Salad Daze

Once upon a time, before the Reagan era, salad bars were something straight out of hippieville, stocked with such weird stuff as alfalfa sprouts. In the early 1970s, the idea of a "salad bar" was considered, like, far out. In America Eats Out, his history of restaurants in America, John Mariani tells the story of how a Chicago college dropout and macrobiotic vegetarian, Richard Melman, and his partner, real estate agent Jerry Orzoff, opened a groovy singles bar and restaurant called R.J. Grunts in 1971. "The restaurant's main gimmick was a 'salad bar,' offering 40 different items from which customers (many of whom were hippies or members of the counterculture) concocted their own salads."

There was nothing else like it, and the place's popularity launched the incredibly successful Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises Inc. and dozens of copycat restaurant concepts, including the now-defunct Sam Wilson's restaurants, a creation of Kansas City restaurateurs Joe Gilbert and Paul Robinson.

At some point in the late 1980s, though, salad bars became unfashionable and, in some cases, potentially scary (one popular Kansas City restaurant suffered a flurry of negative publicity when customers complained that they'd suffered food poisoning from its lavish salad-bar items; the restaurant closed a few months later). When salad bars started showing up in such fast-food joints as Wendy's, the party was over -- and even that chain had dropped the aging concept by the end of the '90s.

Today it's rare that a restaurant offers diners a salad bar (though the Ruby Tuesday chain has a decent one) as an added attraction to what's on the menu. But just when you thought the phenomenon was going the way of the Pet Rock, it's back -- in the form of buffet restaurants totally and enthusiastically devoted to the cult of the "healthy" salad.

Sweet Tomatoes, The Salad Buffet Restaurant, is the newest outpost of a San Diego-based salad buffet chain (in California, the restaurants are called Souplantation). Places like Sweet Tomatoes or its rival, Souper! Salad!, aren't exactly innovators in the world of salad bars. A decade ago, several former Gilbert-Robinson executives invested in a similar concept, The Soup Exchange, in Overland Park. That place lasted only a few years, but then again, so did the ill-fated Italian joint that took over the building after that.

Right now, Sweet Tomatoes is a hot scene, bustling with customers who pile up plastic trays with plates and bowls loaded with food that is hit-or-miss. On the plus side, the long line of fresh ingredients for whipping together a personal salad is terrific: fresh, flavorful, and attractively presented. The nine house-made dressings are delicious, and so are the clever pasta salads, especially cold mostaccioli in a light pesto-and-cream sauce or linguini noodles tossed up in a citrusy vinaigrette.

At Sweet Tomatoes, diners can pick up a handy chart titled "Information to Satisfy a Healthy Curiosity." It lists the calorie, fat, cholesterol, fiber, and sugar counts of nearly everything on the buffet, which is a lot of information because the clean, well-lighted restaurant heaps up mountains of food. But a salad is only as healthy as the stuff you pile onto it. It's one thing to eat a plate of fresh greens and a splash of fat-free dressing. But once the lettuce gets loaded with grated cheese, toasted croutons, a couple of spoonfuls of Zesty Tortellini Salad (15 grams of fat in a half cup), and a big dollop of Sweet Tomatoes' house ranch dressing (15 grams of fat in two tablespoons), you might as well eat a double cheeseburger.

And if you're there to stuff yourself silly, Sweet Tomatoes is a super bargain; a dinner of salad, soup, and everything else at Sweet Tomatoes goes for $7.69 (not including beverages). There's plenty of heavier fare as well, including separate stations for hot breads, pasta, soups, baked potatoes, and a kid-magnet frozen-yogurt machine.

Unfortunately, when you venture away from the salad line the food gets iffy.

The cream of broccoli soup was watery and tasteless; the dull chili was loaded, on two occasions, with undercooked beans that tasted as if they had just been dumped out of a can; and the French onion soup had lots of onions in it but hadn't simmered for very long, so it was watery and bland. Dainty little baked potatoes, wrapped in foil, can be dappled with sour cream, cheese, and bacon (although I had to go back to my table, split open the potato with a knife, and return to the potato department to pile on the accessories). The breads range from moist and tasty (blueberry muffins, Indian grain bread) to practically inedible (rock-hard focaccia, a sugary and undercooked lemon muffin, something that looked like a chocolate brownie muffin but was so bad my friend Bob spit it out). The Pizza Focaccia was good -- but it's a traditional pizza compared to any true Italian, olive-oil-brushed focaccia I've ever seen.

A white-jacketed "chef" mans the pasta station, whipping around a trio of pans piled high with hot pasta choices that vary from day to day, including the mildly peppery Arizona Marinara and, inexplicably, something called Creamy Bruschetta Pasta. The Italian word "bruschetta" derives from "bruscare," meaning "to roast over coals." At any other restaurant, "bruschetta" describes slices of toasted bread rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil and sometimes includes fresh basil and tomatoes. At Sweet Tomatoes it's just a fancy name for an Alfredo pasta with chopped tomatoes. Not bad, but not bruschetta.