When I was a kid, I absolutely adored Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes, those sprawling soup-and-salad buffets where, for a certain kind of child (me), the prospect of choosing from several enormous vats of soup constituted a genuinely thrilling night out.
I did, however, have one complaint: I always thought the selection of soup toppings was a little lacking. There was an entire salad bar’s worth of crunchy, salty, fresh and otherwise interesting things just a few feet away. Why weren’t more of them invited to the soup party? Eventually, I began making little trips between the two, returning to my bowl with whatever seemed promising.
