It is soup season, my dudes. As Tulsa’s fourth or fifth fall blew in in recent weeks, with it arose my latent desire to sip from a warm bowl of something. And so I began my Soupathon: at least one bowl for every time I believed the season had changed.
Thankfully, Tulsa’s restaurants are too great in number and too diverse for me to tick every box in just five meals, so my ground rules were that at least one of the soups had to feel especially fall-themed, and no pho or ramen, because I could never confidently say I’d tried enough Tulsa pho or ramen to decide which one was worth mentioning. Happy sipping and slurping.
Lisu Thai’s Khao Soi
It’s possible for me to say I’ve tried every khao soi in town, because—barring specials and pop-ups—there’s only one, and it’s at Lisu Thai. They serve the northern Thai version with egg noodles and a coconut milk and curry base, and since I first tried it years ago at other restaurants, I’ve ordered it every time I’ve seen it on a menu. Thai curry enthusiasts will recognize the look of the dish. It’s an opaque, orangey-yellow curry soup with flecks of spices and chile flakes throughout. The broth is thinner than the standard curries that come with rice, and instead of rice, this one comes both with boiled egg noodles in the soup AND fried egg noodles in a nest on top. Lisu Thai’s version is on the sweeter and milkier side, so even at spice level four of the available five, it isn’t painful. It comes topped with the traditional addition of sour mustard greens and a bit of lime, green onion, and cilantro, hitting every flavor note I can think of—crunchy, chewy, salty, sour, sweet, spicy—in a single spoonful.
Bishop Quigley’s Brown Soup of the Day
I did not get to choose my spice level or type or even color of soup at Bishop Quigley, where I blindly ordered the cheekily named “brown soup of the day,” an all-the-time staple of the limited menu. The soup I received on this particular day was a smoked pork posole, packed with a full serving of smoked pork roast and enough black pepper to black pepper a horse, to the extent it contributed to making the soup actually spicy. There wasn’t much hominy, and as usual the hominy it did have didn’t have much flavor on its own, but the broth was super tasty, porky and light and clean, despite having visible flecks of fat on top and falling between “reddish” and “dark” by the restaurant menu’s brown soup color wheel. The daily brown soup is available as a side substitution or in a bowl on its own, and if you order it in addition to a meal, don’t be like me: ask first if it’ll be a full bowl of roasted meat.