Top Picks

If television's most talked-about comedy talks about your industry, there's reason to smile. That's the lesson soup restaurant entrepreneurs have learned following the broadcast of the now-legendary "Seinfeld" episode that centered around a cantankerous soup chef nicknamed the "Soup Nazi." As Jerry and friends hankered after the Soup Nazi's bowls of soup, the American public was reminded of its fondness for this simmering delicacy.

Not that the soup restaurants of today are serving up the simple chicken noodle brew that Mom used to make. "We're taking something that's been around for hundreds of years and redefining it," explains Carla Ruben, 35, co-founder of the New York City-based Daily Soup Inc. chain. "We're making it more of a meal. We try to imagine the customer taking the soup and putting it on a piece of bread and making it a sandwich," elaborates Ruben, who is partners with Peter Siegel, 29, and Bob Spiegel, 36.

And, no, neither the lunchtime crowd of working professionals nor the dinner crowd of hungry families spoons up, say, a run-of-the-mill vegetable soup. Ingredients as exotic (and ample) as spicy Moroccan chicken and Thai chilled melon with peanuts are now thrown into the pot.

"It's something people have wanted for a long time-it just wasn't available," says Ruben, whose eight New York City Daily Soup locations serve some 8,000 people every day. "It's healthy. It's nutritious. It's filling."

And it's hot (so hot that we wrote about it last month in our "What's Hot" column). With Americans reputed to slurp up more than 10 billion bowls of the stuff every year, soup is enjoying a popularity that entrepreneurs are happy to translate into lucrative businesses. Thanks, Jerry.

This article was originally published in the December 1997 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Top Picks.