Dining out: Big City Soup

My husband likes to say, "Soup just hits the spot," and I've always thought so, too. I make a lot of soup at home, especially this time of year, and I'm always on the lookout for new favorites. I rarely have soup from a can these days — for me, it's homemade or nothing.

Luckily, homemade doesn't necessarily have to mean "made in my very own kitchen." Big City Soup, for example, has become a doted-upon downtown lunch spot thanks to the reliable excellence of its steamy, savory concoctions.

We took the kids to Big City Soup for a recent weekday lunch, when the lines are longish but tend to move speedy-quick. Big City Soup has a rotating soup menu, with new offerings each day, and a clean-but-classic ambience of big windows, white subway tiles, black-and-white cityscapes and a touch of blue neon. If you're not the type who likes surprises, you can check out the place's highly useful Web site, where menus are updated faithfully every business day (as I write this, for example, I am lamenting missing out on the crab-and-brie soup listed on Tuesday's menu).

In addition to soup, there are sandwiches in various sizes, salads and some nice sweets to finish things up. There's not a kids' menu, per se, but our two youngest girls were filled up (and then some) sharing a ham-and-cheese panini, and 16-ounce bowl of soup.

Actually, we all shared. We ordered three bowls of soup and ended up passing them all around the table.

Not so for the sandwiches, which we each gobbled with possessive gusto. The girls had that crispy panini, a delicious take on ham and cheese, with firm, oozy provolone and salty ham, while my husband enjoyed a hearty roast beef-on-sourdough bread with provolone, roasted red peppers and Dijonnaise.

I had the turkey with havarti, smoked lean meat with sweet caramelized onions and the usual sandwich fixings, on a sourdough baguette. The baguette's height and formidable crust made it challenging to get my mouth around this sandwich, but boy, was it good when I managed.

Through all this we slurped soup. The husband and kids were torn between their liking for the beef stew — dark, fragrant and mellow with big chunks of potato, and topped with bright green peas just before serving — and the Italian sausage with white bean. This was a lovely soup, with thick, peppery broth giving character to the mellow beans and crumbled browned sausage providing chewy texture.