The Panini Scale

It's always astonishing when you realise that someone knows you better than you know yourself. Last night, I had the perfect demonstration of that, courtesy of The Geek.

I have been swithering, to use a great Scots term, about Union being a pure soup cafe - soup, salad, gorgeous breads and nothing else. The menu streamlined; the cafe specialising in soups; the numbers of soups on offer increasing as time goes on. Rather like Ali Yeganeh's Soup Man in New York - we do soup. If you don't want soup, don't come in here. I like that attitude; that robust confidence to stand by your original idea.

However, the thought of turning away sandwich-seeking customers makes me twitch a bit. As I get more nervous about this, I start to widen the menu options to include sandwiches, even though I don't want Union to be yet another Edinburgh sandwich shop. Then I fret that I'm wandering away from the original idea, and then the frets grow.

The Geek knew of these switherings before I was properly aware of them, and now I realise that I swing from being totally confident in the soup-only business model to panicking about it. Thus my confidence (or lack of) can be plotted on the Panini Scale:




In other news, I may be embarking on a renaming exercise for some of my soups. The soup trialists got cream of courgette and spinach this week. Something about this made me ask them if they'd choose this soup from a cafe menu. Almost all of them said 'no' - but they all loved the taste. One of the triallists said I should call the soup 'The Big Green', as the spinach-and-courgette name sounded depressingly healthy. I like that. Not sure what made me ask them that question - must have been irking away in the back of my mind as well. It has, though, reinforced the idea of letting customers have a taste before they buy. That then led me to the 'semi Genius' and 'full Genius' - a lunch serving of multiple smaller portions of soup. 'Full Genius' is all six. Semi ... well, guess.

And I tried a new bakery this week; Bakery Andante in Morningside. Which has left me with a rather annoying earworm.

a three-soup day

Soup trials are going well. I'm experimenting on the folks in The Geek's workplace. I started meekly, with a minestrone followed by cream of mushroom (ha! but this cream of mushroom tastes like a forest floor)(in a good way), but this week's offering is a little more outre: sweetcorn, chipotle chile and lime, from Yotam Ottolenghi, via my tinkerings. It's utterly gorgeous. Though it's rather immodest to say so, but maybe not, as it's not my invention. Though I have tinkered. At a course last week, we were told that the Brits, and Scots in particular, are terribly bad at self-promotion. I had my brand-new business cards in my bag, announcing the launch of Union of Genius to the world. "Have a large, self-promoting gauntlet", I said, as I handed a card to the tutor. And then tiptoed off.

So, today I've cooked up a lot of soup, but by daily cafe standards, it's a mere bagatelle. I have, however, picked up the Geek's challenge: to make a breakfast soup. I thought what I like for breakfast when I'm away, and hungry, and in need of a comfort-food splurge - bacon, sausage, egg, hash browns, tomato. I've taken the essence of that -



- and turned it into soup. What I have is a potato and sausage base, with crispy bacon, pepadew peppers and tomato topping, and an egg flower on top of the topping. As a first attempt, I rather like it. I wonder if it'll catch on? Here it is:



It wasn't bad, actually. The soup base was rich and savoury and the general consensus was that the soup needed some bits of sausage in it, as well as the bacon. The egg flower, though, was a definite hit.

In other news, I've been looking at premises, and nothing seems quite right for any number of different reasons. It's early days. I started looking at property with the thought that by starting early, I'd have lots of time to find a good spot. Unfortunately, my forward-planning brain has interpreted my failure to find the perfect place in three weeks as an impending sign of certain doom. Someone, please tell my critical faculties to go put their feet up for a little while, eh?