Fremont Sweet Tomatoes Permanently Closes Due To Coronavirus

Bea Karnes
·2 min read

FREMONT, CA — Sweet Tomatoes, the buffet-style restaurant chain founded and headquartered in San Diego, is permanently closing due to the coronavirus pandemic. The company has 97 restaurants, including 44 in California and one in Fremont. The Fremont restaurant was at 9370 Paseo Padre Parkway. It was extremely popular and packed at lunchtime.

The company closure means 4,400 employees will lose their jobs, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

San Diego-based Garden Fresh Restaurants, the parent company of Sweet Tomatoes and Souplantation, had closed the eateries in mid-March due to the spread of COVID- 19. At the time, the shutdowns were announced as temporary closures.

"The FDA had previously put out recommendations that included discontinuing self-serve stations, like self-serve beverages in fast food, but they specifically talked about salad bars and buffets," Garden Fresh CEO John Haywood told the U-T. "The regulations are understandable, but unfortunately, it makes it very difficult to reopen. And I'm not sure the health departments are ever going to allow it.

"We could've overcome any other obstacle, and we've worked for eight weeks to overcome these intermittent financial challenges but it doesn't work if we are not allowed to continue our model."

Sweet Tomatoes and Souplantation grew out of a single location that opened in 1978 in San Diego. But the self-serve model of the chain resulted in steep losses in business as the coronavirus crisis rapidly worsened in February and March, according to Robert Allbritton, chairman of Washington, D.C.-based Perpetual Capital Partners, a private investment firm that bought the company following a 2016 bankruptcy filing.

"We spent two years researching and trying to improve things and actually got the business turned around," Allbritton told the U-T. "We were growing the number of guests and were in the process of renovating the restaurants with new fixtures, carpeting (and) signage as late as January. We felt great about it. But I've got to tell you, when the virus hit, we went from 100 percent to 70 to 30 to 10 percent that fast, before the restaurants closed down and the company ran out of money in one week."

— Patch editors Kristina Houck and Bea Karnes contributed to this story

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This article originally appeared on the Fremont Patch