Everybody has a favorite soup. Maybe it’s a rich tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich from a local diner. Or your favorite aunt’s chicken soup, which may still be the only cure for the flu. Maybe a chowder, a bisque or a stew hit the spot when you were growing up. After 9,000 years in existence, soup may qualify as the ultimate comfort food.

A Growing Market
Soups, stews and chilies are making a resurgence on restaurant menus, driven largely by soup lovers who constantly crave new flavors and by diners seeking healthier menu choices. The movement has helped free soup from its lunch-only, left-side-of-the-menu status.

The trends in homemade soup mirror what’s happening across the food industry, according to Campbell Kitchen’s Vice President Lucinda Ayers. A study her company conducted identified emerging soup flavors that include watermelon, rhubarb, celery, pork belly, grapefruit and coconut, and trends that include figs, pomegranate, beets, cauliflower, acai and whole grains.

Seafood soup…

President Obama doesn’t have any problem eating Gulf Coast seafood. His chef, White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford, doesn’t have any problem preparing it. Neither do a lot of restaurants in New Orleans, a city on the leading edge of the culinary world and the water’s edge of this summer’s massive BP oil spill. But the scientific community jury is still out, large areas of the Gulf remain closed to fishing, and it will be years before the spill’s full effect will be known.

So, should you worry about eating seafood now from the Gulf? More importantly, should you worry about serving it to your customers? You might be curious to hear some of the early returns.

The Government Effort
The federal government is working hard to assure everyone that Gulf seafood is safe. In July, President Obama hosted a ceremony honoring the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints. The main course? Gulf shrimp. His chef toured…

In this economic crunch, everyone’s looking for a little extra value. As a restaurant operator, you’ve likely seen this firsthand, as cost-conscious diners continue to seek out satisfying dishes at lower prices. As a result, many customers are bypassing once-popular appetizers like soups or salads and heading straight to the main course. Darren Tristano, Executive Vice President at foodservice research firm, Technomic, Inc., explains this trend:

To justify spending on items from the left side of the menu, they want more value—dishes with unique flavors they can’t make at home, or are large enough to share or eat as an entrée …

With this in mind, it’s more important than ever to make sure your restaurant’s soups and salads work just as well on their own as they do before the main course. Luckily, it couldn’t be easier to move beyond boring chicken noodle soups and dull Caesar salads. The same pastas you serve as individual entrees are just what you need…

It’s clear that the resurgence of comfort foods is one of the major menu trends to emerge out of the economic recession. And what’s a better comfort food than pasta? From penne pomodoro to fettuccine alfredo, few dishes marry satisfying taste an budget-friendly value like pastas. Wholesome, flavorful and easily customizable, pasta is the perfect comfort food for cost-conscious diners and restaurant operators alike.

If anyone knows the value of pasta, it’s the owners and operators of Italian restaurants. From nation-wide chains and franchises to local mom-and-pop shops, more and more pizzerias are adding pasta-based entrees and appetizers to their lineups – and reaping the financial rewards.

Roughly 60% of the independent pizzeria operators surveyed in PMQ Pizza Magazine’s 2009 census already served some kind of pasta dish in their restaurants, and an additional five percent planned to introduce one within the next six months. What’s more, those already serving pasta in their pizzeras reported that…