When Souplantation closed all 97 of its restaurants in 2020, citing health concerns around self-serve dining, seemingly all of Southern California grieved. The San Diego-based buffet chain, which was also known as Sweet Tomatoes in other states, had already filed for bankruptcy in 2016, but the early pandemic was the company’s true death knell. Popular with immigrant families (including my own), hungry students and seniors on limited incomes, the restaurant was known for its affordable, slightly mediocre mix of salads, soups, pastas and baked goods. There were also a few desserts like soft-serve and, if my memory serves me correctly, the occasional molten chocolate sheet cake or seasonal fruit cobbler with which one could create your own dessert à la mode.
As of February 28, a third party in the Inland Empire has resurrected one of Souplantation’s former locations under the name Soup ’n Fresh. It’s not the first time someone has tried to revive the buffet-style soup-and-salad concept, but it’s the only one to have opened thus far. Located about 45 minutes away with no traffic (and more than double that during rush hour) from Downtown L.A. in the city of Rancho Cucamonga, the similarly named restaurant uses a slightly different color scheme but has all-but-identical menu offerings and pricing. To see how the new dupe stacks up to the original, we sent our freelance video contributor Richard Tranley on Sunday, March 17 to review Soup ’n Fresh and then called him up for a play-by-play recap this week.
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“I definitely think the best ingredient they have is nostalgia,” Richard says. He wasn’t sold on coming back, but if you were a Souplantation superfan, don’t mind commuting to the Inland Empire and are willing to wait to get inside, he would say it’s worth a try. At $16.99 for lunch and $18.99 for dinner (plus discounts for teachers and veterans), you won’t be spending much money if you’re planning on taking a day trip to visit, though you will invest plenty of time.
According to Richard, the food was good and exactly as advertised. “Everything was fresh, everything was crispy, nothing was gross. But it was just salad.” Wait times are likely longer than what may become usual due to the restaurant’s relative newness, but you should expect to wait anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours, he added. Having driven to Rancho Cucamonga with his partner, Richard arrived at 1:30pm, and according to the timestamp from video footage he shot on his phone, he was able to enter at 2:41pm, bringing his total wait time to an hour and 11 minutes.
Once inside, the layout was virtually unchanged from Souplantation’s glory days. Richard and his partner were able to build their own salads and sampled all of Soup ’n Fresh’s prepared salads. Among them, he particularly enjoyed the Americanized Chinese chicken salad, which was known as Wonton Happiness at Souplantation. Now simply just called Asian chicken salad, the salad offers the same crunchy, deep-fried chow mein. At Soup ’n Fresh, it’s offered on the side, likely to preserve the topping’s crunch factor.
The day he visited, the restaurant had three soups and three pastas on offer: corn chowder, clam chowder and chicken noodle soup plus spaghetti alfredo, macaroni and cheese and a classic spaghetti marinara. All of the dishes were pretty much the same quality as the OG, except the clam chowder. “The clam chowder was a little runnier,” Richard added. “That was probably the only thing that was different.”
The small baked goods selection included chocolate and blueberry muffins, pizza squares and cornbread. He misses the old blueberry muffin’s crunchy crust, however, though he did find the chocolate muffins to be “pretty good.” Like many of us once once upon a time, Richard took advantage of being able to mix and match offerings, topping his second bowl of corn chowder with cornbread to switch things up a little. If he had to be honest, however, the entire experience was just fine. “I kept waiting for the appetizers to stop. My brain was like, ‘When do the mains come?’” (I should add here that though Richard grew up eating at Souplantation, he also moonlights as a professional chef, with the expected refined taste in food such a side hustle requires.)
All in all, Richard found the food at Soup ‘n Fresh to be generally spot on. “The lack of salt was spot on,” he added, reflecting back on his memories of spooning up bowls of the chain’s famous chicken noodle soup. “If you add the right amount of salt, it’s a good, classic American chicken noodle soup, which is itself adapted from French mirepoix. Same thick noodles.”
Soup ‘n Fresh is located at 8966 Foothill Boulevard in Rancho Cucamonga. It’s open Monday to Thursday from 11am to 8:30pm, Friday and Saturday from 11am to 9:30pm and Sunday 11am to 8:30pm.