Soupçon of broth to warm the heart
Lift your winter spirits with a bowl of this dinky café’s finest
In the colder months, I run on soup. Lidl’s latest special offer veg will be chopped, simmered and stashed in the freezer for cheery winter lunches.
When I worked in an actual office, these defrosting bags would intrigue and sometimes alarm my colleagues. Beetroot caused particular consternation.
One less adventurous eater, unfamiliar with the national dish of Poland, worried that I was a zombie with a melting brain for lunch.
Meeting a chum for a plate of soup is the perfect lunchtime mini-treat, a healthy and economical way to socialise, fraternise and have change from a fiver.
That’s what I promised Nippy Sweetie when another pal and I arranged to join her for a Tayside nosebag.
She had never been to Parlour, a dinky cafe in Dundee’s twisty West Port. It is a blink-andyou-miss-it unit in a row of cool eating, drinking and body piercing establishments.
On a Thursday lunchtime, it was so busy that the soup ran out. Just as we arrived.
Nippy was not amused. Why, she asked in her penetrating voice, had they not made a back-up pot?
And given that it was barely 1pm and more and more soup-seeking lunch customers followed us in, it was a fair point.
The patient and smiley staff must have scraped the one pot they did have because word came back to our table that there was one small portion available.
Peace was restored. For the rest of us there was a cabinet full of enticing sandwiches and wraps waiting to be toasted. There was also a tortilla and bowls of healthful salads.
The scraped-up soup was a perfectly decent, if not enormous, portion. And it went way beyond its billing as “lentil”.
Yes, there were lentils in there, but also potatoes, carrots and some rags of green matter.
It came topped with parsley and chilli flakes.
This was a proper home-made bowlful, with the healing properties that only come from
slow-cooked pulses and root vegetables.
At £4.95 it was a stone cold bargain – and one reason that Parlour is stappit fu of customers at lunchtime.
Worried that the small bowl would actually be small, Nippy added a cheese and ham toastie. This was a perfect old school toasted sandwich, buttered to a crisp on the outside, oozing with strong cheddar within.
It was served, as all Parlour’s savoury food is, with a few dressed spinach leaves and cucumber wedges. Such a simple and classy touch – it makes everything look and taste fresh and elevates a snacky meal into something much more.
Our other friend, who spent years working in whole food shops and restaurants, investigated the salads. These are a challenge in the colder months when there is a limited demand for lettuce and many traditional ingredients are imported.
She went the pulse route and was impressed with a simple but flavoursome mound of dressed chickpeas and a more elaborate concoction of brown lentils, beetroot and roasted red pepper.
Both held their own with individual flavours that did not fight on the plate.
Seeing as she no longer works in the mung bean sector, she added one of the lush toasties. Her cheese and tomato was just as good as Nippy’s with ham.
I love a tortilla, the thick tapas omelette with melting potato and onion.
Parlour’s version is a different variation on eggs and bits, the one I would call a Spanish omelette. It was hot and puffy, with red pepper, chard and feta cheese strewn through it.
A red and white cabbage slaw and couscous salad made this a substantial and healthful lunch. Couscous can make a stolid salad but this was lightened by plenty of peas, cucumber and tomato. It added just enough heft to a plate that was, eggs aside, all veg.
Tempting as the cakes were, we had limited capacity. But when I see a combination I’ve never tried before, somehow I find a tiny corner and give it a go.
Pear and cardamom ? That’s the kind of baked delight I’m talking about.
Which is how we came to be sharing a slice of the dark, crumbly cake version of lebkuchen, those spicy German biscuits that appear around the festive season. It even had the same white icing.
I’m not sure I would have identified the pear if it hadn’t been flagged up but the whole slice went down very well with a table of lebkuchen ladies.
Parlour is a great asset to Dundee. If I lived or worked within lunching distance I would regularly join its queue or arrange soup and sandwich meet-ups.
There is nothing more cheering on a dreary day … and we all need a bit of that.