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"FacebookPinterest\n\nI do not mean to do a disservice to Manhattan\u2019s celebrated new seafood restaurant Cello or its chef, Laurent Tourondel, when I say that I came away from my first meal there smitten with the soup. At one time, soup was an essential and admired component of every formal meal, but it no longer has much of a gastronomic good name. These days soup is esteemed primarily for its restorative (chicken) or canned (Campbell\u2019s) properties, and even Tourondel, a 33-year-old French chef from just outside the city of Vichy, spiritual home of the greatest of all cold soups, vichyssoise, brushed aside my efforts to declare him the Picasso of potage. \u201CI don\u2019t like soup. I never eat soup,\u201C he claimed. \u201CWhen I cook, I like to have both soft and crunchy in my food. With a soup, you know, you cannot get the crispness.\u201C\n\nNevertheless, he acceded to my request to retaste two of the soups I most admired, and he shrugged when I timidly suggested that I wouldn\u2019t mind a sip of any other soups he might have around the place. When I arrived several weeks later, the captain did not cry out \u201CSoup\u2019s on!\u201C as I was seated, but it would not have been inappropriate. Tourondel had created an eight-course, all-soup tasting luncheon, with sommelier Olivier Zardoni matching a wine to each course. Seldom has a meal been so satisfying\u2014to say nothing of moist.\n\nSoup, to me, is the one food (other than ice cream) that never fails to comfort and soothe. On a cold day, it elicits a sigh of relief. It is rarely formal and never tough. Soup is sometimes too hot, but patience alleviates that problem. Soup encourages us to linger, and while most soups do not summon deep thoughts, Tourondel\u2019s are an exception. They are served in tiny portions, prepared with water instead of stock (to emphasize the flavors of the principal ingredients) and so light I believe they should be served in stemware, not bowls.\n\nThe first of his soups was a foamy, frothy blend of eggs and cream topped with beluga\u2014he called it an emulsion, but to me it was caviar on a cloud. Then came the soup most responsible for luring me back, a mushroom velout\u00E9 of impossible richness in light of its delicacy. That was only the start, for the soups kept tumbling out of the kitchen, tureen after tureen: a cream of Jerusalem artichoke laced with swirls of red-wine reduction, a butternut-squash soup tasting of bacon and adorned with seared bay scallops and white truffles, a foamy lobster bisque of shocking intensity enhanced by a Sauternes gel\u00E9e that melted upon contact with the warm liquid, a nutmeg-scented emulsion of lettuce topped with a slice of saut\u00E9ed foie gras, a cool dessert soup made from Granny Smith apples and enhanced with a fan of caramelized apple slices and a second dessert soup based on the fundamental principle that warm chocolate is even more appealing than cold. (Or why would all of us crave hot fudge?)\n\nSoups are some of the most difficult foods to pair with wines, and among the best of Zardoni\u2019s choices were a Paul Goerg blanc de blancs Champagne with the egg-and-caviar soup and a Banyuls (a portlike French red wine) with the lettuce-and-foie gras soup. His absolute triumph was a sweet, apple-scented Hungarian Tokaji to accompany the Granny Smith soup.\n\nAlthough I tried convincing Tourondel that his all-soup menu was a culinary breakthrough that the world was waiting to embrace, he exhibited the stubbornness for which all French chefs are beloved and declared that he had no intention of offering such a meal to his customers. Chefs are used to preparing meals that go from soup to nuts, but he is the first I\u2019ve encountered to say nuts to soup."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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