With the cool winter months fast-approaching, a place like the Stone Soup Company in Ybor City seems to become all the more enticing.  This Ybor lunch spot specializes in a number of variations on this warm, hearty treat alongside a modest assortment of sandwiches, salads, and other mid-day fare ideal for warming the palate when the temperature drops.

Even in the blistering heat we're blessed with nine months out of the year, Stone Soup Company has found some modicum of success since they opened their small 7th Avenue storefront just over two years ago, not an easy feat in a culinary landscape as constantly-shifting as Ybor's.

Judging from a visit earlier this week, and a handful of others times in month's past, finding your ideal soup is key at Stone Soup because tastiness is incredibly varied here.

The soup sampler is a great way to do this; you pick four soups and get a nice plate of four mini-cups filled with your choices.  If there's one soup that's near-incontestably great here, it's Stone Soup's Ybor Chili.  Packed with a slow-cooked meat trifecta composed of Italian sausage, ground beef, and pulled pork, the chili is a heartily gut-busting delight tinged with classic spices a little to no filler, a quality just as rare as it is immensely appreciated.  Nothing worse than a bowl of beans with a few meat speckles thrown in.

Three cheese broccoli fares almost just as well - super-thick and bolstered by big chunks of cheesy broccoli, this is a soup that simply comforts from the inside.

Other varieties like chicken noodle seem like afterthoughts in the shadow the heavy hitters like the chili and broccoli, but there are still many more soups we need to try to get the full picture.

As for sandwiches, Stone Soup's Cubamanti - their take on the classic, french fry and coleslaw-packing Primanti Bros. sandwich - is the only one you need to know about.  Ok, maybe not, but still, this thing is a beast, a tasty, tasty, beast.  Packed with grilled slices of salami and other indiscernable sandwich meats, fries, coleslaw, and more, the Cubamanti is a sandwich-lovers sandwich - sloppy, with a nice contrast of flavor between the fries, slaw, and meat that keeps you coming back bite after bite.

Overall, Stone Soup Company's got the fundamentals down when it comes to a classic, wintertime lunch in Ybor.  Here's to, hopefully, many more winters to come for them.