NASHUA – When snow falls early in the Gate City, Bob Hughes is armed and ready – with a ladle, that is.

The head cook and co-owner of Collins Brothers Chowder Co. keeps his eye on weather forecasts all year long to determine which soups to keep in larger quantities each week.

“I look at the weather a week ahead of time,” Hughes said. “I knew the other day that it was going to be cold, so I knew to make a nice New Orleans chicken sausage gumbo. We look at the weather probably more than anybody. That’s our business.

“On a slushy, rainy day, what really sells well, believe it or not, even though we’re a chowder place, we make the best chili.”

The hidden soup-to-go hot spot over the hill on Temple Street experiences its busiest season from October to April, co-owner Dan Largy said.

Stop in at lunchtime from Wednesday to Saturday and you’ll probably find a line out the door waiting for a dose of their daily menu – which includes clam chowder, corn and bacon chowder, Tuscan country vegetable soup, and Texas-style chili – just to name a few.

In the summer, Hughes said, they switch the batches on hand.

“When we had that Indian summer, I was making light broth soups,” Largy said. “A turkey lentil, just stuff that was light.

“As it gets colder, that’s when I know I’ll get into my split pea with ham and beef stew and stuff like that. Our menu is definitely planned around the weather. You don’t want to have beef stew when it’s 65 degrees out.”

Largy and Hughes bought Collins Brothers Chowder Co. from the original Collinses when it was still a wholesale soup supplier. In 2008, the two-man team transitioned the business into a retail soup store, and they’ve never looked back.

“A lot of people started smelling our soup,” Largy said. “We’d have production days – the neighborhood loved us. We’d get all these people knocking on the doors saying, ‘Can we buy the soup?’

“So, talking about it one night at a business meeting, we said, ‘Maybe it would be a good idea to see if we can sell them in pints and quarts.’”

Today, Collins Brothers keeps a daily soup and specials menu, with Thanksgiving Day soup – a “turkey pie without the crust,” Largy said – cheddar potato with scallions and sour cream, and Nantucket seafood chowder, plus many more.

The first Wednesday of each month, they dish up 125 gallons of their popular fish chowder, which usually goes in a few hours, Hughes said.

“Our following knows,” Hughes said. “They come in and they’re buying 4 quarts, because they know it only comes once a month. We get people calling at 9:30 a.m. saying, ‘Save me 3 quarts. I’ll pick it up at 4:30.’”

Collins Brothers’ soup is available by the pint, quart or gallon, for $6, $10 or $32 ($35 for chowder), respectively. For $1, customers can take a hunk of freshly baked bread to go with it.

That’s just the soups.

Today, they also serve a changing menu of homemade favorites such as American chop suey, shepherd’s pie, Yankee pot roast and double-glazed meat loaf with beef gravy. The precooked meals come ready to heat and eat in microwaveable containers, some with sides of green beans and mashed potatoes.

“They go hand in hand,” Hughes said. “We’ve got people coming in who have a family of five and will grab two meat loaves, two pot roasts. … It’s all microwaveable, so it’s a quick fix.”

The comfort eats retreat is strictly for takeout dining, voted one of the best in the state by Yankee Magazine. Despite the difficulties of parking on Temple, the store averages 400-500 customers a day, Largy said, serving people from the city courts to the city streets.

“We cater to hospitals, all the school systems, the court systems,” Largy said. “Whether you’re the mayor or the street sweeper, we make it happen.”

To keep up with the high demand, Collins has two soup production days, Sunday and Tuesday, to cook for the coming week.

“Once the soup is made, we put the soup in ice baths,” Hughes said. “Our ice machine makes 1,500 pounds of ice every 12 hours.”

On sales days, “I’ll get the soup out and heat it up in my kettle. I can just take a peek around the corner and know, ‘Better get more of this or that on.’ When that door doesn’t close, that’s when I’m heating. That’s when it’s busy.”

Saturdays and Mondays are prep days, when Hughes said his crew cuts 300-400 pounds of potatoes, 150 pounds of carrots, 100 pounds of celery and 300 pounds of onions for the soups each week. They keep about 300 gallons of soup on hand each day, Largy said.

Largy joked about their common comparison to the well-known “Soup Nazi” skit from “Seinfeld,” but he said Collins Brothers’ service style is what keeps people coming back in droves.

“What we have over the ‘Soup Nazi,’ when people come here, we’re friendly,” Largy said. “We make them feel comfortable. When we see an elderly lady come in for the first time, we go out of our way for that person.

“We don’t want their business one day. It’s got to be a revolving thing.”

Largy and Hughes keep the door revolving by allowing customers to sample their variety of soups – except between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., when the shop is busiest, Largy said.

The enticing bites seem to work, considering the amount of product the small shop pushes each week.

Despite the long lines, Largy said the average wait time to pick up a pint once customers get to the counter is just two to four minutes. Collins Brothers employs nine workers, he said, and a staff of six usually runs the shop at one time, between people heating, ladling, packaging and running – who call out customer numbers as they deliver the bags of gumbo.

“It’s like a show we put on,” Hughes said. “People love it.”

During flu season, people also love the Collins Brothers’ antidote to the common cold, Largy said.

“People will come in and say, ‘What’s the best thing for a cold?’” Largy said. “Chicken rice. Chicken noodle. It’s like medicine.”

When the weather gets worse, Collins Brothers does better, Largy said.

“Whether it’s rain or sleet, that’s when we do the best,” Largy said with a laugh. “When everybody else is doing the worst.

“We’ve had people during the ice storms, during snowstorms, when they’ve lost power. … Soup customers are devoted.”

For more information, call 883-2347 or visit www.collinsbrotherschowder.com.

Maryalice Gill can be reached at 594-6490 or mgill@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Gill on Twitter (@Telegraph_MAG).