How they like their soups is:

Clear broths (so you can see the components) made in large batches, simmered with bones and thin slices of meat for a delicate umami flavor, fleshed out with bits of onion, celery, carrot, and bean sprouts, served with your choice of wheat or rice noodles (rice seems marginally more popular), with an egg cracked into it when you order it and whisked to produce a fine cloud of bits of egg.

The egg is popular but optional; the shop also sells a version made with only vegetables, and distinguishes between "savory" and "spicy" broths.

The soup comes in a ceramic dish with a lid that clamps on by means of a little wire lever for spill-free transport, in two different sizes.

Vesherti orders a large bowl of spicy rice-noodle soup, which he explains is his favorite soup of this type.

After some consideration he gets a small bowl of savory rice-noodle soup with an egg, and gets out some jerky for the dog (who's been sleeping at his feet, tired out after her long run yesterday) while he waits for it. The lid mechanism is briefly confusing, but once he's figured it out he thinks it's delightful, and the soup is good too.

Crafters favor thicker soups, he explains while he's eating - they're usually made to use up leftovers, which mostly means meat and bread, and they toast the bread and crumble it in to thicken it.

"We do have some thicker soups too," Vesherti agrees. "There's a kind of thick soup made with potatoes and leeks that's pretty popular. I think people usually like to eat bread with non-noodle soups more, though, since the noodles already provide a certain amount of bread-like texture. I'm not sure I've ever tried crumbling bread into the soup directly, though. I'll have to try that."

Potato leek soup sounds interesting and tasty. He's a little surprised they wouldn't like bread with noodle soup, the texture isn't that similar in his opinion - the bread isn't in chunks, it breaks down into the broth to thicken it into mush, and then the noodles are firmer like vegetables.

"I'm sure there are some people here who do like bread with their noodle soups, I'm just ..."

Vesherti pauses, tapping his chin with his stylus as he thinks how to word this.

"I guess I don't really have an explanation for it. I'd never really thought to question the difference."

Well, people like what they like, of course. That's not a very common way to make soup even for Crafters, but it's the noodle part that's uncommon.

Vesherti considers the soup for a moment.

"I guess if I tried to predict which foods would and wouldn't be popular with Crafters, I probably wouldn't have a very good success rate. But I wouldn't have guessed that noodles were uncommon. What are the most common Crafter foods?"

The most common are things that can be grown and picked and baked and eaten without extra steps - eggs, potatoes, breadfruit, apples, squash, onions, corn, things like that. Porridges are pretty popular, too, that's the more common way to eat grains, and they're good for mixing other things into for variety. Noodles and flat bread are more effort, so they're a little less common. Round bread is a bit of a weird case because it's more of a lifestyle choice, you have to keep the starter going and make sure it doesn't overgrow and each batch takes a couple days to make unless you want to knead it by hand and even then it's not quick, so you have to make a habit of it rather than just making what you want when you want it. And then meat's its own whole thing, tasty as it is.

"Huh. I guess that makes sense, although I didn't think that bread was that difficult to make. Bread starter — it's a kind of very tiny animal that likes to eat sugar and excretes the gasses that make the bread puffy. But it can hibernate, like a bear or a frog, and live without water just fine for many years. So we separate out the tiny animals from the starter and store them for later. Then to make bread, you just put them in warm water with some sugar and salt in it and they stop hibernating and become more starter, which is much easier than tending to the starter every day. I'm not sure when we figured that out, though; let me look it up."

He pokes at his phone a bit.

"Oh, that's more recent than I thought. It looks like we only figured out how to separate and store the tiny animals about one hundred and fourty four years ago. We had to do a bunch of tiny animal breeding to get a kind that hibernated better. With fleshcrafting, Crafters might be able to separate out and store the tiny animals more easily, though."

He wouldn't say that bread is difficult, exactly, it's just that it takes more forethought than growing a potato and baking it. He's not sure being able to store the starter without feeding it would even help that much, since that part can be mostly automated; the part where the dough takes a couple days the normal way or a few hours the fast way to be ready to bake is the main thing that makes it different from other food.

Vesherti nods.

"Oh, I see. I guess I probably would eat fewer foods that needed lengthy preparation if I lived alone, so that makes sense. What do you think of the soup? Are there bits you particularly like or dislike, so that I can recommend other foods in the future?"

He likes the egg flurry, and the bean sprouts are interesting, he hasn't seen those before. He'd consider adding a bit of sweetness to a mixed dish like this but it's fine without that, it'd be surprising if they used the same flavor profiles he's used to.

Vesherti makes a note of this, and then listens to a message in his ear piece.

"Alright — There's a kind of sweet flatbread you might like to try later. Also, I just got a message that the person who has interesting conversations with people and then shares them is ready for you, so we can head over to her whenever you're ready."

Sounds good. He should find someplace for the dog to run around a bit first, if it'd be a problem for her to interrupt them.

"Since we knew you'd prefer to meet outside, she planned to meet you a small park — would that work for your dog to run around in? Or should I find somewhere else?" Vesherti asks.

That should be fine, yeah.

He directs them down a few more streets and then around a wide building, eventually emerging into another green space. This one is somewhat smaller than the one near the edge of the city, space being at more of a premium, but it's still large enough to have a group of people running around playing with a frisbee.

A blue woman sitting under a gray sun shade waves to them as they come into view. She has a display screen set up beside her, and a pair of fluffy microphones on an adjustable boom.

He waves back, but heads over to the frisbee players first: he expects his dog would like to play with them if they're all right with that.

There ain't no rule that says a dog can't play frisbee. Although she might have some trouble throwing it, so maybe they should consider bending the normal travel rules ...

After a brief discussion, the players agree that Traveler's dog is welcome to play. If she can't throw the frisbee, she should run to someone to hand it off, and they'll count that as a throw. Does she want to know about the scoring rules, or does she just want to run around trying to catch a frisbee?

(Vesherti translates this from LCTL to Crafter glyphs, of course.)

Oh, if they're playing with formal rules that's harder, it'd take more than a few minutes to explain them to her and he has other things to do right now. He'll ask her to leave them alone.

"The rules are optional," Vesherti relays. "They're there to add additional challenge for people who have played a lot before, and are designed to encourage those players to make sure everyone gets a chance throwing and catching. So she's welcome to play without knowing the rules, or to leave us alone, we just didn't know whether she would want to know them."

(It is possible the frisbee players are overestimating a dog's usual concern for the rules of frisbee)

She'll be fine without the rules if they're fine with that, she just likes chasing and catching things. He should give them a spare disc, too, she's usually good about giving toys back when she should but she's not perfect about it when she gets too excited. (He crafts up a second disc with a slightly different form factor and tosses it to the speaker.)

They catch the disk and give Traveler a nod. The other players spread out again.

"Ready, ma'am?" they say, addressing his dog.

She doesn't know what spoken language is yet. That play bow she's doing means she's hyped for them to throw the disc for her, though.