Pleasanton Sweet Tomatoes Permanently Closed Due To Coronavirus
PLEASANTON, CA — Sweet Tomatoes, the buffet-style restaurant that is owned by San Diego-based Garden Fresh Restaurants, and includes a location in Pleasanton, is closing permanently due to the coronavirus.
The company has 97 restaurants, including 44 in California. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the closures will result in 4,400 employees losing their jobs. Garden Fresh Restaurants had closed their locations in mid-March because of the spread of the coronavirus. At the time, the closures were listed as being temporary.
"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 Union-Tribune. "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."
According to company, the self-serve, buffet style of the company’s restaurants resulted in big losses in February and March as the pandemic began to impact areas across the United States.
"We spent two years researching and trying to improve things and actually got the business turned around," Robert Allbritton, chairman of Washington, D.C.-based Perpetual Capital Partners, a private investment firm that bought the company following a 2016 bankruptcy filing, told the Union-Tribune. “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."
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This article originally appeared on the Pleasanton Patch
