Fresh Choice Restaurant

CLOSED!!! Didn’t pay lease!!!

The food is getting better, but the service is getting worse. Checking out is slow and the management invents rules about coupons, discounts and loyalty cards as they go along. Food is inconsistent. One week very good, the next week, not so good.
We come here only when we can’t make it to another location.

All the makin’s for a a complete huge @$$ meal!
Salad bar
Pasta bar
Soup bar
Bread bar
Desert bar
…bar none
Place can definitely use more lighting.

The food is good but the dining area needs more lights. For this reason I am happy that they offer you to have it to go.

Super small location compared to the one in Mountain View. They’re both on the same street, probably like 4 – 6 miles apart from each other. So it’s worth it to drive a few more miles for better selection.
I can’t emphasize how tiny this place is. You’ll probably regret it when you walk through their doors.
It totally sucks that it’s small because this one is so much closer to me where I could walk here. Dang it!

My least favorite Fresh Choice location.
They staff is friendly enough, but this location doesn’t have as much variety as the others. Plus the hot food isn’t hot enough and they seem to really scrimp on ingredients. For instance, the spaghetti with meat sauce had a very very light sprinkling of meat on the very top and that was it. The phở broth wasn’t hot at a ll.
With other Fresh Choice locations to go to, I won’t be back to this one.

Usually good variety especially at the salad bar. The food is generally fresh. The atmosphere inside is a bit depressing; they could do with better lighting inside

What have you done to yourself in the past year since my last visit?
I love to build myself a big salad and I could still do that, but some of the more expensive toppings, including bleu cheese crumbles were no longer available. It also appeared that there were more prepared salads, but even those seemed somehow diminished. Isn’t Chinese Chicken Salad supposed to have at least a molecule of chicken in it?
The soups were watery and not even tepid. The pastas were so repulsive and dried out looking I didn’t even make an attempt to try any. The lovely baked yams were no longer being offered. It was 12 noon and the 2 types of breads available were already stale tasting. There were always a variety of muffins to select from, including some lowfat options, now it was a corn muffin or blueberry muffin. The pizza was ice cold and was so horrible that I couldn’t even swallow the one bite I took. I didn’t have any of the dessert items, but I did notice that those individuals choosing a soft– serve yogurt cone had a river of milk running down their hands even before they returned to their tables.
I hate wasting food, but far more food stayed on my plate then was consumed. Fresh Choice, you may think you are doing the consumer a favor by not raising your prices, but it is at the expense of food quality which doesn’t fly with me.

Manager is very friendly and helpful.
Salads are fresh and salad bar is always well-​stocked. Dining room is clean.
Great to-​go salad deal currently.

Boy oh boy has this place gotten bad!!! I don’t even know where to begin. This used to be one of our favorite places to go! The restaurant was dingy and dank with no air conditioning. It was just gross. To top it off, there were FLIES hovering near the soup area.
I went for the salad which was watery and tasteless and my daughter wanted the pizza. Well guess what? There was no pizza and the servers or «cooks» behind the counter were just standing around. I asked if they were going to have pizza ready and the guy just kind of shrugged. We waited for about 20 minutes, finally gave up and settled for some stale bread. Nice… 20 bucks for some bread and watery salad… ugh.
Not only was the restaurant grubby, a woman came in with her dog and tied it a chair next to where we were sitting right smack in the center of the dining room. The employees all looked uncomfortable but no one would tell her she had to take her dog out. She came back to the table and asked me in a defensive manner if I had a problem with the dog next to us. I felt so sorry for the little guy shivering and cowering under the table and came to the obvious conclusion that this was no service dog. At this point, we just left.

I used to love Fresh Choice back in the day, but the food quality has gone way down.
The salad bar seems fine I guess, but my old favorite (fettuccine chicken noodle soup) was bland, gummy and tasteless. The mac and cheese only resembles mac and cheese. It tastes like nothing. The baked potatoes are tiny. Even the corn muffins aren’t good anymore.
Maybe I’ll find redemption over at the dessert area. Nope. The soft serve was fine, but the fruit salad looked and tasted like the frozen stuff from a bag.
I think I’ll try Sweet Tomatoes next time I want this type of meal.

I came here for a co-worker’s birthday lunch. This place was not busy at all when we got here. The produce was fresh soups were ok. There was not much selections as the other locations I’ve been to. What was funny here too was the staff here was celebrating one of their employee’s birthdays here as well. They didn’t have food from there own establishment. They had outside food brought in from another restaurant and ate it in front of dining patrons. So much for endorsing your own restaurant.

Wow, the food quality has gone way down recently. Use to eat here frequently (yes, it is a sad statement of my dietary choice). The salads are still good, but my friend was noticing where ever there use to be a salad ingredient, it was now occupied by tortilla chips (but no salsa). The pizza … well, unless you are 5 years old, nobody else is going to say «lets go to Fresh Choice for pizza!» Today’s pizza was barely warm. Mac’n Cheese — this gets a ZERO. It was orange colored like it had cheese, but no cheese taste at all! All you could taste was overcooked pasta. Now to the real tragedy — the clam chowder. It use to be rich tasting, like there was cream and/​or butter used. Today, very starchy and no clam taste at all. I had to double check to see if I had gotten the potato soup by mistake. Nope.
Pluses — salads still okay, but the number of ingredient choices are slowly declining. Clean. Inexpensive with $ 6.99 coupon.
Minuses — Food quality declining. Orange slices the only fruit choice.
They haven’t messed with the ice cream, yet. If they do …

Stale Choice…
My visit for an early dinner started well. Piling the salad high & deep, I garbanzoed the heck out of my plate-​still warm from the wash I might add.
My return for the ceremonial breadstick with honeyed_​butter, however, crusted my spirits. I discovered film over soups, beads of sweat from the butters, and some mean-​spirited spirit had put 3 day old pizza out.
I would choose a location with more motivated owners for future consuming.

NEVER AGAIN! Its so GROSS! GO to a different location-​trust me ;)!
Its cheap but the food was so gross. I’m not sure if its an everyday thing or did I perhaps go eat on the wrong day. My boyfriend and I decided to go somewhere that’s healthy so we decided to go here for a change. Boy was that a mistake and waste of money! The only thing there that was ok was the pizza but still If i wanted pizza of course I would have gone somewhere else. The salad was all old my usual favorite is the Chinese chicken salad where I once had it at the Fresh Choice in Cupertino (its clean and good there). Everything here was old and the restaurant looked run down and dark. Ewwwwwww!

I had to do a double take — why did this place get such bad reviews?!
I’m a huge salad lover and this was one of the cleanest Fresh Choice spots I’ve been to. Not to mention, the nicest staff.
The veggies were all fresh and crisp, and they had the same options as any other FC, but seems to have a little more to choose from. Pizza/​breads were warm, soups and pastas were pretty good, fruits were good and had a lot to choose from.
The whole time we were there, someone was always cleaning up tables and sweeping the floor. Maybe it just depends on what time you get here (we were here a little after lunch, so it wasn’t crowded). We had a great experience and glad to finally find a «clean» FC location. The one at Valco is always dirty, and the workers seem to hate it there. Sweet Tomato is slowly sinking, as far as freshness goes. This is by far our favorite so we’ll be coming back.

After trying Sweet Tomatoes, Fresh Choice is a real let down. The soups aren’t as good and neither are the food options. Although similar in concept, Fresh Choice ironically is not as fresh as Sweet Tomatoes.

First, the good things:
— The salad itself is fairly fresh with a decent variety of ingredients
— The soft serve is pretty tasty and doesn’t have an aftertaste like many do.
— The pizza was passable, and had an ok flavorful sauce.
Unfortunately those were the only good things about our visit.
— The soups tasted like they were diluted — thin and weak flavored
— Everything was lukewarm at best, the potatoes were cold
— The bread was stale and hard as a rock.
— The syrup had completely run out on the Sierra Mist, and it just put out city water tasting fizzy water
— The whole restaurant felt old and decrepit
— There was a cockroach hanging out near the soup.
BLAH. Completely fail. Especially for $ 10 a person, this is not a bargain, I’d be happier eating at McDonald’s. The San Mateo Fresh Choice is not bad and a pleasant place to eat, but this one in Sunnyvale fails really hard at having fresh good tasting food. I walked out and said, «Sad Panda Choice.»

OK place to take the kids or for a quick bite. As has been noted, this place is kind of small and hasn’t been updated since the 80s. The quality of the food largely depends when you are there. We usually go around 7 PM and things seem to be in pretty good shape.
Avoid sitting near larger groups, especially those who look like they have camped out for the week. They tend to generate a lot of back and forth traffic which can get annoying. Also, leave a buck or two for the poor folks who are cleaning up all your dishes.

I like Fresh Choice, but I don’t plan on coming back to this one.
I visited around 8pm when they close at 9pm so that could’ve been why things were out of order, but here it goes
— mess around the restaurant, bottle caps and random stuff all over the ground. Someone came to clean the table next to ours, but apparently did not see the paper napkins left on the ground.
— Ice cream machine out of order and they had no more pizza. Out of order? When I pay at the cash register before going in, I’m paying the amount expecting there would be pizza and ice cream.
— the tables were all over the place from customers moving them around. It just seemed like workers could’ve done better to pep this place up.
— lighting of the restaurant was dim, but maybe that’s their intention.
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