I contemplated not posting this out of sheer embarrassment at actually having paid for the meal, but then I realized I would be doing my fellow Sacramentans a disservice. Fresh Choice was always a family favorite of ours, since our oldest child was a baby. We actually visited Fresh Choice the day after it closed its doors, and were really bummed for a few weeks. Our spirits were lifted this week when Cathie Anderson posted about the new restaurant California Fresh rising from the ashes of Fresh Choice. Tonight we decided to dine there on a whim. And, well, I’d write what happened next but then I found what Ali T. had to say on Yelp and I’ll just let the dude run with it because he said it all very well.
Did you ever have the chance to prepare your own salad in post-war Soviet Russia? Yeah, me neither, but the “new” California Fresh gives you the chance to feel like you did.
Read Ali T’s review before you visit California Fresh, and then don’t actually go there at least until Cathie says it’s safe to go back. Or who am I kidding, I won’t remember that I wrote this and I’ll be back in a few months to let you know if they have something besides green beans in the pasta section. THIS IS NOT A JOKE IT WAS LITERALLY JUST MAC N’ CHEESE AND GREEN BEANS OVER THERE. I’m hoping that they’ll get the cash flow going and be able to get back to where they were a few weeks ago.
The Sac Rag 
I’m freaking out a little here because this is the first I’d heard about Fresh Choice closing. It’s (well, now -was-) a reliable Plan B fallback sure to please the kids while causing minimal offense to the parents. The world is not the same any longer. (Anyone want a half-stamped Fresh Choice frequent eater rewards card?)
LikeLike
I’m hopeful that it will come back to what it was. It seems like they should not have opened the new restaurant yet, or at least not charged the old prices without anything approximating the old menu. 😦
LikeLike
I thought California Fresh was the new name for food stamps. So now foodstamps has a restaurant?
LikeLike
@cogmeyer –
Technically it would be called California Fresh, but what you’re referring to is called CalFresh. http://www.calfresh.ca.gov/
LikeLike
The place went from bad to worse once Boyd got his claws into an already failing concept. Boyd had no idea how to run a restaurant when he had the great idea to buy Fresh Choice from Cedar Lane. Boyd cut the labor down to having the manager run the register for most if not all of their shift giving them no room to check on food quality or check tables. Each location turned into a crap whole from equipment failures to just plain dirt build up everywhere you looked. No crew to clean or take care of customers, bad customer service. The food, OMG, is horrible. Most of the soups were frozen for days then reheated to save money. They certainly saved money and chased away those who grew up with fresh food. Boyd if you want to do it the right way re-model one location, hire the proper amount of crew, make food fresh, and support operations 100 percent. This is called building the four walls before you expand.
LikeLike
Is the new welfare program for food stamps-CA Fresh? They have a restraurant??
LikeLike