The Drake Hotel Bookbinder Red Snapper Soup Recipe - Secret Copycat Restaurant Recipes (2024)

This Straight-From-the-Restaurant Master Recipe for Bookbinder’s Red Snapper Soup comes from The Cape Cod Room in The Drake Hotel, Chicago and was adapted by them from the original served at Old Original Bookbinder’s Seafood & Steakhouse in Philadelphia.

Photo by nichole

The Drake Hotel Bookbinder Red Snapper Soup

A Drake Hotel / Cape Cod Room / Old Original Bookbinder’s Seafood & Steakhouse Copycat Recipe

Bookbinder Soup was created by restaurateur Samuel Bookbinder in Philadelphia in 1893 at his oyster saloon – which was to become Old Original Bookbinder’s Seafood & Steakhouse.

Bookbinder Soup’s reputation spread around the world and is a staple at many high-end seafood restaurants even today. This recipe is from the Cape Cod Room in the Drake Hotel, Chicago while the lovely photo above is from The Edgewater Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin.

A Note About the Recipe

This is a Straight-From-the-Restaurant Recipe in the truest sense of the term – in other words, it needed quite a bit of interpretation and work to make it understandable for us home cooks.

Like many restaurant and chef recipes, it was more a collection of “Cliff Notes” for the sous chefs who would be making the soup daily and had been previously trained to make the recipe by the chef. We took those notes, and a stripped down, but more easily understandable, version of the recipe (found, in all places, on a soup paddle displayed in The Cape Cod Room – apparently a souvenir for sale sometime in the past) and combined them to make, what we hope is, an authentic, delicious and easily understood recipe for everyone.

Enjoy and let us know how we did.

Another Note About the Recipe

The original Cape Cod Room recipe lists two separate preparations – this is probably to allow the stock to be made in advance and held for the red snapper to be added when someone orders the soup.

We kept this separation, because it is in the original recipe — but it also makes it easier for you, especially if you want to serve this for guests or a party. You can prepare the somewhat complicated stock in advance and finish the soup when serving. But, naturally, you can do both steps at the same time, if you like.

Photo of Bookbinder Soup at Edgewater Hotel – Admiralty. is by Nichole and is used by permission under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) License. Thank you, Nichole. Great Picture. Photos may be “representative” of the recipe and not the actual finished dish. All photo licenses listed were correct at the time of the posting of the page. Bookbinder’s Red Snapper Soup Recipe comes from The Cape Cod Room in The Drake Hotel, Chicago and was adapted by them from the original served at Old Original Bookbinder’s Seafood & Steakhouse in Philadelphia and shared to the Chicago Tribune when the Cape Cod Room closed in 2017. It was heavily rewritten by us. Additional Information Courtesy of Wikipedia and is used by permission.