RESTAURANT REVIEW : Souplantation: Another Salad Bar? Yes, but With a Difference

Why is there a line outside Souplantation? Stick your head inside and it just looks like some kind of cafeteria, a bunch of people pushing trays down a long counter. Except the selections are all salad stuff.

OK, sure. Salad: light, healthful, inexpensive. Great idea for a restaurant, in fact every couple of years somebody has this same great idea of a soup and salad restaurant chain, only nothing very exciting ever comes of it. The San Diego-based Souplantation chain, which just opened a branch in Pasadena, shows that soup and salad was an exciting idea all along, if you make it attractive and see to it that people feel good. A lot of restaurants could learn a thing or two from how Souplantation is run.

For starters, the place has high ceilings and plate-glass windows all around, making it bright and airy, something that can’t be said about every salad bar. All the salad makings are visibly fresh, even positively photogenic; no tired tomatoes or bleached carrot sticks. Possibly the most unappetizing thing about most salad bars is how messy they end up looking. Here the bins are constantly being replenished to keep them fresh, with the area around the bins being tidied up all the time too.

Of course, appearance is not the whole secret. The food has to be good. Just about every vegetable in season is on display, from iceberg lettuce to grated green and yellow squash. There are nine prepared salads ranging from eggy potato salad to (I swear it) two-color cheese tortellini in vinaigrette. The tuna tarragon and pesto pasta salads are particularly good, and so is the famous San Francisco three-bean salad, which I don’t believe I’ve ever had in its hometown with beans that looked this fresh.

There are lots of things to put on top of the salad--not just pickled beets and bacon bits. In particular, there are freshly made croutons and terrific crunchy dill pickles. There are over a dozen salad dressings, of which the most popular seems to be Ranch (two crocks of it, usually), but there are also “lo-cal New Orleans French” (a sweet one of fresh tomato chunks), an avocado dressing, hot bacon, raspberry-walnut vinaigrette, even a selection of oils and vinegars if you want to mix your own.

At the end of the line you pay, ordering a beverage (wine and beer available as well as health stuff), and soup if you want. There’s always good fresh chicken broth with thick noodles and chunks of meat at the bottom, a meaty-tomatoey chili (not terribly hot) and a rich clam chowder. The rest of the soups change daily, and might include a split pea strongly flavored by ham, a minestrone with the flavor of Italian sausage or a cream of mushroom.

You can get seconds on the soup by asking the busboy for a clean bowl, and you can always go back for seconds to the muffin bar, too. And that muffin bar is a great idea. Fresh, hot muffins--where else can you get those? There was apple raisin walnut and peach poppyseed, plus corn bread and sourdough. For dessert, if you’re feeling sinful, you can sin to the extent of putting yogurt dressing or cottage cheese with your fresh fruit.

The other big thing they do at Souplantation, apart from making things look good, is making people feel good about being there. Despite the cafeteria-style self service, they do seat you, a necessity when the place gets crowded. They don’t lecture about health, although there is a brochure on high-fiber, low-protein diet at the table which tells you which of the items are approved by the American Heart Assn. Nor do they congratulate the diner at every turn for eating in a health food place, insistently bringing up connotations of snobbery and ill health. Here’s a health-food place where you don’t have to feel like a geek.

Souplantation, 201 S. Lake St., Pasadena, (818) 577-4797. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Wine and beer only. Validated parking in lot on Cordova Street. No credit cards; cash or travelers’ checks only. Soup or salad $4.95, both $5.65. Children $2.99; senior citizens’ discount 10%.