Bisque is not Gazpacho

[Toliver]

This is a very minor question in the Grand Scheme of things but I thought what better place to ask it than here at eGullet?

During the last holiday season, I took my best friend's mom out to eat at a french food cafe she had been wanting to try. It wasn't a full blown french restaurant...they said they served "peasant/country food", whatever that is.

For a starter we thought we'd give the Lobster Bisque a try (what all the lucky french peasants get to eat these days!). When it was served to us the temperature was tepid at best as if it had been sitting for a while waiting for our waitress to serve it. Most of the hot soups in our dining past have been served hot so this was puzzling to us. When we told our waitress that our soup wasn't hot and could she ask the kitchen staff to heat it up for us, she seemed a little put off as if the tepid soup WAS served at the correct temperature. She did get the soup reheated for us but this leads me to ask:

Is Lobster Bisque supposed to be served at room temperature and did we make culinary fools of ourselves asking for it to be reheated? Or should it have been served hot?

Thanks in advance for your replies!

[fifi]

I am not sure about "room temperature" but there is, IMHO, a good case for not serving soups too hot. I really hate it when it is so hot I have to sit there stirring it around like a dork before I can eat it. Also, The delicate flavors and the cream in a bisque can be destroyed by too much heat. I have some bisque recipes that call for adding cream AFTER you take it off the heat. My personal taste is to have soups warm, not hot, but that is a personal thing.

[Toliver]

I can see your point, but the soup really had no heat to it at all so you couldn't even call it "warm". If they had added the cream after removing the bisque from the heat, logically you would think it would be, at least, room-temperature cream and not cold cream from the restaurant fridge.

And to hijack my own thread, this makes me curious as to how chefs gauge the temperature of the food they're serving without tasting or touching everything.

[Jinmyo]

Usually everything is touched and tasted. But once it is on the counter for FOH staff anything can happen.

Bisque should never be piping hot. It tends to hold too much heat because of its thickness.

Cold bisques are beautiful if the flavours can still stand up from it.

[arlene]

I would think that if lobster bisque was really supposed to be cold it would have been listed as cold lobster bisque because lobster bisque is traditionally hot.

[tissue]

Soups should either be hot or cold. Anything in between I really dislike.