A casualty of the pandemic, the days of the salad bar are gone for the foreseeable future.
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To those who always sniffed at the self-serve station, it should have been tossed long ago, and merits no eulogy. Salad-and-hot bars snobs find them unappetizing, their open-air fixings exposed to coughs and picked up with shared utensils, containers topped with sneeze-guards splattered with ranch dressing.
But to devotees, the banishment of buffet bars signifies the closing of a cherished chapter in childhood memories. Salad bars, mirages of healthful eating, provided free choice for kids. Affection for the set-up often carried into adulthood.
“Salad bars are fantastic because the combinations are limitless. You can go through like 30 ingredients and not eat the same salad twice for years,” said Steve Hughes, a 35-year-old structural engineer. He calls them “one of the most delightful epicurean experiences I for one have ever had.”
Seeking an escape in early August, Mr. Hughes planned a road trip with a few friends to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was about a 10-hour drive from his Louisiana home. Yet before they entered the forests, there was a rite of passage from his youth that needed addressing. Around 5 p.m., he and his pals strolled into what Mr. Hughes called the main reason he chose the Smokies: the Peddler Steakhouse, a restaurant in Gatlinburg, gateway to the mountains and, more crucially, home to a wondrous salad bar.
Steve Hughes, right, and friends visited the Great Smoky Mountains this summer. First, they made a stop at the Peddler Steakhouse, known for its salad bar.
Photo: Samy AbdelghaniAfter his parents took him there for his 10th birthday, he returned every couple of years. He recalls the chilled plates, and his first time trying pickled beets. “Oh, there were smoked oysters…who does that?” he said. “And those tiny corns and actual bacon, but also Bacos—I mix the two together. And those little fried onions, and green-bean casserole, and like 10 or more dressings.” He took a breath. “At the Peddler I ate whatever I wanted.”
On this visit, a masked server brought the table pre-dinner salads made in the kitchen. The salad bar itself, normally holding 45 items, was empty. Mr. Hughes was crestfallen.
Geoff Wolpert, who has owned the restaurant since 1985, said the Peddler was closed until May. When it reopened, the salad bar remained shut down. Initially, he said, the empty bar looked “stark” with nothing in it, so a few weeks ago they decorated it as a seasonal display.
The Peddler Steakhouse salad bar, in Gatlinburg, Tenn., is now filled with fall decorations.
Photo: Peddler SteakhouseThe all-you-can-eat salad bar used to be the restaurant’s second-most-popular entree, after the rib eye, Mr. Wolpert said.
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“I feel a sense of loss,” said J. Lynn Lyons, a New Orleans bartender who frequented Sizzler steakhouses with her parents in Los Angeles for the unlimited salad bars, and wondered aloud if creamy Italian dressing was born from customers mixing Italian and ranch. “The first time, getting to make your own salad…it was like…it’s yours, yours for the making,” she said.
Pre-Covid, Ms. Lyons said the salad bar at a local Whole Foods acted as an educational introduction to “superfood” items such as quinoa. “I wasn’t even sure how to say it,” she said. “I know I’m making a salad bar sound like some sort of Utopia. But they were pretty damned awesome.”
In September, Sizzler USA filed for bankruptcy.
Patrons could help themselves at Sizzler salad bars.
Photo: Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times/Getty ImagesMickey Costello, 79, misses the social aspects. He went to a Souplantation restaurant near his Seal Beach, Calif., home three times a month for eight years, often on Sundays with his wife, Carol, to meet friends heading there from church.
“Going to the soup-and-salad bar makes you feel you are doing something healthy even if you’re overeating,” he said. “The best thing about them is that they are indulgences.”
Garden Fresh Restaurants, owner of around 100 Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes buffet-focused restaurants, filed for bankruptcy in May.
“Buffet bars are like stepping over the line into a little bit of evil,” Mr. Costello said. “You can always get a little treat like ice cream on top of a piece of cake.”
A closed Souplantation buffet restaurant in Alhambra, Calif.
Photo: Image Of Sports/Newscom/Zuma PressDave Swanson, a marketing strategist who now lives in Hollywood, Calif., has fond memories of going to all-you-can-eat salad bars with his parents when he was in grade school in suburban New Jersey.
“With each visit I could create something new, live a little. It was personal, rewarding,” he said. His affinity carried over into adulthood, where he frequented a branch of a small salad-bar chain in Santa Monica, temporarily closed now. “It’s a bummer,” he said.
Self-service food, with origins such as the Swedish smorgasbord, began to gain popularity in the U.S. in the 1940s. Salad bars spread in the 1970s, when casual restaurants incorporated them.
Chassie Post, a New York-based style consultant, frequented Wendy’s salad bar when she was growing up in Atlanta. Eschewing french fries and a Frosty, she said, “I remember it being a point of pride to stride up to the counter and say, ‘I’ll just have a salad.’ ”
Chassie Post, a New York-based style consultant, frequented Wendy's salad bar when she was growing up.
Photo: Chassie PostIt provided an illusion of dieting. Her self-built salad consisted, she said, of “three pieces of shredded iceberg topped with four pounds of croutons, two cups of cottage cheese, seven plastic spoonfuls of sunflower seeds, and five handfuls of raisins—all smothered in ladles of either ‘low-fat’ ranch, blue, or Russian.” The chain discontinued its salad bar in 2006.
Before the pandemic, Ms. Post frequented hot-food and salad bars at grocery markets in Manhattan that featured bagels, make-your-own bowls, soups, sushi and other specialties.
“I am so sad that they are disappearing,” Ms. Post said. “There were so many options based on your cravings at the moment. I actually liked that I alone was in charge of how many croutons went on my salad.”
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Appeared in the October 5, 2020, print edition as 'Devotees Lament Tossing Of the Salad Bar.'
October 05, 2020 at 12:06AM
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