Soup Factory serves winter comfort at QVM

Winter Night Market stall The Soup Factory gets crazy busy on a Wednesday night. Thanks to a pop-up residence in the dairy hall, its unusual offering is currently also on offer to QVM day shoppers.

When former chef and restaurant owner Hormoz “David” Ishaya was asked for an idea for a winter night market stall it didn’t take him long to come up with one.

“I said, ‘well, soup would be the best thing,” he told CBD News.

And soon after it had evolved into “soup in a roll!”.

According to David, the concept offers “the best of both worlds”.

“You get the bread and the soup,” he said. “Most people eat the whole lot.”

He had heard about it being done in the US but knew that there they were using sourdough.

“That bread is very easy to make but it actually changes the flavours of the soup,” he said.

“I wanted to do something that doesn’t change the flavour.”

Having previously made a bread he served dips in; he worked to adapt it into a type of white cob loaf that was “basically strong enough to hold boiling water”.

Then he went to work on the soups.

Twelve years later the business, which David runs with his son, Dylan, is booming.

“It’s been a long process,” he said.

“But now we’ve got it to a stage where everyone knows the quality, whoever buys something, they always come back, especially if it’s the clam chowder, which is our biggest seller.”

“Every time we take it off the menu people complain.”

While earlier on there was a bigger range of soups, the business has “stuck with the top five”: sweet potato and coriander, Asian chicken and corn, potato and leek, pumpkin, vegan lentil and the chowder.

During the day, there are heaps of regular customers, many of them taking the separately packaged components of the dish back to their homes or offices.

At the night market there are 16 staff on the stall, and the queue can run to close to 300 people.

“We make our own bread, we make our own soups, so that’s why we don’t have any copycats out there,” David said.

“No-one knows how to make the bread.”

The downside of this is that between the baking, soup-making and selling he has just worked a 112-hour week.

“That’s the problem when you can’t give away your recipes, I suppose,” he said with a laugh. “You’ve got to do it all yourself.

“It’s a bit of a punishment.”

The Winter Night Market runs from 5pm to 10pm every Wednesday until August 26. •