New England clam chowder is thicker than something like chicken noodle soup because it uses milk as the base instead of water, but it’s still meant to be a soup. If your spoon sticks into the chowder like you stabbed it into a stick of butter or mashed potatoes, then somebody’s gone off the deep end. That bowl was more potato starch than anything else. But what I really meant was that the thought of trying to drink chunks of potato makes me think of spoiled milk. 🤢

As for Manhattan style vs New England, it’s one of those things where you like one or the other and you’d divorce your wife if she said she liked the other kind. People are ride or die on both sides of the fence, and I may be biased having grown up in the land of New England chowder where I can harvest my own clams to make my own chowder from scratch, but the thought of throwing clams into what is basically vegetable soup seems crazy to me. New England chowder is meant to be hearty and filling; the kind of thing that you can sit down with after a long winter’s day out in the cold and wind that will stick to your ribs and return feeling to your fingers and toes. If I wanted vegetable soup, I’d make vegetable soup and save the clams for something else, like stuffed quahogs or clams casino or something. And as to how it relates to the original photo, trying to chug down what is basically watered down salsa (but with pieces of clam in it) sounds horrible as well.