Food for thirst

Chilled out and fed up with summer overdoses of icy Starbuck sorbettos, sickeningly sweet 7-Eleven Slurpies, childish Gatorade ice cubes at home and other Arctic schmaltz, it wasn’t until I happened into Crepe Vine that I hit on something cold that I was still craving — a liquid salad of cold soup, real food for thirst.

Hoping for a classic tomato gazpacho, desire this day was slaked by a chilled vegetable soup consisting mainly of chopped cucumber and tomato, with bits of mushroom, asparagus, carrot and avocado. Thickened with yogurt, it became more like a pudding impersonating a soup. For color and a bit of impudence, the full-bodied dish was dotted with drops of bright orange-red paprika oil. For $5, it was like a mini-summer meal — and healthful. Plus, I didn’t need to get bloated with ice water.

Before arriving at Crepe Vine, I’d spent a good part of the day asking foodie acquaintances about where I could get the very best gazpacho, but found praise for the cold soup drained of vigor. Most people remembered it from “someplace,” but “hadn’t seen it around lately.”

Some young people replied, “Gazpacho?” as if I had used a word they didn’t comprehend. I may as well have said “chingadero.”

Finally, one person remembered that they had a fine bowl at El Cholo Cafe (956 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, 626- 441-4353). That clicked for me. I remembered tasting a gazpacho made by a friend from a recipe in the restaurant’s cookbook.

Rich in tomato and garlic, spiked with herbs and Tabasco, the cold soup was really on. El Cholo people tell me that the use of clam juice in the recipe is the secret to its acclaim. Instead of blending contrasting tastes of hot, mellow, sweet, sour, salty and tart — mishmashed so as to render the constituent flavors indistinguishable from one another — clam juice turns this into a soup of many layers so that that you taste something different with each spoonful.

I called El Cholo: It’s not on the menu.

Asked why a soup like that — which should be a summer staple in fine restaurants — is so hard to find, Crepe Vine owner Kate Hagglund replied, “It’s a marketing thing. Its name doesn’t sell. To lots of people the term cold soup means something has gone wrong in the kitchen.”

I can understand the resistance. It was at Café Pinot (700 W. Fifth St., downtown Los Angeles) that I first sampled gazpacho. Blood-red, streaked with yellow and greens, it contained something called “crab toes.” Actually, it looked like an accident had happened in an aquarium.

Hagglund said that Crepe Vine now serves cold soup only every other week in the summer.

Did I miss Chef Dan Siegel’s bowl of melon balls bobbing around in a mint-oiled icy slick of watermelon puree — the soup I enjoyed so much last summer?

“No,” said Hagglund, “it hasn’t been on the menu; it didn’t sell very well last summer. But you’re in luck. We’re having gazpacho from Aug. 21 to Aug. 27.”

This is the ripest time of the year to serve ideal gazpacho, as tomatoes are peaking with plumpness and juiciness. Chef Siegel, a classic French stylist, abstains from the use of tomato juice and purees only whole fresh tomatoes. Adding chopped sweet peppers, cucumbers, onions and jalapeños, the soup is leafed with minty basil, pinched with salt and pepper, dashed with sherry vinaigrette and topped with a velvety rich avocado crème fraîche.

Before I cool it with Siegel’s gazpacho, I intend to get a few licks in on a shrimp Diane that my foodie friends keep raving about. In this bowl, you get five large grilled shrimp, slathered in a mushroomy, Cajun-spiced white wine beurre blanc sauce, surrounded by toast points.

While I’ll be checking in frequently to get Siegel’s soup while its cold, Hagglund was gracious enough to remind me that Julienne (2649 Mission St., San Marino, 626-441-2299) serves cold soup every day during the summer.

The following day at Julienne I enjoyed a refreshing strawberry and ginger chilled soup, porridged with banana, blueberries, raspberries, white wine, sugar and yogurt. Not on the menu but sold in quarts for about $10 in the restaurant’s market section was a freezer full of various cold soups, including a chunky gazpacho. But the contents noted on the gazpacho label included “tomato juice.

A place where very particular people congregate, I can hear the tut-tutting: “Tomato juice? You should have known better.”

The Crepe Vine Bistro & Wine Bar
36 W. Colorado Blvd. (Mills Place Alley) Old Pasadena
(626) 796-7250
www.thecrepevine.com