Sweet Tomatoes in Pleasant Hill is permanently closing, according to a report on the website Eater San Diego.
The popular San Diego-based restaurant-chain, which is also known as Soup Plantation in Southern California, announced the temporary closure of all their restaurants in early March due to the coronavirus.
On May 7, Garden Fresh CEO John Haywood confirmed that the temporary shutter will in fact be permanent, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune that the company worked for eight weeks to overcome the financial challenges caused by the pandemic, but that it was ultimately unsuccessful. The closure puts its 4,400 employees permanently out of work, according to the report.
photo credit: yelp.com
I’ve always thought buffets were pretty unhygienic. I am sorry for all those people who will lose their jobs. Hopefully our economy will reopen soon and we can all get back to work.
I have a feeling they’re going to do away with all forms of buffets here soon 😭 I loved sweet tomatoes, that’s too bad! This COVID freak out is ridiculous. More people have lost their jobs permanently than the entire amount of global deaths due to the virus..
How someone thinks it’s reasonable to compare job loss to life loss is incomprehensible…
And as the suicide rates increase, they’ll classify them as Wuhan casualties.
WhatThe- What’s incomprehensible is how more people die from car accidents but nobody is putting more restrictions on driving!!! Let’s not be total idiots here.. Stop picking and choosing 1 thing to be worried about if you’re not going to worry about anything else, it’s ridiculous.
The economy will shrink 3% this year!! The first time since the Great Depression almost 100 years ago!! But you’re worried about the people dying and not the billions of people who will have to survive when this is all over.
You can have sympathy/empathy for those who have lost their lives, but don’t lose sight of the fact that this is financially destroying millions of lives, even if only a fraction of those lives perish.
Here’s a flash, jack: there already are restrictions on driving. You need a license after passing a driving test, there are speed limits, the roads have lanes built into them and are built to certain specifications, there are laws regarding seat belt usage, provisions for lights and crash-resistance measures, prohibitions on the use of alcohol and other drugs, and a whole host of other restrictions whose purpose is to enhance safety.
@mental mainstream media thinks calling it a Wuhan anything is racist and wrong, associating it with China in any way is wrong, blaming the CCP for unleashing the virus on the world is wrong and you are a racist for saying so. So no, they won’t be classified as Wuhan anything.
The article has a lot of good information on what happened.
1) They shut down their locations prior to the stay at home rules.
2) ” coronavirus concerns sent Souplantation’s revenue plummeting back in February and March, when its buffet-style, serve-yourself concept made diners wary of its communal food bar.”
– So their customer’s behavioral actions dictated behavior before the stay at home rules. Yes, communal locations were food is served are unlikely to be able to get enough people during a viral outbreak where no one has immunity nor a vaccine is available.
3) Looks like they may have not been financially successful for a while.
“In October 2016, Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp, the owner/operator of Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the time Garden Fresh was nearly $175 million in debt.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souplantation
4) I feel bad for the workers but not to worry, pretty sure the executives will be ok, because, America.
Yeah, I thought I heard they were struggling even before this epidemic.
Rob, you wrote your ending comment like you have something against America. She’s heavily in debt right now helping Americans and yet you still found it necessary to complain about Her. Not cool.
Cyn, that comment was right in Rob’s wheelhouse. Nothing new here.
You’re not allowed to ever criticize what you love Rob. That’s the message from the new right. Apparently global warning doesn’t melt snowflakes because they’re everywhere I look nowadays. ❄️🇺🇸
“New right”? There’s a news flash.
Enjoyed going to ST in Pleasant Hill back in the day. Always felt kind of sorry for the staff having to constantly clean up the serving area, the tables, the floors, the ice cream area, etc., however, that was the job in that restaurant.
This will be a domino effect because of Newsom. Tax revenues are going to plummet and businesses and people will start relocating. The Democrats will officially destroy California.
I’m going to miss that place. I always thought that the food quality was very good and staff very nice. I was afraid that they’d be unable to survive in the new world.
So, going back to the 80’s… There was a place in the Willow’s… I want to think it was called Soup’erb Salad; not Souper Salad. I liked it quite a bit. I would mainly fill up on the heavy soups, but it was all pretty good.
Never been to a Sweet Tom….
Most of these places run on a very thin margin. The demands on them to raise wages, provide healthcare etc. have reduced the margins even more. I’ll be surprised if 60% of the places return. Hopefully going forward the government and activist groups will consider how fragile these businesses are before they attempt to bleed them even more.
I’m a bit puzzled but maybe it’s because it had been years since I visited a Sweet Tomatoes. I thought you told someone what you wanted, they put it on a plate, and handed it to you over a glass divider wall. You then paid and sat down to eat. I don’t recall much in the way of self-serve. Maybe the salad bar was self serve?
If the glass divider wall is not accepted by the post COVID-19 public or health authorities does this mean that nearly all deli style eating is not viable? What about Panda Express, Boston Market, etc.? It seems many restaurants use a model where they plate the food out of tubs and hand you the plate which you put on a tray and carry to your table. It seems the only thing they need to change for the COVID-19 era is to clean the trays as thoroughly as the plates and silverware. Or, switch to using disposable cardboard trays, plates and plastic-ware much like many fast food restaurants.
Nope, buffet style. I loved ST. Sad to see it go.
Uh oh, you’re making too much sense. You need to stop.
WC Resident – its been years since I’ve been to Sweet Tomatoes too, but if you’ve been there once, you know its a buffet. Where do you dream this up? It is sad to see any business permanently close due to covid-19. Businesses close for financial reasons all the time, and your suggestion doesn’t make any sense. There are people who were weary of buffets prior to covid-19, and some people are going to be even more weary now. For obvious reasons… others have touched the food or utensils used to put the food on their plate. This is very easy and logical to understand.
You are thinking of Urban Plates which is located right next to the Sweet Tomatoes in Pleasant Hill. All the food is behind the counter and you tell the servers what you want.
I went by today and looked at the Pleasant Hill location of Sweet Tomatoes. It’s as I remembered it. When you walk in the traffic is split into two identical lanes. For each, you tell the staff what you want and they put it on a plate. There is a glass barricade at face level but it’s open at the bottom. Had they wanted to remain in business they could have done it by installing glass on the bottom. I consider this to be a staffed buffet style.
The areas where you can get sides and things like pizza slices were self serve buffet but with two exceptions all of them were set up with a staff person on the other side. Thus, they could have fixed those by adding a barricade on the bottom along with the existing face level barricade and you tell the server what you wanted.
The exceptions were the fruit stand and soft drink machines both which were self serve with no space for a server. Both of these would need to be reconfigured to have a server.
Nearly every business in the downtown Pleasant Hill area was open. Most restaurants were offering take-out. Cold Stone Creamery had people going inside to order and what looked like a Japanese place across Cold Stone also seemed to have had walk-in to order.
Many retail businesses were set up to allow for ordering on-line and offered curb side pickup. One exception was Michaels crafts which looked like they were shut down entirely. The Michaels web site claims you can order on line with curb side pickup but all eight locations in the east bay area were “Temporarily Closed.” The Pleasant Hill store had a permanently closed look.
I suspect Sweet Tomatoes was already failing financially and used the COVID-19 shutdown as a signal to shut down operations rather than adapting to conditions the way other businesses are.
They don’t put it on a plate. YOU put it on a plate. It’s called a buffet
How food is going to be sold and serviced is very much a part of the “new normal” of things. If we don’t stay awake they’ll mandate a “science diet” for humans like they do for dogs. 😀
Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!
I will miss the Cream of Mushroom soup. Once a year we would go a pig out. Cream on Cream …of mushroom I suppose?
Imagine having to remove half your tables and spend huge dollars on some kind of vacuum sealed buffet assembly line. The gross profit is gone, so the business decision is to close. Very sad.
I wonder if that buffet in Concord where they have the brawls will stay open?
Maybe if Golden Corral sold spectator tickets???
My wife and used to go there all the time and then my wife became a germaphobe and we stopped going there. It has been so long since we ate there I forgot what they had that I really liked. Oh well.
Just remembered what I used to do. There wasn’t much meat there but they had Chicken noodle soup. All of the chicken was at the bottom of the pot, so once I found that out I pretty much got all of the protein that I wanted.
Are there any plans on refunding gift cards if we had previously done so before the pandemic?
Not first business to close and won’t be the last.
Restaurants that do open back up may not survive if distancing is mandatory. Distancing requirements will mean fewer server positions to start with. Staffing overall will be less but even with reduced employee costs, reduced revenue may not be enough to meet fixed costs resulting in business failure.
As businesses close cities, counties and state will see reduction in sales tax revenue. State governors by closing their states to varying degrees have damaged their states.
Calaveras, Amador, Siskiyou, Plumas and Del Norte counties have had no deaths, have had no new cases and have ZERO active cases. Why aren’t these counties open ?
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/
Have more people gotten sick after eating buffet food than regular restaurant food, or even at home? It would seem that if someone got sick from the contents of the pan that everybody who was served from that pan would also get sick. Women often complain of getting sick but I’ll bet that they are already having some problem at that establishment.
What will happen to the ubiquitous Chinese buffets, which IMO, are a blight on the community and cheapen the area? Same with Golden Corral. There’s one next to Concord DMV. I suppose all these places are at risk.
I’ve only eaten at Sweet Tomatoes once, in the 90s. The receptionist chose it for our monthly company lunch. We went to the Hopyard location in Pleasanton. All they had was soup, salad bar, garlic bread and cheese pizza. The 30 of us emptied the cheese pizza tray in an instant and then the chef slow-rolled us on pizza refills. Everyone left full of soup, salad and bread, but I noticed people ordering McDonald’s 2 hours after lunch. By 3:00 PM everyone was hungry. The poor receptionist got an ear full. She meant well, but what was she thinking? Thirty hungry young men and she chose that stupid place? Men need meat! Women! 😉
How is your story relevant? The PH location was almost always busy and packed at dinner, sometimes with a line waiting for a table to open. It was a fabulous place to take our teenagers who could stuff themselves at a decent price. Not everyone is tortured by the lack of meat. They loved that place AND ate vegetables! Shocking!!
Anyway, the chain was running on very thin margins as it was, and might have looked at the cost of changing their format, the cost of extra staff to serve food if they couldn’t stay a buffet, and the cost of paying back any government loan that most of us small businesses haven’t seen one cent of anyway, and decided it was smarter and the right time to close.
How many businesses will die every single day this nonsense continues? Let My People Go… out to eat, to Church, the beach, ‘non-essential stores’ before we find ourselves in the Mother-Of-All Depressions!
For the corona-maniacs who are scared of their own shadow because they have embraced fear instead of life, Cower-In-Place (or Swelter-In-Place when it is hot) until your money runs out.
And for people who are really ‘immune-compromised’ or otherwise in a high risk group, continue to shelter in place as long as necessary.
Gotta agree. Should’ve been run like that from the beginning.
That is terrible. Sweet tomatoes is one of my favorite resturants. The employees were very sweet friendly and helpful and the food was so amazing. Im gonna mmiss that resturant a lot..
One of my favorite places. I loved everything there. Very sad to see it go
ST was one of the only places we could get our son to eat when he was really little. The staff was always very kind and I feel bad to know they’ve lost their jobs for good.
Eventually kids will eat whatever you put in front of them when they get hungry enough, maybe I’m just an old fogey.
Wow, nytemuvr, that was an unnecessary and irrelevant comment. I would guess you don’t have kids? And that has nothing to do with the whole discussion, but you couldn’t help yourself and had to criticize someone anyway? To their point, LOTS of people loved SW because it was a fun place to take kids. Parenting is hard and kids are stubborn. Jeez.
Speaking of not being able to help yourself and criticizing someone anyway, what else pushes your buttons? It would be fun to watch.
We liked Sweet Tomatoes when we lived in the area. It wasn’t our favorite place, but we liked having choices. I’m afraid we’re going to lose a lot of businesses in the near-term future.
Agreed Corwellian, this is just the start. There will be many more, many many more if this madness doesn’t stop.
Newsom is using his “science” to impose a political agenda. The Covid death rate per Stanford for ages 1-45 is 0.014%. Newsom is using the total death rate to punish everyone unnecessarily. This is just the latest of literally thousands to come.
We used to do “chicken pox parties” – remember? Get the kids exposed and through another virus for life. The REAL science here is R: the transmission rate. We need to get everyone else exposed while managong the curve and while keeping our elderly and immunocompromised quarantined, and regularly test those who interact with them. Get the overall infection rate to 55-60%, the R of 2.3-2.5 people infected per person becomes irrelevant, and we return to normal. Permanently.
We didn’t have the testing, the PPE, and an understanding of where we are in March. We do now. It is time to lead Newsom – not hide.
We will have far more people die from suicide, drugs, alcohol, and homelessness than Covid due to the purposeful destruction of our economy. Get the big picture Newsom. Use some math. And stop playing politics.