The Practical Reason Restaurants Have A Soup Of The Day

Plenty of restaurants offer a soup of the day on their menus — but why is it such a thing across all sorts of restaurants? Historically, at least, it has come down to restaurants aiming to get the most out of their food they order, and throwing away as little of it as possible. 

Soups of the day allow a restaurant to use up whatever food they have leftover. For most restaurants (except those with totally set menus), it's hard to predict exactly what will be ordered on any given day, so some volume of leftover food that isn't served to customers is inevitable. When it comes to basics like vegetables or standard meats like beef or chicken, these leftovers can easily be repurposed into hearty soups, also allowing chefs to use a little creativity in crafting a new dish on the spot. It's a smart financial decision for restaurants: Soup is already a pretty cheap dish to make, and if a restaurant centers those soups around ingredients that they already have on hand and need to use up, it's doubly the case. A lot of soups also use stock — and stock is also easy for restaurants to make since it uses up extras like chicken bones and vegetable scraps, saving even more food. Soup is also, frankly speaking, a relatively hard-to-screw-up dish — common problems like a soup being too thick or thin are easily fixed, so even if a chef's experimentation doesn't totally work out, the soup can still be saved.

Soup of the day sometimes has a bad reputation. Because of the idea that it's just a way to use up leftover ingredients, it could be seen as just a dumping point for random kitchen leftovers. But don't automatically write them off: If a chef is skilled or a restaurant cares about serving quality food, then (ideally speaking) the soup of the day should also be good. Plus, not all restaurants see the soup of the day as a place to use up ingredients, instead planning out their soups and buying ingredients specifically for them, with an eye to quality.

There are also signs you can look out for to determine if a restaurant is putting effort into its soup. In an interview with Town & Country, Gordon Ramsay notoriously advised against ordering it, noting that some restaurants just serve the same soup of the day over and over — so, to figure out if a restaurant does this, ask a server what yesterday's soup was or (if possible) try to check out the daily menu on a few occasions to see if the same soup is constantly there. If you're at cheaper restaurants, like a fast-casual chain such as Panera Bread, it's arguably more likely that the soup of the day is not made on-site, and instead comes pre-frozen or in a can. On the flip side, if a restaurant's soup has unique ingredients or a more complicated recipe, it's more likely to be good.