A Golden Age Built on Greens and Ranch Dressing
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, salad bars were big draws for restaurants, luring in customers with the promise of leafy greens and unlimited refills. They offered something fast food couldn’t: the illusion of choice, health, and abundance all at once. Families could customize their plates, kids could pile on croutons, and parents felt slightly better about the meal.
These marvels of overconsumption were once one of the more popular models for restaurants in the country; not only were entire chains devoted to the model, but other restaurants had their own mini-buffets, and even fast food restaurants wanted a piece of that buffet action. It was a cultural moment, not just a dining format.
The Chains That Built an Empire Around the Salad Bar
What started as one self-serve, healthy food-forward Souplantation restaurant in San Diego in the late 1970s grew into an accompanying concept called Sweet Tomatoes, complete with a 50-foot-long salad bar. At its height, it became a beloved institution for health-conscious diners across the country.
At its height, Sweet Tomatoes had more than 100 locations in 15 states. Meanwhile, Steak and Ale had more than 200 outlets in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, not including its sister restaurant operation, Bennigan’s. These weren’t small operations. They were nationally recognized names with loyal regulars who came back week after week.
The Economics Were Always Fragile
With an average buffet price of around $20, buffets operate on extremely thin margins: for every $20 in revenue, $19 might go toward overhead, leaving just around 5% in net profit. The math was tight from the start. Keeping a salad bar stocked, fresh, and compliant with health codes required constant labor and food replenishment.
Maintaining a fresh and appealing salad bar is no small feat. The greens wilt, the toppings get soggy, and before you know it, customers are staring at a sad and unappealing pile of limp lettuce. Restaurants have to invest time and money to keep things fresh, and for some, it likely wasn’t worth the hassle. That pressure only intensified as food and labor costs climbed over the years.
Decades of Slow Decline Before COVID Even Arrived
In the past 20 years, more than 1,300 buffets have shut their doors. The big buffet chains that once dotted the Midwest were hit the hardest: Old Country Buffet is down to just 17 of its 350 original locations, and HomeTown Buffet has closed 217 of its 250 eateries. The erosion was already well underway long before 2020.
Ruby Tuesday opted to get rid of its popular salad bar and shifted to a more luxurious caliber of menu items that both failed to impress the intended demographic and alienated existing customers. It’s a vivid example of how removing the salad bar could actually accelerate a chain’s decline rather than save it. Traffic and sales fell off as longtime fans bemoaned the trendier menu and reminisced about the once-showcased salad bar.
COVID-19: The Killing Blow for Many
The COVID-19 pandemic devastated the salad bar and buffet dining concept in 2020, as buffet-style restaurants shut down across the nation as the pandemic forced strict health requirements upon restaurants and consumers became frightened of the thought of eating at such establishments. It was, for many operators, the moment a struggling model became an impossible one.
Sweet Tomatoes and Souplantation’s owner filed Chapter 11 in 2016, and then four years later, the buffet restaurant chain filed for Chapter 7 liquidation and permanently closed all 97 locations, after the COVID-19 pandemic had forced a shutdown. The closure resulted in 4,400 people losing their jobs. It wasn’t just a restaurant closing. It was an entire model collapsing.
Health and Safety: The Fears That Lingered
Salad bars and buffets have seen a major decline since the COVID-19 pandemic in particular. Changes to food shopping and dining trends, focused on preventing the spread of disease, altered how customers interact with their food and fellow diners. Self-service tools like ladles and tongs are difficult to keep clean after every use, which really hurts the safety rating of the classic salad bar.
Self-service areas like salad bars and buffets allow guests to assemble a meal by their tastes and appetite, but they also offer extra opportunities for bacteria and viruses to contaminate food. The FDA’s policies and guidelines have only gotten stricter since the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring health inspectors to increase their standards and even make changes to health codes. Restaurants that wanted to keep running salad bars faced a genuinely higher compliance burden.
The Chains That Were Already Gone Before the Pandemic
Souper Salad had expanded to over 150 locations by the early 2000s, but industry headwinds and a downturn in consumer confidence led to a 2011 bankruptcy filing and continued restaurant closings. The chain has only three locations today, in Lubbock, Pasadena, and El Paso, Texas. From 150 locations to three is a staggering fall by any measure.
At its peak in the late 1990s, Fresh Choice had 48 restaurants and expanded into Seattle and Dallas markets. After the recession hit in the 2000s, Fresh Choice fell on hard times, falling out of favor with younger, wealthier clientele. In 2012, Fresh Choice filed for bankruptcy and eventually closed all but two locations. Many of these chains were quietly dying well before anyone had heard of COVID-19.
Ruby Tuesday: The Last Real Holdout
In today’s dining landscape, there aren’t many salad bars left for customers to build their own plate full of leafy greens and toppings. However, one restaurant chain is keeping the tradition alive: Ruby Tuesday. The casual dining chain is known for its Endless Garden Bar, with over 55 items for guests to select and serve for themselves.
Not only does Ruby Tuesday offer an unlimited salad bar, but you can also purchase a month-long salad bar membership. Since 2024, diners can pay $39.99 for a Garden Bar Pass that is valid for 30 days at most dine-in locations. It’s a creative move, though the chain itself is under pressure. At its peak around 15 years ago, Ruby Tuesday had approximately 945 locations in the United States. By 2020, that number had decreased to 470. Today, only around 200 remain.
The Grocery Store Salad Bar: A Surprising Survivor
While restaurants have largely abandoned the format, something interesting has been happening at grocery stores. Even as overall sales lag in grocery, self-serve food bars have become preferred choices for shoppers. Hot buffet and salad bar transactions increased significantly, with hot buffet transactions up 37% in September 2023 compared to September 2022, and salad bar transactions up 11%.
Hot buffets and salad bars are high-margin stations in a world of razor-thin margins. Most items on grocery store shelves have a gross profit margin between 10% and 40%. In contrast, salad bars can turn a higher profit margin, in some cases up to 70%, before factoring in labor and overhead costs. The grocery context strips away some of the stigma and keeps the format financially attractive in a way that standalone restaurant chains couldn’t sustain.
What Replaced the Salad Bar – and What Was Lost
Today, the nostalgic salad bar has been replaced by a sleeker, more streamlined concept: custom-built salads ordered from a menu or via an app. It’s as if the salad bar got a digital makeover. Instead of walking up to a buffet and piling on ingredients, diners now use touchscreen kiosks or smartphones to order a salad with personalized toppings.
This move not only cuts down on food waste but also ensures a more consistent dining experience. For restaurants, it’s easier to manage and keep food fresh, since each salad is built to order. The new model is undeniably more efficient. What it lacks is harder to quantify: the tactile pleasure of building your own plate, the communal atmosphere, the feeling that you were in control of something as simple as lunch.
The salad bar wasn’t just a meal format. It was a ritual of sorts, and its disappearance from the American dining room says something real about how much the industry has changed since those all-you-can-eat days. Whether that’s progress or just pragmatism probably depends on how much you miss the croutons.
