THE LINE OUT THE DOOR TOLD THE TALE

The first time I went to Souplantation in Tustin, it was about two days old and a third full. A week later the place had still not advertised or been reviewed, but there was a line out the door and it was all I could do to find space at the counter.

Well, OK, you don’t have to set off a bomb. I can recognize a phenomenon when it picks me up and bounces me around. Souplantation, which originated in San Diego, is talking about opening 50 more locations in the next five years--the next will be in Garden Grove this December--and we may be looking at the McDonald’s of soup and salad bars here.

If that’s what it becomes, I’m convinced the reason will be that this is not the stereotype of the dim, fuzzy salad bar full of anxious-looking dieters and singles trying to pick each other up by talking about running shoes. It feels like an all-American fast-food restaurant where an ordinary human being would eat, a place big enough to seat 200 people and notable for good lighting and lots of warm blond wood. The staff is very young and enthusiastic and they work at keeping the place nice looking. At the 114-foot salad bar they are constantly replacing the salad items and cleaning up around the bins.

The health-food angle of a soup and salad bar is certainly here. Every table has a sheaf of little brochures (informative and not in the least reproachful), explaining the principles of high-fiber, high-carbohydrate diet and listing, among other things, the dishes offered that follow American Heart Assn. guidelines. It’s clear from the brochure that a number of dishes--cream soups and hot bacon salad dressing prominently among them--are on the menu for fun and not for virtue, and for that matter, dieting will still require discipline. You’ll have to say no to the unlimited seconds.

Apart from the fact that all the salad ingredients are quite fresh, there’s not much I can say about a salad bar except that I’ve had:

Alfalfa sprouts, bacon bits, banana chips, pickled beets, red bell peppers, green bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cheese (Cheddar and something else), coconut, fresh Parmesan croutons, cucumber, dill pickles, sweet gherkins, hard-boiled eggs, iceberg lettuce, jicama, mung bean sprouts, mushrooms, fried noodles, olives, red onions, green onions, pickled peppers, raisins, romaine lettuce, snow peas, spinach, sunflower seeds, tomatoes and zucchini.

And all the salad dressings seem pretty good: avocado (not as bland as it sounds), hot bacon, blue cheese, honey mustard, Italian, low-cal Italian, oil and vinegar, ranch house and thousand island. This is not health food as penance. If anything, I prefer the low-cal Italian to the high-cal.

Half a dozen prepared salads are always around, and of these the potato salad is terrific, obviously fresh-made and never mushy, and the same can be said about the pasta salads, particularly the tarragon tuna with lumache. The coleslaw is a little quaint with its pineapple and coconut flavoring. The three-bean salad, I must say, puts me to sleep.

There are six soups available every day. One is always chili--a very respectable chili, on the mild and tomato side but quite meaty. Its AHA approval must come from the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a speck of fat in it. A creamy clam chowder and simple chicken noodle are offered also every day. Mostly, the soups are quite good, such as shrimp bisque with oddly effective yams in it, strongly ham-flavored navy bean and a minestrone that tastes of Italian sausage. The only loser I’ve had is a dull vegetable soup like thin mashed potatoes with some vegetables floating around.

My favorite part of the meal is the muffins. It’s rare to get fresh, hot muffins in a restaurant, all moist and tender, and practically unheard of to get a choice of four. As with the soups, there is a rotating daily selection, mostly flavored with fruits and/or nuts but including very good corn bread as well. One of them is always a honey bran muffin which could serve as a standing reproach to the usual bran muffin whose main usefulness is as a weapon of last resort in a food fight.

Dessert, no surprise, is raw fruit. If you feel reckless and sinful, you can adorn your melon or grapes with cottage cheese or sour cream dressing. Speaking of sin, the choice of beverages is not limited to fruit juice and mineral water--beer and wine are available, too.

Overhead is small in a place like this, where the chef could probably go home as soon as the soups were made and leave the kitchen staffed with a few people to chop vegetables and shove muffins into the oven. As a result, prices are modest. At lunch, either soup or salad is $4.95 and both together are 75 cents more. At dinner, prices are one dollar higher: $5.95 and $6.65. Children under 12 eat for $2.99 and seniors get a 10% discount.

SOUPLANTATION Tustin Plaza,

13681 Newport Ave., Tustin.

(714) 730-5443

Open for lunch and dinner daily. No credit cards.