You may recall that on this site, I used to relentlessly pimp for the Creamy Tomato Soup offered from time to time at Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes restaurants. That sounds like two separate restaurant chains but it's really one that operates some outlets under one name and some under the other. I told you how wonderful that soup was and I even mounted a little campaign to get them to make the Creamy Tomato Soup one of their regular offerings.
My urgings were rebuffed. They did send me a lot of free meal coupons, especially after my crusade directly caused a mention of them and their tomato soup on The Big Bang Theory. But they did not take my advice.
I stopped pressing the matter because it seemed futile but also because after a while, I found that the food at Souplantation was going down in quality…and not just at one outlet. Whatever they were now doing to their cuisine, they were doing it at four different Souplantations, which to me was sampling enough to give up on all of them. The vegetables increasingly tasted canned and not fresh. The soups began lacking in taste.
I complained on this blog a few times — here, for instance — and sadly stopped patronizing their businesses. I don't want to claim credit but I hope you'll assume that's just me being modest when I mention here that the company that operates Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes has filed for bankruptcy.
The press release says that the Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. plans to close 20-30 of their outlets (they had 124, last I looked) and soldier on. I know how they can succeed. They need to undo whatever it was they did to cheapen their cuisine a few years ago and they need to get the Creamy Tomato Soup into their regular lineup and use the old recipe. But will they listen to me? The Love's Barbecue chain didn't and look where they are today.
According to another article I consulted on this, Garden Fresh is the ninth restaurant operator to file for federal debt protection since November 2015. That's a high number when you consider that Donald Trump is not a restaurant operator.