A SOUPer Day

   This past Saturday LES and I volunteered at the South Side Soup Contest for the Junior League.   It was an awesome event where twenty five different restaurants participated in making soup to compete in the categories of Best Soup, Most Creative, and Best Vegetarian.

It works like a "Crawl."  Each restaurant was partnered with a retail store where the soup was served.  The twenty five different soup tastings, were scattered in stores over a twenty block radius on the same street in the South Side.

Each stop on the Soup Crawl was labeled with signs and balloons so you knew where to go next.  At each stop you would sample the soup, and could browse/shop in the store. 

All the participants wore this card on a lanyard and you would get each soup-stop punched so you knew which stops you hit.

At the end of the crawl, you would vote on your favorite soups.

  It was a ton of fun to volunteer at this event as well as particpate in the crawl.  LES and I tried some amazing soups and such as an awesome Sausage and Pepper Soup, a Jamaican Pepper Pot, and a Cool Ham Jook, which won Most Creative.  The soup stop  where I volunteered was the Over the Bar Bicycle Cafe, and they made a delicious beer cheese soup called the Cheddar Peddlar Brewhaha which won best vegetarian soup. 

  There were other soups we tried which we unique, but not so good.  One restaurant made Rust Belt Borscht which I did not like, Ironically, the winning soup of the day was one of my least favorites, it was a Parsnip Soup, which I did not particularly like...ohh well

I'd been on bar crawls before, but this was my first soup crawl, and I loved it, obviously anything that involves sampling food is always great.  I am already excited for next year!