Soup season is here and I'm pretty pleased about it. I like soup all year round but any soup lover has to get excited about winter. I moved to Chicago on January 1st of this year so I came in midwinter totally unarmed with coping mechanisms. This year I will at least have soup on my side. If you live in Chicago and you are also fetishistic about soup, then please use this tool appropriately.

The Higher End:

Bouillabase at La Sardine French bistro on Carpenter St. near Harpo Studios. Bouillabase is the traditional fish soup from Marseille. It is a bistro traditional but these days it's harder and harder to find because it's not that easy to make well and because, well, Americans don't really eat seafood as much as they should. Good bouillabase is the result of good proportions, good fish stock, and great seafood. La Sardine's version is really good. It's served with two croutons that are dipped in an intense roux that adds additional flavor to the fish broth, which is gently flavored with saffron. The bowl comes heaped with muscles, clams, Mediterranean fish, and a nice chunk of Maine lobster. You could say it's more of a stew than a soup, but the broth is tomatoey soup broth, clear and nourishing. Bouillabase at La Sardine goes for $19.50 a la carte.

Sukiyaki at Kamehachi Japanese restaurant in Old Town . Sukiyaki is a beef soup served on special family occasions during the Japanese winter. It generally contains cabbage, onions, clear noodles, beef. The broth is brown, transparent, and slightly sweet. Sukiyaki is one of those dishes that can be really awful. When it's good though, it's fantastic. I've been in search of a good sukiyaki ever since my favorite restaurant in Washington D.C., the Mikado, closed. Like the Mikado, Kamehachi is a first generation Japanese restaurant, meaning it's been here since long before the sushi boom of the 80s. And therefore the restaurant's reputation was built on its execution of traditional Japanese kitchen food. Good sukiyaki is all about good broth, which I'm told gains its subtlety from the vegetables. Many Japanese eat sukiyaki by dipping the steaming hot contents into a whipped raw egg. It makes the taste a bit milder, less sweet, and the dish more filling. I like it both ways. Sukiyaki is a full mean at Kamehachi and comes with rice and Miso soup for $18.50.

The Lower End:

Birria at Reyes Ocotlan on 18th Street in Pilsen. Birria is traditional Mexican goat stew or soup, that comes from the center of the country, particularly the state of Jalisco. The main city in Jalisco is Guadalajara and Ocotlan is a small town on the shores of Lake Chapala. Okay now you got the history lesson down. Birria is not really a pure soup. I mean it's more about the meat but what makes it good is the jugo or the juice that the meat is cooked in. When you ask for a birria what they do is take the meat out and chop it off the leg of the goat and put it in a bowl and then pour the juice over top until the bowl is full. You can always ask for more juice if you want more juice but I usually get full on the first time through. The juice is thin and mildly spiced. The meat is very tender. You have to like goat, which I happen to. Goat is to red meat what turkey is to white meat. Stronger flavor and for whatever reason very likely to put you to sleep after you eat it. Birriria Reyes Ocotlan makes the best birria you'll have that's not cooked in an army pot over an open fire. The dish will run you about $8 with unlimited tortillas and jugo. Also good at this establishment is the agua de Jamaica, a very sweet hibiscus punch.

Korean Beef and Seafood Soup at Joy Yee's Noodle Shop, Chinatown and S. Halsted-Joy Yee's is a small chain that specializes in making Chinese and E. Asian cuisine that has not been so altered that it's unrecognizable to its countrymen but which is still palatable to mainstream Americans. The menu is s huge you wonder what the kitchen looks like. Joy's achieves its end by employing clever marketing tactics like pushing its fruit shakes and bubble teas, which bring the chicks in, and also by having a young, hip waitstaff. The cool thing about Joy's is that it's sort of a new phenomena in American society, which is mainstream Asian-American culture. If you go to the one on Halsted it will be packed with college kids who are on the one hand from all over Asia and on the other hand from all over the Midwest. The trouble with Joy Yee's is that it might lack the soul of an immigrant kitchen. BUT I found a soup there, during my quest for the proper sukiyaki, that I like a lot. It's like a Korean sukiyaki with no noodles, a lot of seafood, and in the spicy red broth that makes Korean soup and makes your nose run. It comes with a bowl of rice and it will definitely fill you up. It only costs $7 which is a miracle considering it's full of beef and oysters and vegetables and all kinds of good stuff. I'm sure this soup has a real name. One of my favorite soups of all time is Yu Kae Jang, a Korean winter soup made from beef bone marrow. If you know where it lives in this town please email me.

Chicken Soup at Taqueria Azteca on S. Blue Island-This is a great place all the way around. It's cheap, fast, and good. There are a million taquerias in Pilsen and about half of them offer some kind of caldo de pollo, or chicken soup. I choose Azteca because I'm loyal to it. The soup is not really special, mostly because its cooked to order on very high heat. Mexican chicken soup usually consists of a rough cut bunch of vegetables-carrots, yucca, potato, cabbage-and a chicken leg and thigh. The broth at Azteca is good and so is the chicken. This is when you feel poor and sick and you need chicken soup with real chicken bones in it. Obviously for the real medicinal value you should use a whole chicken and cook it slow because it's all the droplets of enzymatic grease that really helps fight the bad guys, but when you live alone in a cold city you sometimes have to seek substitutes. Everything is good at Azteca. The gorditas with rajas con queso, mild chile strips with cheese, are fantastic. The caldo de pollo runs $6.95 and is served with a side of rice and a mound of tortillas. Azteca has free chips and salsa. The salsa is good. They also have beer and a video juke box that pounds ranchera music.

Beet Soup at Healthy Foods on S. Halsted around 35th-Healthy Foods is a Lithuanian diner in Bridgeport. You could call their soup Borscht if you wanted to but it's not because the place isn't Polish. The rest of the food here is extremely heavy but the soups are always right on. They have cold varieties in the summer. In fact the cold beet soup in the summer is my favorite. It's a deep medicinal red chock full of hand peeled beets and it's sprinkled with fresh dill and served with a whole boiled potato on the side and a stack of good bread with butter. It's a great nourishing meal on a hot day. This is a pretty cool spot. My maternal grandfather was Lithuanian so I always feel some kind of innate pride there but even beyond that it's a new American time capsule left over from the days when immigrant communities had to and wanted to assimilate on one level and never really did on another. It looks like a diner. The family that runs it is nice and Lithuanian is still spoken in the kitchen. Special bonus for any women who made it this far through the soup article or any guys who need a romantic, the owner imports amber jewelry from Lithuania, which is famous for its Baltic amber. The jewelry is handmade, mostly pieces of silver and amber, and has the sort of Nordic/Celtic/Baltic vibe without being played out like most Irish stuff is. It runs from about $50-$200 and it's worth it.

 

Cabbage Soup at Podhalanka, Ashland and Division. This is an old school Polish Kitchen and I like all the food here. It has a counter and there are usually regulars (men) sitting at it and chowing down. The soup is chock full of cabbage and shreds of whatever part of pig they use to cook with it. It has a slightly sour taste, like sauerkraut but not as strong, and the broth is reddish brown in color. It is very delicious and for $2.80 plus tax comes with two pieces of Polish bread which you should slather in butter and dip in your soup. I also once asked for a made-to-order Polish specialty here that a friend of mine told me about. He translated it as potato pancake Hungarian style, and it was a large potato pancake with goulash on top of it. My friend said that "Hungarian style" in Polish is like saying "Southern Style" in English. They don't have it on the menu at Podhalanka but they assembled it happily and charged me the regular price for an entrée. I respect that type of attitude. They usually have four or five home-made soups on tap here for lunch and it has to be one of the best bargains in town.