Remembering Sweet Tomatoes
An ode to our family's favorite buffet restaurant in honor of National Buffet Day.
On the east side of the I-17 Freeway in North Central Phoenix, the deserted Sweet Tomatoes building still stands, housing only memories of meals past.
Before it was abruptly shut down in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was one of our family’s favorite places. We started eating there as a family nearly16 years ago, when our oldest was an infant enjoying mashed sweet potatoes.
We moved through many stages of Sweet Tomatoes in the years that followed, from walking through the salad bar line with an infant carrier, to maneuvering multiple plates and trays with my husband and I filling them with developmentally appropriate foods while accompanied by little ones too short to see what their choices were to when to where we were three years ago, when they filled and carried their own trays and filled their own drinks.
We started off at the location off of Camelback Road in Central Phoenix and when that one closed, we moved to the North Central Phoenix location, although sometimes we at the Scottsdale one when meeting my husband’s grandparents on that side of town and sometimes visited the Desert Ridge location and even occasionally the Tempe restaurant, which was the location closest to my dad’s house.
Each restaurant had pretty much the same offerings, though the prepared salads and soups went through rotations and some were seasonal and we all had our favorites. One of the fun things for the kids was dessert was always guaranteed, which wasn’t always the cases in other restaurants we frequented. (And one thing we as parents appreciated was all the healthy options that they filled their plates with for the meal.) For me personally, a buffet is my favorite kind of meal because I don’t have to narrow down my choices of what I want to try.
The restaurant also represents one of the many lessons we learned from the pandemic, namely you shouldn’t take anything for granted. Who would have thought the last time we ate dinner at Sweet Tomatoes that not only would that be our last time but that three months later the company would permanently shut all 97 of their locations, leaving 4,400 people out of work?
Thank you to all the employees at Sweet Tomatoes that made it such a wonderful place for our family through the years.
(National Buffet Day is Jan. 2.)