You're getting warmer

Looking for a tasty way to fight the cold? In the first of our winter-food specials, Michael Bateman gets his spoon into soups that will bowl you over

Don't you just love February? OK, so it's cold, dark, rainy and you've probably forgotten what sunshine feels like. But there are some things that make winter worthwhile, and a bowl of freshly made soup is currently high up on my wish list. Any home-cook will tell you that nothing compares to soup you've made yourself, but there's one trend you can't ignore – soup bars.

Ben Page-Phillips knows all about soup fashions. Five years ago some friends told him about soup bars that were opening in Manhattan. "I went with my brother Tom to take a look, and we were pretty confident we could do something similar in London," he says. "Confident" is an understatement. On their return, the brothers sold their houses to raise £400,000, bought the lease of a burger bar near Old Street Tube station. For a year, they lived on-site, carrying out the bulk of the renovations themselves. "We worked 18-hour days, sometimes through the night, and at weekends." A builder friend oversaw the work, but they only called in the professional shop fitters to put in the counter.

When they opened, in May 2001, they didn't achieve the success they expected. They went further. "There were queues out the door. I'd look at these people and think, 'What on earth are you doing here?' So we had to close for another two months so we could deal with that capacity." Ben and Tom now serve 1,000 people a day, up from 600 this time last year.

Needless to say, the brothers now have expansion plans. Who'd bet against them soon having an empire built on soup? But then, soup has risen to a higher plane than was imaginable during the pre-war days of Brown Windsor, as served at almost every hotel in Britain. Soup-making skills were lost to a generation of Brits who grew up on tinned cream of tomato. Then tins were out and cartons and tubs were in. That trend that started with the New Covent Garden Soup Co in 1998 – two years later the company had a turnover of £8m, and now, despite some excellent competition from the supermarkets' own-brands, that figure now stands at over £30m.

Soup bars have raised the game further still, says Ben. "Our soups can be so much chunkier than carton soups – some are like stews. The stuff you buy in the supermarkets has to be divided between so many cartons, it all has to be blended, homogenised."

For between £2 and £4.40, you get a tub (either 300ml or 400ml) of one of the six soups available daily. You can order bread or corn tortilla on the side, but these soups are meals in themselves. Surely now it's time we learnt how to make them. The recipes here have been adapted from the ones used in the restaurant to make them suitable for domestic kitchens. But first, a pointer from Ben himself.

"Don't leave soup on the heat for ages," he says. "It overcooks everything, and meat and fish get tough and rubbery. Use a low heat and short cooking times. Onions should be just translucent, meat just tender."