend also described the soup as comfort food, which makes the fact that the soups are low calorie even better. My Mexican Chicken Tortilla soup was only 230 calories, while the Organic Split Pea soup was about 280.
With spring break coming up, finding low-calorie but filling meals without spending ridiculous amounts of money is a priority for me, but it’s proved difficult in Boulder, where salads are almost $5. That just makes San Francisco Soup Company that much better – even with the bread, the meal is still only about 500 calories and good for you.
San Francisco Soup Company serves foods somewhat similar to Panera, but their focus on the soups and providing organic and healthier foods sets it apart. While some of their soups are better than others, the restaurant overall does a good job and seems to cater to a Boulder audience. The larger meals are expensive, but the smaller dishes are worth the price.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Ainslee Mac Naughton at Ainslee.macnaughton@colorado.edu.
