Ramada Soup Festival: Saying goodbye to winter - review

I personally could eat soup all year (and in fact we make chicken soup with matzo balls every Shabbat even in August at the request of my chicken-soup loving offspring.) If you hurry you can still make the Ramada Hotel’s Winter Soup Festival, which is one of the best deals in town and runs until April 11.

For NIS 65 you get all you can eat soup as well as cheeses, and more than a dozen homemade spreads.

“The idea is to have as many soups as possible and to make it as tasty as possible,” Chef Shimon Almog told me. He said he doesn’t use any soup powder but makes a vegetable stock that is often the base for the soup.

Sampling some soup

It was quiet on the night we tried the soup festival at the Timna restaurant in the lobby of the hotel, but Almog said it had been packed the night before in advance of the fast of Ta’anit Esther. There were five soups on offer (plus an extra one which he wanted us to taste). The first was a Moroccan-style legume soup that was thick and hearty and had interesting spices along with chickpeas, carrots and potatoes. We moved on to a pumpkin soup which might have been my favorite of the night. It was a little sweet, and as my husband said, it was like “eating a liquid pumpkin pie.”

Next I tried the onion soup, which came at the right time as I had been craving onion soup for a few weeks. I added a nice amount of cheese and some croutons, and was quite happy. Next was the red bean soup, which had quite a kick to it, and the last one was a roasted sun dried tomato soup which I confess I was too full to try but my husband said was very good.

The reason I was too full was because Chef Shimon also brought us a small bowl of roasted red pepper soup (which was slated for the next day’s menu) to try. There are five soups each night and they vary, although he said there is onion soup every night.

There was a nice platter of cheeses including tzafit and mozzarella, as well as the dips which included black tahina, tahina and beets and pesto – all homemade.

Next to us was a young couple: Daniella and Tzvi Gleiberman with their very cute two-month-old Eden. It was their first date night out since Daniella gave birth, and I confess I might have kidnapped their baby girl for a while: I forgot just how good babies feel.

“I think they should have had a sign saying the bean soup is spicy,” Tzvi said, “but overall, the soups are delicious.”

I couldn’t agree more – and for NIS 65 per person, it’s a steal.

• Ramada Soup Festival
• Ramada Hotel, Timna Restaurant
• Hours 12 noon – 10 pm
• Kashrut: Mehadrin Yerushalayim

The writer was a guest of the restaurant.