Well when its touted as homemade style in a pot soup that your paying 4-5 bucks for … a microwave is a tad disappointing
When I worked at Boston Market 20 years ago, our soups came frozen in vacuum-sealed bags that we thawed and heated in a boiling water bath, after which we added chicken (usually hand-pulled dark meat left over from the chickens that went unsold at the end of the previous day) and put it on the steam table. I would guess that other fast casual chains that serve soup (Panera etc.) do pretty much the same.
I doubt it would’ve tasted much different if we’d microwaved it instead.
When I worked in the kitchen at The Grand Concourse, a seafood restaurant, we made Charlie’s Chowder from scratch in a huge industrial cooker. A couple hundred pounds of pollock, etc. From there it went into smaller tureens.
Diners loved that chowder.
Technically, I said you’re not really a restaurant if your “kitchen” is incapable of heating soup in a pot. Yes, it’s gatekeeping. I’m OK with it being gatekeeping, because these companies are pretending to be restaurants, but are actually the customer facing end of a food production assembly line.
A restaurant is a place where food is prepared on the premises for customers. It’s delusional for someone to expect fast food restaurants and regional or national chain restaurants to prepare food like a fine dinnng establishment.
I don’t expect that - I fully expect fast-food places and chain restaurants to be serving frozen or even canned soup and I would understand if a fast food place had nowhere to heat soup other than a microwave. But that’s different from a chain restaurant not even having a stove and pots, so they can’t heat up the soup if the microwave is broken. I don’t expect a chain restaurant to prepare food like a fine dining establishment - but I don’t think it’s crazy to expect them to prepare food like a diner.
Why is it delusional to think that an Applebee’s or a TGIFridays can prepare food like my local bar/restaurant? I just checked out the menus of my local TGIF and my local Pub (about a 5min drive between the two). They both have bars, TVs, and places to sit and eat where a waitress will take your order etc. They both sell wings, sliders, mozz sticks, burgers, steaks, pasta, fish&chips, salads and kids meals, both at around the same price.
They’re competing directly with real restaurants, they can take a little criticism.
Having worked at a number of restaurants of varying levels, I would say that unless you are paying $50 for a bottle of wine, you should expect your soup to come in a bag, and probably spend a bit of time with Chef Mike.
As far as “not having a pot to heat a soup in”, sure they have pots, but their smallest is probably around 5 gallons, not something that efficiently can be used to heat up your bowl of soup.
Honestly, even a fine dining restaurant is something of a factory operation. So in theory, yes, they can heat your soup in a pot on the stove but that may not part of their normal processes, which are necessary to feeding some hundreds of people each day, (If you walked in with a picky child, in theory, a restaurant worker could run to the local bodega and buy a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and heat that, but I also doubt they’ll do that.)
Have you actually been in the kitchen of your local bar/restaurant? Chances are they are getting bagged soup in from GFS or Sysco or some such and are heating it up just the same as your local chain.
Having a broken microwave is such a rare event that it is indeed delusional to expect having dedicated sauce pans as a backup.
They aren’t competing directly with “real” restaurants. They are a completely different market with a different business model.
Here, for instance, is a gift link to a New York Times article describing, as the headline says, 22 hours at Balthazar, a fine dining restaurant in Manhattan that seats 180 people and sees about 1500 diners on a normal evening. (Note that the article is nine years old, so things may have changed; the restaurant may not even be there any longer.) It uses the factory metaphor to describe how that number of people get fed.
And this is assuming of course that the server and staff were being completely honest, and weren’t just being lazy and giving a weak excuse that they didn’t care if it made sense.
A friend of mine owned a busy bar. His license to sell alcohol was technically a restaurant license because that was what he could get given the neighborhood and the state liquor laws. He did not sell food, but occasionally had chex mix or peanuts on the bar as freebies.
One day Liquor Control did an inspection and noticed he had no food. He was fined and given one month to correct his deficiency. He ran to Sam’s Club and bought a case of Campbell’s Soups and a microwave along with plastic spoons and cardboard bowls. He hung a sign: “WE NOW HAVE SOUP, $10 A BOWL”. He did not want anyone to order soup.
When Liquor Control returned, they were not amused. He held tight and got a lawyer. A fight ensued. Eventually he gave in and did a big remodel, adding a real kitchen and hiring a chef to run it. It turned out to be a great move financially
I’m not talking about having emergency sauce pans behind a breakable glass panel, I’m talking about the concept of a “restaurant kitchen” that does so little actual preparation of food that they don’t need any sauce pans at all, for anything, ever.
Are you saying that GFS and Sysco sell soup bagged by the individual serving ? - because it seems to me that a microwave wouldn’t work for a 4 lb bag of soup. That bag would have to be heated in a pot or heated and kept warm in the same sort of urn or kettle that you see at buffets/hot bars. I suppose you could initially heat it up in a bigger pot and then reheat it by the individual bowl - but while it’s certainly easier to heat up the individual serving if you only sell a couple of bowls of soup per day, at some point it’s not worth having the soup on the menu.
Or they don’t have sauce pans that are right sized for an individual bowl of soup, and/or a cook that cares enough to get one out to heat up an individual bowl of soup.
No, I’m not saying that. (Well, actually they do, in some special cases and circumstances, but that’s not relevant to this discussion.)
It would probably be thawed and heated in a large pot of boiling water, left in the bag, then poured into a bain-marie.
And I can think of a dozen different reasons why they would, having worked in restaurants. We don’t know what time OP came in, if it was a bit later after they’d pulled the soup off, we don’t know what soup he ordered, and if it is one that they sell a lot of and keep warm, or one that they don’t sell much of and only heat to order. It could be that the OP was early, and the pot of soup was still warming up, wasn’t a servable temperature, and an individual serving would need to be nuked.
I can think of many, many more scenarios where a bowl of soup would need to go in the microwave, but I’m not going to sit here for the next hour and type out a few pages of speculation, especially when the current information from the OP leaves it rather open.
I will say that having worked in restaurants, having a broken microwave wasn’t really that rare an event.
That said, I’ve never worked in a restaurant with only one (at least, any that depended on them), and having them all broken at the same time would be a bit of an outlier.
And, honestly, that’s what I am surprised at in the OP, not that they heat up their soup in a microwave, not that a microwave was broken, but that they didn’t have any functional microwaves at their disposal.
Back when sous vide units and cooking was a new thing, a chef who got me into sous vide cooking texted me asking if he could buy my Anova for what they sold for new. I ran it down to him as a two day loan while he awaited his shipment.