During summers in high school, I’d work in my dad’s department at Greyhound in San Francisco, where he was a bookkeeper.

It was tedious work to be sure, filing papers and ticket receipts by hand, hour after hour, (yes, before dawn of the digital age).

The highlight of the day was always lunch, when my dad and I would walk a few yards outside to go to a cafe that catered to the in-a-rush office crowd.

It was cafeteria-style, where you took your tray down the line until you got to the station from which you wanted to order. I always held out to the end, where the roster of rotating homemade soups could be found hidden under stainless steel lids. It proved my introduction to the wide, wide world of soups. There was the familiar minestrone and clam chowder, of course, but also Mexican wedding soup, Greek Avogolemo soup, and Indian mulligatawny, all of which were new to me and dazzled with their distinctive, warm flavors.

That’s why one spoonful of this golden “Mulligatawny Soup” prompted a flood of wonderful memories of sitting at a cafe table with my dad, discussing the food we were enjoying as he’d ask “How’s things?”

The recipe is from the new “My Indian Kitchen” (Figure 1), of which I received a review copy, by Vikram Vij, the celebrated chef and restaurateur behind the groundbreaking Vij’s, which opened in 1994 and introduced Vancouver, BC to contemporary, innovative Indian cuisine. It was written with Jennifer Muttoo, a hospitality and marketing expert.