With a murmured "crab bisque," the waiter sets the bowl before my wife. Magical words, but in this case a shamefully inadequate description. First there are the solids—morsels of cooked potato under a mound of crabmeat, the tender, glistening flesh drawn from the creature’s broken claws and picked out of the delicate chitinous bulkheads of its body. Then there is the bisque itself: sleek, brown and piping hot, made from Dungeness meat and the roasted carcasses of crab and lobster. Add chicken stock (fish stock would be too oily and sapid), white wine and a splash of cognac late in the cooking—the heady crustacean aroma rises like incense into the evening. Finish it with streaks of foamed crème fraîche and chopped chives, then set beside it a glass filled with glossy red-pepper aïoli and a stack of very crisp little wild rice toasts. Spread one onto the other and set them adrift on the liquid, like an argosy of richly laden rafts—but not before tasting the bisque. The flavour is deep and layered, like the crab’s own pungent tamalley. Neptune himself would ask for seconds. But I had expected no less from Jamie Kennedy Restaurant.

Last year was not a great one for new restaurants—Kennedy’s venture one of few significant openings—but it sure was a good one for soup. In our bistros and neighbourhood beaneries, the decade-long stranglehold of puréed butternut squash with a trace of curry was finally broken. It felt as if an old and stiflingly heavy yellow curtain had been lifted, revealing a sparkling soupscape of infinite possibility. My wife, a fanatical soup worshipper, danced off into the distance, returning with tales of wonder and discovery. Ambrosial cauliflower soup at Sassafraz (of all places) was no cumbersome porridge but a delicately textured milk full of fresh flavour. A classic French onion at 65 Degrees, the hip new steak house on College Street, proved as deep and dark as any she had known—a bowlful of liquid umami. But she missed the best soup of the year, one of 10 courses Michael Stadtländer included in his Heaven on Earth project in August at Eigensinn Farm. Hidden beneath a singular raviolo filled with chanterelles and wild rice, and dished up, unforgettably, in the dimpled punt of an upside-down wine bottle, the tiny pool of chanterelle consommé offered such resonant profundities of flavour that I forgot I was sitting on a hilltop in driving rain, wearing inappropriate shoes. The theory and practice of soup is a subject of considerable breadth, stretching from the humblest notions of sustenance to the farthest horizons of artistic invention. Somehow Stadtländer’s consommé embraced all parameters and, in doing so, underlined my conviction that Toronto’s broth standard has never been higher.

For as long as I can remember, soup has been my default comfort food. When I was a small boy, it was the surefire salvation of For as long as I can remember, soup has been my default comfort food. When I was a small boy, it was the surefire salvation of my dreams. Trapped in a nightmare, chased through the house by shambling zombies or a next-door neighbour morphed into some swooping, razor-clawed banshee, I knew I could always escape by finding a bowl of Heinz tomato soup. It might be behind the sofa or out on the landing, but if I could taste even one spoonful, the dream would end.

At school, we had a kettle in the prefect’s common room, and while less greedy boys boiled it for tea, some of us preferred to tip a sachet of instant chicken broth powder into a mug and stir up a half-pint of greasy, salty, restorative bouillon. In my 20s, living hand to mouth on a Greek island with my wife and our tiny children, I kept a stockpot simmering all day on the woodstove in the cold, wet winter months, its waste-nothing contents sometimes divine, sometimes not. It was in Athens we also tasted the worst soup in the history of the world. Waking at dawn and seven months pregnant, my darling announced an irrepressible craving for soup of any kind whatsoever. Dressing quickly, we hurried down to the fishermen’s docks in Piraeus and found a café with a cauldron simmering, waiting to welcome the fleet. In foodie books, it would have been an epiphanic moment; in real life, it was hell. To this day, I imagine the owners must have harboured some grudge against innocent foreign couples, that they took dirty mops and yesterday’s sodden dishcloths and wrung out their contents into an unwashed bowl. Gagging and heaving, we slammed down our money and fled away into the morning.

It was only when we moved back to Canada that I finally glimpsed soup’s true and majestic potential and joined my wife fully in her still-resolute obsession. One night in 1987, we had dinner at Pronto, where Mark McEwan was co-owner and chef, and we ordered the lamb consommé. It arrived in a silver bowl, garnished with nothing but four or five beige petals shaved from a white Alba truffle. Golden, heavy and as translucent as a polished topaz, that consommé was the pure quintessence of lamb.

It did not go unchallenged in the Toronto of the 1980s. “In those days,” muses Jamie Kennedy, “I was known as Mr. Consommé, because I always had one on the menu at Palmerston. I loved making them, and they were so useful in a five-course menu, to precede or follow a foie gras course, for example—so intense but so clean, rich in flavour but not in calories.” Fans who remembered made mental notes to scour the menu for soups when Kennedy opened his eponymous Church Street restaurant last August. It’s a versatile room, cleverly created from the old party space next to the Wine Bar. A movable wall divides it into a lounge bar and a dining area that seems almost undecorated, the small wooden tables bare and lit from above by clear glass globes.

There was plenty to love on the first, summer menu. An appetizer called Streets of Toronto had fun gentrifying three blue-collar Hogtown staples: baby pizza with raw and cooked heirloom tomatoes and melted Monforte sheep’s cheese; a soft pork and fennel sausage poking jauntily up from a bowl of even softer braised onions; a crisp tempura of yellow lake perch with crunchy potato threads and tangy tartar sauce. Galantine of rock Cornish hen came surrounded by a loose succotash of corn kernels, summer squash and lima beans, as if the bird had brought its own lunch. But the star of the show was that Dungeness crab bisque, especially when sommelier Jamie Drummond paired it with a fruity, exotic white wine from the Loire called “Les Zunics,” made, he said, from a blend of mostly obscure local grapes.

That soup joins the immortals, the latest on a list that is already long. Perhaps because it is such a primal item, a perfect soup imprints itself onto a deeper place in the memory than other foods. It might be as delicate as Hiro Yoshida’s matsutake infusion—just a fresh B.C. pine mushroom sliced into a teapot and steeped in a colourless stock to release its faintly resinous, earthy perfume. Or it could be as concentrated as the double reduction of chicken and duck stock Susur Lee put on his first menu at Susur—an elixir swimming with shark fin, shredded herbs and flecks of tender lobster meat. He cooked it in a hollowed squash the size of a baseball, and every gentle scrape of the spoon removed cloud-soft morsels of the vegetable to further thicken the broth.