JUST The Soup

Yesterday I had lunch with my daughter Bridget and event which has been at least a week in the making, actually longer be we have been really trying this last week. Between the move at my office and the meeting I have got sucked into and Bridget’s meetings which have run long or what ever we just have not been able to get together. The weekday, downtown lunch would be great since we are down there and having lunch with a daughter would be/ is a great break in the day. But not this week; We decided to schedule some time together Saturday, yesterday.

When Bridget first came into my life she was a vibrant pre-teen, part of a package deal; ripped from the deep south to be relocated in Utah the girl did pretty good. She was pretty cynical with life by the time we met and I think I identified that in her and we bonded immediately. My cynicism and Bridget’s could get pretty thick so we dealt with each other in small amounts. Our bond was always there shaky, at times, but enduring. We, the congregate fam ( those living all the same roof which was Bridget and Brooks Dianne and me) went to the tabernacle broadcast each Sunday for a couple of year soon after we were married. The Tabernacle is a covert LDS missionary device. A radio broadcast of the famous LDS Tabernacle choir, in the historic Tabernacle on Temple Square where “everything is free!!”. So every Sunday we were up early and went down to the Tab for the broadcast and after we would go out for breakfast. One of our favorite places was/is Market Street Grill. One of Salt Lake’s established “up scale” restaurants molded in the turn of the century vain inhabiting the first floor of the historic New York building. Young scrubbed faced staff, crusty bread and fresh fish flown in from the coast every morning—one of the few restaurants in SLC where they grind their own coffee for every pot.

The thing with an upscale restaurant is that one has to remain tough and committed to ordering the cheapest thing on the menu or not on the menu, no matter what the help is committed to “Up sale” you with. The Market

Street makes an excellent clam chowder and the chowder is fairly inexpensive compared to the rest of the menu Krystle, our waiter, of course tried to up sale us on the soup and salad combo but Bridget and I stuck to our guns and stuck with JUST the soup. There is no selection of the menu of just soup nd we had to specify just the clam chowder. Krystle appeared crestfallen but also relieved. She obviously have been instructed to ask the customer once and only once if they wanted the larger order. Sense we had so insistently “just the soup” she was off the hook. We have learned the soup is inexpensive the coffee sorta and coffee and soup—the bread of course is free.

We drank our coffees, gorged on the incredible hard crusted French loaves and sipped our soup and talked. It was “game day” for University of Utah and all the fat old alums were crowding the joint. I didn’t know it was a game day but all the better for all the old couples gave us a rich pallet to paint the stories about each couple we watched through out the course of our meal. We stretched our meager meal out over an hour enjoying the company, the ambience and people watching on a stormy afternoon.