Business & Tech

Bites Nearby: Special Soup in a Hotdog Hideaway

For more than 15 years, Gary Sable has been producing the borough's best soups from the most unassuming joint in town.

George Lystris is sitting at a table in his at Red Bank restaurant during the afternoon lull when his good friend and fellow chef Anthony Ferrando, owner of the New York Times-reviewed , A Restaurant, wanders over with a cup of coffee and asks what’s doing for lunch.

The first choice is soup. So it’s decided. Soup sounds good.

This is the place, tucked down a narrow alley on Monmouth Street, a curious corridor comprised of a random assortment of shops, one selling trinkets from the Emerald Isle, another selling eyebrows, where the chefs of Red Bank come to grab a bite to eat. “Best soup,” Lyristis says. “Have you met Gary? You’ve got to meet Gary, he knows everything that’s going on in this town.”

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Fittingly enough, as if by design, the guy with the best information is hidden away in a deli that’s large enough for a kitchen, counter, and, at the most, two and a half customers at any time. And, the place with the best soup in town is called, well, fittingly enough, That Hot Dog Place.

“I started doing soups and it just took off,” Gary Sable said on an early weekday morning, at a time when there’s still street parking and before meter maids in golf carts shove out in search of new ticket victims. “I dumped the hamburgers, most of the grill items. I still have hotdogs and sandwiches, but they come for the soup.

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“People already knew it, so it was just easier to keep the same name.”

In April, Sable will celebrate 17 years at this hole in the wall disguised as a restaurant. His time here has been at the protestations of his landlords, who have made numerous offers of a bigger location, something with room to turn around and maybe even a bit of seating. But, he likes it here. This is a one-man operation and that’s all he wants it to be. He used to own a bar where he did the manager thing for nearly three decades of his life.

That, he said, was plenty.

That Hot Dog Place is a bit of a rare breed in Red Bank. It’s managed to last longer than eras. In the time Sable has been selling soup out of the little deli with the wrong name he’s seen a Red Bank downtown littered with empty storefronts, a town-wide revitalization and the anointment of Hip City, the borough’s emergence as a draw for national retail outfits retreating from the failing malls they once abandoned Main Streets for, back to a downtown littered with empty storefronts.

“I tell people what’s changed since 1996 is that the facades of the empty storefronts are prettier now,” he said, noting that reflections like those tend to clash with the borough’s official, but perhaps slightly inaccurate, line. “There have been some tough years. This past summer was the quietest of the past 12 years for me, but it’s starting to rebound.”

As always, Sable counts on the soup to make his point, to draw the customers in and to taste what the gourmands go for. The secret, of course, has always been the soup. Most of his customers come from word of mouth recommendations. Some stop in for, go figure, a hotdog, but the soup is and has always been what keeps them coming back.

“Every week I have people that come in here. They ask ‘how long have you been here?’ When I tell them, ‘for years,’ they’re almost surprised,” he said. “You can always tell the new ones. They come in,” he said, looking around and doing his best impersonation of a person lost in the center of a strange city. “They look around and they ask for some soup.”

Hanging over one of four pots fired simultaneously stirring mirepoix, Sable said he’s probably got more than 100 soups on his roster; many of them variations of classics or new creations – yes, he said, even 15 years into it he’s still tinkering with recipes and trying new things. On this rainy day, Sable has the base for several of his most popular soups going at once – Italian Wedding, spicy sausage, and corn chowder. When the weather’s fussy you’ve got to go with the most popular menu choices, he said, that’s how you get the businessmen to leave their offices and brave a few rain clouds for a bowl of soup.

It is all so simple, so unassuming and pared down. All the work in this place goes into the soups, and it shows. In a town that’s decidedly a restaurant town, the best soup comes out of a hotdog place.

“It seems like 15 years go people just got into soups. Mine took off more than anyone else’s because I’m here in the morning making it. Other places are opening a can or cutting open a bag,” the 59 year old said. “A lot of people treat soup like a place to dump their leftovers. No, seriously, they get their menus and then they decide to throw a pot of soup up there, too.”

Even with the lack of competition, reigning soup king is a title Sable is proud to own, especially if it’s an honor bestowed on him by the likes of fellow chefs who would never think of serving a meal in a Styrofoam cup with a plastic spoon. It’s the authenticity that makes it and its what Sable credits for counting Red Bank’s best among his regular customers.

“That’s what it is, the quality,” he said.

That Hot Dog Place is open Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.-ish. For contact information or a list of daily soup specials, visit www.soupmeister.com.


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