By Donna Cornelius
When you make soup for a living, you’d better get ready for repeated jokes about the Soup Nazi.
Chef Monty Todd doesn’t mind the inevitable comparisons to the “Seinfeld” soup-maker, even though Todd’s sunny personality is wildly different from the TV character’s surly disposition. That’s because, just like the Soup Nazi, Todd serves up some pretty tasty stuff through his company, Spoon & Ladle.
His Birmingham-based business sells small-batch, made-from-scratch soups to grocery stores and restaurants and at the Pepper Place Saturday Market. He started Spoon & Ladle three years ago as a way to get back to doing what he loved: cooking.
“I grew up in Prattville and went to the University of Montevallo,” he said. “I started bartending in Birmingham while I was going to school and fell in love with the restaurant business. That turned into bar managing. I saw the guys in the kitchen and thought, I want to do that.”
He and a partner had their own restaurant on U.S. 280 for a while, and he later went to work and became the manager at Dexter’s on Hollywood.
“The local Budweiser distributor owned a wine distributor in Birmingham, and it didn’t have good presence in the restaurant business,” he said. “They courted me to help. I was successful, and then they told me they wanted me to come to the Bud side. I was with Bud for 27 years. My true love was still in the kitchen – but not in a restaurant.
“My wife told me, ‘You make the best soup in the world, so go make soup.’”
Todd said he decided to give the idea a shot.
“I created a Facebook page and got three orders overnight,” he said. “I thought, well, I guess I need to make some soup. I’d make it, put the labels on, and drive all over town to homes and offices to deliver even so much as one quart.”
This method of selling soup “probably wasn’t the best business model,” he said, laughing.
Todd said cooking his soups at home lasted about a week. He moved his operation to The Cajun Cleaver’s kitchen in Hoover.
“I was doing the home and office deliveries, catering and going to any farmers market I could get into,” he said. “But I knew the grocery business was where I wanted to be – where the volume is.”
Todd was selling his soup at the Ross Bridge Farmers Market when he made a major connection.
“A fellow came up and tried my shrimp and crab gumbo,” Todd said. “He said, ‘This is really good. Have you considered being in a grocery store?’ I said, ‘Yes. I’d like to start with Western or Piggly Wiggly.’ He said, ‘My name is Brett Hubbard.’”
Hubbard is the deli, bakery and floral director of Western Supermarkets, and his father, Ken Hubbard, is Western’s owner and CEO.
“We had to jump through some hoops to be able to sell to grocery stores, so it took about six months,” Todd said. “True to Brett’s word, the week before Thanksgiving two years ago, our soup was in the Mountain Brook Western. Western is very dear to my heart.”
Spoon & Ladle now has so much business that it’s expanding. The company is building a new production facility in Pelham that Todd said he expects to be ready later this month.
Gumbo was the first soup offered by Spoon & Ladle.
“I’ve always loved making gumbo,” Todd said. “I first made chicken and sausage gumbo, and Brunswick stew was next. I started having fun. I got the basic soups down, like tomato basil and broccoli and cheese.”
He had fun creating new flavors, too, such as Mushroom Mushroom Mushroom with mushrooms from Southern Foothills, an Oneonta farm. His menu includes seasonal options such as Green Chile and Cilantro Bisque in the spring, Potato and Leek Soup in the fall, Guinness Beef and Barley Stew in the winter, and Fresh Fruit and Mint Gazpacho in the summer.
“Up until the Western Market in Mountain Brook opened, I had created 86 flavors,” Todd said. “I’d make them, taste them, maybe throw some out, and make them again.
“The folks at Western said, ‘Monty, we’ve got to have chicken noodle.’ After that one, I stopped creating for a while. I’ve got my hands full with the basics. But we can do more fun things at our new facility.”
Soup & Ladle offers its gumbos every week along with a rotation of four other soups.
Many may think of soup as a cold-weather dish. But that’s a misconception, Todd said.
“For the second year, August has been our busiest month,” he said. “People say it’s too hot for soup, but they don’t mind firing up a grill. When I first applied to sell at Pepper Place, they said they’d consider me for the fall because they weren’t sure people would buy soup in the summer. Now, we sell everything we take there.”
In the soup business, Todd said, the biggest challenge is cooling the soup after it’s been cooked.
“You have six hours to get it to 41 degrees after it’s cooked,” he said.
He found a quicker way to do that at an expo in Las Vegas. He attended with his wife, Kelly Todd, who’s also his business partner and a forensic accountant, and saw a commercial kettle with the steep price tag of $50,000.
“I ended up getting an even bigger one for our new facility,” Todd said. “The one I’ve been using is a 60-gallon kettle. The new one is a 100-gallon model. You can heat and cool soup in it. It takes two hours to heat and two hours to cool, so my eight-hour day will now be cut in half.”
Todd had some suggestions for incorporating soup into autumn get-togethers.
“I think soup is a great starter for Thanksgiving,” he said. “You usually have plenty of vegetables at your Thanksgiving dinner, so stay away from soups with lots of vegetables. Use simple ingredients, like butternut squash or carrot-quinoa, that won’t fill you up, or a simple tomato soup.”
Soup also is a good choice for football parties, whether they’re tailgates on campus or at home around the TV, Todd said.
“My daughter was on the dance team at Auburn,” he said. “We had 12 couples we tailgated with at games there, and all they had to do was show up. I’d always do two soups. I call them crowd-pleaser soups, like gumbo and Brunswick stew, which goes well with barbecue.
“If I hosted a football party at home, I’d do four different soups – maybe gumbo, Brunswick stew, cream of mushroom or she-crab soup, and some sort of cheese soup, maybe broccoli and cheese or beer cheese. Then you can just add homemade or bakery-bought bread. It’s very affordable. You can add a salad if you’re eating at home. Small sandwiches or sliders are good if you’re trying to be mobile.”
You can visit the company’s website, spoonandladle.com, to find out where to buy Spoon & Ladle soups and to sign up for email notices.
“The emails go out every Monday listing the soups we’ll be doing that week and any special events,” Todd said.
The chef said he loves to cook so much that he goes home and makes supper even after cooking soup all day.
“I have this uncanny knack for opening the fridge and saying, ‘I can take that, that and that and make soup from it,’” Todd said.
He’s glad he listened to his wife when she told him to “go make soup,” he said.
“I’m having the time of my life,” Hughes said. “I never thought it would be like this on that first day my wife suggested soup.”
