After his proprietary blend of miso, yuzu, koshu, rice, and chicken soup sold out in just over an hour, it was off to the races: Hot Soup beget Soup Tour, a multi-stop pop-up of soup at some of the city’s most fashionable hotspots, such as Public Records, Colbo, Lichen and Frog Wine Bar. “I kept doing it because it was the first time that I cooked food for people where I was getting messages like, ‘that felt like a warm hug’,” he says.
With back-to-back “tour” dates over the last few months, Markus has since done events at Sincerely, Tommy, Che, Hudson Wilder, and Vitra, raising soup’s standing from mushy gruel into an elevated artform that has the art and fashion set lining up. (A recent event for the artist and designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen transformed the first strawberries of the season into sorbet form.) What’s most striking about the trend, perhaps, is that given the made-for-Instagram food trends that typically flood social media feeds, soup is comparably low on the aesthetic scale—in fact, the mushy, liquidy puree is staunchly anti-aesthetic. “It’s the least pretentious food you could give people,” Markus says. “One comment I had from a friend was, ‘I don’t even know how to take a picture of this, because there’s nothing to take a picture of.’ It’s just mush in a cup.” Perhaps the need to constantly keep up with what Markus describes as, “a bit of show and tell, look where I’ve been. Look at the cards that I’ve collected,” has led to a sense of visual food fatigue.