Today we went to Pasadena, CA, to see my sister, Julie, and two of her kids, Katie and Peter, and to meet for a breakfast buffet at a place called Soup Plantation. I had never been to a Soup Plantation before but Peggy had and stated that she liked eating at the stores she had been to previously.
The drive from Hemet to Pasadena was an uneventful 75 minutes of freeway driving without the usual dreadful L.A. traffic snarls encountered on weekdays. We even beat Julie to the buffet which doesn’t happen very often because she prefers to dine slowly throughout the duration of the service.
Soup Plantation is quite strange in my view. First – there is very little soup available or I am a poor searcher because all I found was some chicken noodle soup and some chili which really isn’t soup. Second – they have an enormous salad bar such that perhaps a better name for the restaurant would be Salad Plantation. Third – they serve virtually no meat. I was able to find some miniscule pieces of some type of sausage in the gravy for biscuits and gravy plus they were offering some kind of scrambled egg dish that had some microscopic pieces of ham mixed into the eggs along with some green shit that was unidentifiable.
There were several types of bready crud like biscuits, some cinnamon nugget thingies, pizza-looking stuff with multi-colored bits of something diced into the top, some terrible french toast, tepid waffles augmented by maple syrup devoid of maple in addition to Jell-O and a sizable bowl of whipped cream. They did have coffee and orange juice but none for Julie because she used a dollar-off coupon. All in all, it was not the type of place I would care to go again.
After a couple hours of being unable to find any decent food within the restaurant, we departed and drove over to my sister Julie’s place which is on Orange Grove Avenue, home to the starting location of the Rose Parade held every New Year’s Day. Clean up from this year’s event is still in progress and some streets are still blocked of despite the parade being history for some nine days. We lounged around at Julie’s condo until about 3:00 PM when we hopped back into Charlotte for another 75 minute drive back to Hemet.
Two suggestions come to mind from today’s exploration: if you really want to eat a good breakfast, don’t go to Soup Plantation and always drive in the L.A. basin on Sunday.