On the face of it, Tomat is an unlikely place for some of the city’s most interesting new California cuisine. Hidden inside a sprawling shopping complex, the four-month-old London-inspired restaurant is located less than a mile away from LAX. A giant tomato decorates the exterior of the three-story building; Tomat derives its name from a childhood nickname coincidentally shared by married owners Harry Posner and Natalie Dial. After dark, the bright red neon sign draws in hungry neighborhood locals and in-the-know diners from across the city hankering for an eclectic, unforgettable combination of global flavors most Angelenos have never seen or tasted before.
While Posner and Dial’s intentions might sound fairly common—they want Tomat to be an upscale neighborhood fixture, worthy of date nights and the like—the painstaking efforts that went into the making of Tomat, along with each meal, reveal a restaurant that is anything but. Five years ago, the couple moved to L.A. from London, abandoning careers in medicine (Posner) and global health (Dial) in order to take advantage of an unmissable lease opportunity in Westchester, where in the late 1940s Dial’s late grandfather started Drollinger Properties, the area’s oldest, largest commercial real estate group (which her mother now presides over today). The couple have pored over every aspect of the fully renovated building, from the open kitchen to the dining room’s pale wood, dark green and burnt-orange color scheme.
Nowhere is this distinction more evident than when I stepped into Tomat’s nearby garden, the Kids’ Lot, where airplanes screech overhead every two to three minutes. With the help of edible landscaper Urban Farms LA, Posner and Dial have completely transformed a former junk-filled parking lot a block away from the LAX In-N-Out. The intoxicating smells of burger and fries cooking hits my nostrils, immediately followed by the unmistakable scent of decomposing organic matter; Tomat composts its coffee grounds and other restaurant-related food waste.
For Dial, whose great-grandmother opened the first supermarket in the area, the combination of restaurant and garden has been a great way to reconnect with her family’s roots and put academic concepts of community health and sustainability into real-life practice. Ultimately, it’s a way to give back to Westchester, which she visited frequently as a child growing up in Missoula, Montana and briefly attended college in. “L.A. often feels like a swath of parking lot,” Dial adds. “We had to do a lot of due diligence to make [the Kids’ Lot] happen, but I’m so glad we did.”
Previously a lifeless expanse of concrete, the garden includes a built-in irrigation system and a miniature greenhouse. Fruiting passionfruit and olallieberry (a type of blackberry) vines cling to the chain link fences that border Melody Bar & Grill, a longtime neighborhood dive. After the recent atmospheric river, many of the plots are lush with greenery, from delicate lettuces to thickets of English peas. Tangles of long, dark green onion leaves sprout plentifully from several planter boxes. I also spot a climbing dragonfruit cactus vine and the fledgling red leaves of a pomegranate tree.
Like many of the city’s best restaurants, Tomat relies on farmers’ market produce and sustainably sourced meat and seafood, which the team dry-ages on site. Similar to Baroo and Sqirl, the couple also ferment their own miso and hot sauce, the latter made with chili peppers grown in Tomat’s garden. But unlike any other place in L.A., Posner (the duo’s culinary lead) distills his British upbringing, Irish culinary training, Persian heritage and Japanese influences into a refreshingly ambitious, ever-improving dinner menu that excites and thrills, even if not every dish hits the bull’s-eye. Recipe tweaks, seasonal changes and weekly menu specials translate into one of the city’s most dynamic new dining destinations.
On my first meal in November, I was impressed by the fluffy, hot “barbari” bread, whose texture more closely resembled focaccia, served with an umami-rich tomato butter. Since then, Posner has begun milling his own whole wheat flour and integrating it into the dough, which has significantly altered the bread’s texture. As a Persian cuisine aficionado, I loved the dry-aged duck, a menu fixture accompanied by a mole sauce loosely inspired by fesenjoon, a traditional Persian stew made with pomegranates and walnuts. A riff on peri-peri chicken, now listed as “turmeric chicken,” will scratch the itch for anyone familiar with Nando’s, the British fast-casual favorite by way of South Africa. The fragrant, saffron-tinged jeweled rice calls to mind Persian tahdig, but the donabe-style steam cooking renders the grains pillowy and soft instead of crunchy.
Two subsequent dinners in January revealed a few more all-around winning dishes. Among them is a family-style British-style beef and bone marrow pie, which Posner livens up with a cornucopia of cumin, turmeric, chili and black pepper. Available only on weekend evenings, it’s usually accompanied by another monthly savory pie special. The one I tried was a creamy, wonderfully chowder-like stargazy pie, named for the traditional British dish with fish heads protruding through the crust. In a rather California fashion, Tomat’s version swaps the fish heads out for those of prawns, but uses the same cream-rich base for a mix of potatoes, snap peas, California steelhead trout, vermillion rockfish and gulf prawns. The ever-changing starters, salads and off-menu specials are where Posner and Dial truly flex their culinary creativity, showcasing English peas picked fresh from Tomat’s garden in a stellar white bean “ajoblanco,” which resembles more of an alternative hummus than a traditional Spanish white gazpacho.
All three visits also featured an assortment of comforting, mostly winning desserts by pastry chef Bex Tilton. An alum of Minh Phan’s now-closed Phenakite and Echo Park’s Bacetti, Tilton is responsible for Tomat’s freshly baked madeleines, a sticky toffee pudding and a delightful saffron ice cream topped with pistachio brittle. During the restaurant’s current daytime service, which runs from 8am to 1pm every day but Monday, Tilton also bakes petite sausage rolls, cookies and a few varieties of croissants. Despite lesser-seen flavorings like yuzu jam, pistachio butter and slices of mango, these daytime offerings came off to me as straightforward, slightly upmarket midday fuel for those who happen to be in the area more than anything else.
At the same time, my return visits have revealed a not-so-insignificant issue in terms of how the current menu is structured in terms of price and portion size. Right now, Tomat’s most interesting dishes tend to run on the larger side, including the weekend-only savory pies, which start at a whopping $95. Posner and Dial have divided the menu into “smaller mains” and “larger mains,” but parties of two will likely either have to forgo ordering more than one or two of the starters, salads and sides if they order any of Tomat’s menu standouts. The steakhouse-portioned sides—the jeweled rice and some heartily cooked roast potatoes with fenugreek among them—would likely overwhelm those dining in pairs.
Other menu items cleverly but clumsily nod to Japanese, Persian, British and L.A. foodways without necessarily hitting the mark in terms of flavor, consistency or technical precision. “Brussels on the cob” draws inspiration from Mexican elote and swaps mayo for corn miso and tahini yogurt, but the end result runs slightly bland. The restaurant’s take on British fish and chips uses a much lighter tempura fry than the traditional and swaps fries for seasonal vegetables, but each component of the dish was slightly soggy on the occasion I ordered it. A vegan-friendly stew made with Rancho Gordo beans—considered the Rolls-Royce of the legume world, if you may—appears to be a riff on ghormeh sabzi. Unlike the complex, herbaceous stew it draws inspiration from, the dish offered plant-based comfort but left no deeper impression than that.
Posner, though talented and highly creative, is still a relative novice when it comes to running the day-to-day of a restaurant kitchen. In between stages of UK-based medical training, he attended Ireland’s prestigious, farm-to-table-focused Ballymaloe Cookery School. Before moving to L.A. in March 2020, he racked up short-term work experiences at the two Michelin-starred Clove Club in London and now-closed Inua in Tokyo. Around that same time frame, both Posner and Dial also worked at a friend’s bakery in northern Italy. During the years-long process of opening Tomat, Posner also worked as a private chef alongside Junya Yamasaki, the Japanese-born chef and fellow London transplant behind Yess in the Arts District. Aside from Dial’s first job at a taco shop in Missoula during high school, the pair have limited formal experience in the restaurant industry.
Even taking that into account, I still appreciate the sheer amount of culinary ambition on display at Tomat, particularly the nearby Kids’ Lot. Though Posner actually sources most of the restaurant’s produce from the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, the restaurant garden still serves as a major source of menu inspiration. “When you go to Ballymaloe, you get indoctrinated,” explains Posner. “There’s no stopping it. You’re on the farm, you’re using ingredients from the farm, and you’re like, ‘This is the best way of cooking, ever.’”
Despite the menu’s occasional shortcomings, the couple’s clear sense of vision and undercurrent of idealism have made Tomat stand out in the increasingly homogenous sea of L.A. restaurant openings, which these days usually fall into one of three categories: Crowd-pleasing (read: boring) dining genres like Italian and high-end sushi; follow-ups from established chefs, hospitality groups and longtime pop-ups; and wine bars serving fairly straightforward bar bites that are somehow now being touted as the best thing since sliced bread.
The restaurant’s emphasis on from-scratch cooking reminds me of Yang’s Kitchen and earlier versions of Baroo, which I never experienced firsthand but have read extensively about. It may take some time for the kitchen to fire on all cylinders, but the menu’s unique mix of cultural influences, combined with Posner and Dial’s laudable commitment to growing their own produce and making almost everything in-house, down to $4 sides of hot sauce, could one day translate into Tomat stepping into the spotlight as the city’s next-gen torchbearer for California cuisine.
In other contexts, “ambitious” can sound like a dirty word, a less cruel synonym for tryhard. But at a time in the L.A. restaurant industry when most chefs and operators are playing it safe, Tomat holds itself to a higher standard in ways that are both discernible on the plate and sometimes not. In other words, the restaurant dares to be bold—and that, alone, is reason enough to buy the ticket and take the ride.
Tomat earned four stars—“very good”—from us. To find out more about Time Out’s curation methods and ethics policies, head to our global “How we review” page.
Tomat
6261 W 87th St, Los Angeles, CA 90045.
Tue 8am–1pm, Wed–Sun 8am–1pm, 5–8:30pm.