Zuppa

My previous post essentially stated that I downgraded the restaurant almost 5 minutes into the meal owing to the quality of the soup (and confirmed shortly thereafter by the subpar food).
The question of the inverse problem now crops up? What if the soup is good? With a name like Zuppa, one would imagine that this restaurant specializes in the aforementioned item (an appetizer or a full meal if one chooses so).
A couple of visits to this Zuppa have resulted in pretty good soups - The creamy tomato being our favorite. A nice consistency and taste. They do justice to their name. However, oddly, they serve crackers with all their soups, which seems a bit of a cheapening of the entire premise.
What of the food? It turns out that the answer to the posed question is - 'not necessarily so'. We havent actually had any entrees here but we tried a few of their sandwiches and wraps. And they were decent, not great not bad but very deli-ish and very importantly - greasy !! I had to use a copious quantity of napkins for a couple of their sandwiches (notably - the barbeque sandwich with apple bacon bbq sauce). The quantity of the grease made the otherwise decent sandwich a bit disconcerting on the old gastric system.

The one downside to zuppa is the really slow service. On one particularly poor occasion (which was a holiday of some sort but the restaurant was pretty full), there was one waitress for around ten tables !! We felt bad for the poor girl. It wasnt her fault but the restaurant management could perhaps do a better job making assignments. Other visits havent been positive either with the clear problem being that the restaurant is quite severly undermanned. Is finding waitresses difficult?
Another quirky thing about Zuppa is the really weird artwork on the walls. They have the brick wall decor too (we've lost count of the number of places with this) and some really odd pieces of art hung on the walls without any apparent theme (or artful quality either sadly). It does provide some conversation when one looks at the walls and tries to gauge the mind of the "artist" and/or the individual who decided that they merit such a place of visibility.

Now, if they improved their service, got some real art (or just stick with generic posters/prints quite the like the vintage french they have when you enter) and cut down on the grease....
Note: On Sunday nights, they do not serve the dinner menu but the lunch menu.
Our lunches and dinners averaged $20-$35.

Grade: C (the soup B-). Zuppa 101 N 18th Street, Richmond VA 23223 Google Maps.