Ode to Sweet Tomatoes
Sometimes I wonder if someone else is in charge of my brain.
Why else would I find myself in front of Sweet Tomatoes, on a Friday morning when Sweet Tomatoes isn’t even open yet, not that I have anyone to eat with, not that I’d be eating with anyone right now. I mean this because there’s a pandemic going on, and more importantly, because the pandemic is why Sweet Tomatoes is closed. Permanently.
The building is there. The sign is there. The flyers detailing the extra covid-19-related precautions are there. But all of it is just a grave, a shell, a decaying skeleton.
I peer through the windows and can see mounds of to-go boxes near the entrance. Each one is a tray with a slot for a cup of soup, probably for when they thought they could survive off takeout during the beginning of I’ve come to term ‘these covid days.’
Everything that should be there is there. The red plastic plates, the green colored trays, restaurant-standard rectangular tin trays of various depths and widths. The soda machine. The soft-serve machine. The chairs stacked upside down on tables, their legs jetting upwards like dead bugs—appropriate, because for all the innards that are there, the life is gone.
Sweet Tomatoes is dead.
I’m not a military guy, but it feels natural to want to salute.
So I do. Long live Sweet Tomatoes.
Sweet Tomatoes is a salad buffet.
It seems like a uniquely American concept, and if it’s not, I’ve yet to encounter it elsewhere.
On paper it sounds terrible. Buffets are for luxury, that contradictory gratifying-yet-sickening feeling we call being stuffed, and above all, value.
Salad is the antithesis of all three. And yet, Sweet Tomatoes exists. Or it did.
Like all memories, I don’t remember the first; I remember the memorable.
I was with two high school church friends, I’ll call them Ray and Kyle. We were a bit of an unbalanced trio; the goofball (Ray), the goofier goofball (Kyle), and the guy there for kicks and giggles (take a wild guess). This basically sums up why we, three high school boys, decided to eat at a salad buffet of all places. One of us was nostalgic for the place, the other just loved it, and the last was there for the ride. Again, guess who is who.
I assume we talked up your normal high school topics, I don’t really remember. What’s important, is that we sat at the table at the farthest corner next to the bathroom. Yes, this is important.
This is where I have to stitch together what happened next.
Either Ray or Kyle needed to go to the bathroom, and by coincidence (maybe?), so did the other. Which left yours truly sitting at the table, picking at mixed greens, wonton chips, and chicken noodle soup. I don’t know what I thought about, maybe I was dreaming about my future as a worship band leader, married with three kids (two biological, one adopted, naturally).
When suddenly Kyle stormed out of the bathroom, power walking past our table and towards who knows where.
I was too stunned to ask.
A few minutes later, an elderly man walked out of the bathroom, grumbling, which based on my youthful perceptions, all elderly men did.
Ray followed him minutes later, many minutes later, cautiously sliding back into the chair.
“Hey, did an older man walk by?” he asked.
“Yeah?” I squinted. “I think so. Why?”
“Do you see him anywhere?”
I poked my head up and scanned the room.
“No. What happened?”
Here is what Ray told me.
Ray and Kyle both went into the bathroom, which has one urinal and two stalls. Obviously, they can’t both use same unit. Kyle takes the urinal, Ray takes the stall. Kyle is faster, washes his hands, and as he’s leaving, goes:
“Hey, Ray…” I imagined a grin on his face, as he began to flip the light switch. “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo—“
“HEY STOP THAT!” a voice belted out, from the other stall.
Kyle freaked out and left the bathroom, with the light switch off.
I suppose this is when I saw him run away.
Ray quietly hides in the stall, frozen, in a spy thriller, hoping the old man doesn’t notice him, until the old man grumbles about the youth in this country, flicks the light switch and leaves.
“Oh, yeah now I get what happened,” I laughed. “Yeah I saw this older dude come marching out here.”
Kyle suddenly reappears at our table and punches Ray in the shoulder.
“Stupid!” he said.
“What do you mean, stupid? You’re stupid.”
“I had to run away, stupid!”
“What!? You’re the one who flicked the switch. What is that sound anyway, ‘doo doo doo doo’—“
“That’s not what it sounded like, stupid.”
I present to you: high school boys, at a salad buffet.
There’s another restaurant called Soup Plantation, which is just Sweet Tomatoes in Southern California. I don’t remember which name is the official company name.
Here’s how both of them work.
There are three pre-made salads to choose from, followed by a long string of other greens and toppings, to either modify that pre-made salad or to build your own.
Then, you pay, and the whole world becomes your oyster.
You can go to the soup shelf, which has at least seven or so soups to choose from, the only mainstays being chicken noodle and some kind of chili. The baked potato tin and its toppings are nearby, in case you want either on your soup, or if you want it by itself.
Then there’s the breads, which are exactly that. There’s bread, there’s savory bread-based items like focaccia pizza or garlic bread, and then there’s sweet bread-based desserts, like blueberry muffins. Usually there’s a cobbler too.
Relegated to the back is the pasta section, where a lonely cook is making one of three pastas using an induction plate right in front of your eyes. I think this is supposed to give the pasta the veneer of freshness, but make no mistake, the pasta is always the worst part of the entire restaurant.
And that, is Sweet Tomatoes, a plethora of choices. Some would say, too much.
One of my friends—a mentor, really—had this mentality. Every time he took me to Soup Plantation (because this was a part of the college, San Diego part of my life), he had an exact order. He would follow it, every single time, deviating for absolutely no reason.
If my memory serves me well, it went like this: A self-made salad of mixed greens, assorted other veggies (dry), boiled eggs, and a light vinaigrette as dressing; Then, a baked potato, with chives, green onions, a little bacon, and the smallest pinch of cheese. No sour cream; Finally, two pieces of focaccia bread, and a blueberry muffin.
You may notice that there’s very little fat and almost no sugar as a part of this mix.
Personally, I don’t know what the point of a buffet is if you’re going to have very specific rules about it. I suppose it can help you make sense of all the choices if it’s too overwhelming—rules are there to help take the brain’s mind off of decision paralysis, and when the rules stop helping, you change them.
But this guy never changed them. No matter how many times we ate at Soup Plantation together.
I also suppose this is why he’s always been more fit than I am, like, hot guy fit, and I’ve always admired his discipline.
If I had rules about Sweet Tomatoes, I’d have only one: Never have the pasta.
It never looks good, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I really, really like pasta.
They always have three choices, two of which are on rotation and every time a new one shows up, I think: Maybe, maybe, maybe this is the time it will be good.
And then I’m reminded why I thought of the rule in the first place.
But it doesn’t really matter. I break my own rules, all the time.
Because who knows. Maybe, maybe this is the time.
At some point, Sweet Tomatoes became a family affair, and an incubator for life lessons about growing old.
My brother learned to always stand in front of my dad when in line, because my dad has a habit of being impatient and getting as close to the next person as possible.
I learned to make up reasons to follow my mom whenever she wanted to get more things to eat, because she had a hard time holding heavier plates but had an even harder time admitting it.
My extended family learned that as you get older, holiday gatherings just get hard. It’s hard to cook for a lot of people. It’s hard to handle teenagers and college kids who no longer look for the magic of Christmas. It’s hard to wash that many dishes and if you use disposable plates you hate the environment and you still have to clean the house—before and after.
Life is just kind of hard.
Going to Sweet Tomatoes, is just a lot simpler.
And so we went. We went as immediate family. We went as bigger family. We went as extended family. Who says Christmas can’t be for salad buffets?
I never said it—not to family, not to my friends—but I’ve never really liked Sweet Tomatoes. There are plenty of diamonds in the rough, but the overall food quality just isn’t that good.
But I’ll never complain or object, because for whatever reason, even if I didn’t like the food, I always enjoyed going.
It’s not even one of those “people make the place” kind of deals. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if it’s precisely the cheap, mediocre, but wide swath variety that makes going there with friends and family part of the fun.
It’s too bad I can’t test this hypothesis anymore.
As they say, you don’t appreciate something until it’s gone, and you often don’t know you’re doing something for the last time, until it’s too late and it becomes a game of “If I’d known it was the last time I would’ve appreciated it more,” like all things in life.
It’s a strange phenomenon, isn’t it? We have so many chances to learn this lesson, to appreciate something as we have it before we lose it, and yet we never really do.
The last time I ate at Sweet Tomatoes was for Ray’s thirty-fourth birthday, because after all these years, he still loves it for the nostalgia, for the idea of it, and really, for the value: unlimited salad, at dinner, with a coupon—very importantly—for less than twelve dollars.
By then I was pretty bored of the place, but I knew I was in the minority, so I always kept quiet, there for the ride like I’ve always been. I know that there are others that genuinely like the place, and nostalgia is a perfectly fine reason for liking it.
Which makes it all the more devastating when Sweet Tomatoes announced that it was closing, for good.
So I pay a few more visits to Sweet Tomatoes, and each time the skeleton decays a little bit more.
They hold a sale to sell off the kitchen equipment, and slowly pieces start disappearing. The machines, the tins, the silverware.
The tables get taken away.
They take down the sign.
And then one day, it’s all gone. It’s just a space decorated in varying shades of blue in a checkerboxed tile pattern, stock photos plastered over the windows selling the next great business venture that could be right here, coming soon.
It will become a new store, and only a few of us will know of the fun times and memories we built on this very ground.
Who knows if it’ll become a restaurant. If it is, who knows if it could ever recapture our memories, our nostalgia, the value. Honestly, it would be a mistake to hope for such a thing. So much of my history with the place is tied to my childhood, my college days, our family gatherings, all of which are gone, or have evolved anyway.
But I’ll never forget the place, and with the right friends, maybe I’ll never stop celebrating it either.
“We should do a Sweet Tomatoes-themed dinner,” Ray suggests at some point.
“We should!” I say.
“Someone can do the salad, the focaccia pizza, we can have soft serve, blueberry muffins…”
“Chicken noodle soup?”
“Yeah! Oh yeah we have to have the chicken noodle soup. And the chili, and…”
Ray drones on. I let him.
And then I call dibs on the pasta.