The Tomato Tragedy

Tomatoes are a sublime food with many passionate fans. Lynne Rosetto Kasper has called them the force behind America’s love affair with Italian food. But face it, how many restaurant tomatoes have you eaten that are tasteless, hard, or otherwise inferior? Maybe 80 percent? And the ratio of good to bad restaurant tomatoes worsens each year for some reason.

The harsh reality is that there is no such thing as a good winter tomato. Yet they appear everywhere—in Caprese salad, sliced in club sandwiches, or with raw onions at steak houses. The number of restaurants serving substandard tomatoes year-round is insulting.

Tomatoes are one of our hardest-to-grow, most easily damaged, highly seasonal foodstuffs with a short shelf life, yet we use them in many more dishes than more robust produce, such as broccoli, mushrooms, or squash. We won’t put up with mealy, bruised, rotting apples, but we scarf down hard, tasteless, pale-pink tomatoes. (In Italy, raw tomatoes are a seasonal item, period. They ain’t serving greenish disks of tomato on Capri at Christmas.)

Tomatoes are at their peak only when ripened on the vine and hand-picked. But most restaurant tomatoes are chosen from more predominant species that are picked green and gassed to ripen. They are bred for thick skins (tougher to bruise) and long shelf lives. There aren’t enough local farmers to service local restaurants, even in July and August. That’s why most restaurants buy mass-produced tomatoes even when vine-ripened tomatoes are in season.

Only in our own gardens and in a handful of ingredient-driven restaurants will you find great tomatoes. Why would restaurants serve anything less? Chains, small restaurant groups, larger-scale restaurants (100 seats and up), and mom-and-pop cafés are beholden to preprinted menus and customer expectations of year-round BLTs and Greek salads. (Maybe we’d rather have bad tomatoes than none at all?)

All these types of restaurants use suppliers such as U. S. Foodservice and Sysco, which offer everything from cleaning supplies to chickens. They do a tremendous service for their clients, and they have a lot of leverage. Smaller restaurants are offered substantial discounts for doing most or all of their business with the supplier—a savings that can save “several percent on your food cost alone,” according to Mission American Kitchen & Bar’s Jordan Smith.

“You get great prices, but sometimes you also get really bad product,” Smith explains. “I saw today that a case of slicing tomatoes was $42, and that’s for a gassed tomato.” According to partner Anoush Ansari, the volatility of quality, price, and availability dictate that they buy tomatoes from multiple sources, since tomatoes are a mainstay of the Mediterranean menus of Hemisphere Restaurant Partners—their restaurant group, which includes Atlas Grill, Kabobi, and Good to Go. Even then, great tomatoes are not necessarily readily available.

For a few weeks a year, Smith buys from local farmers who sell a crate of handpacked vine-ripened tomatoes for $12, but it’s hype that most chefs are buying from local family farms.

Thanks to modern science, tomatoes look good, taste crappy, and get served anyway. Many restaurant kitchens don’t even taste what they serve. Next time you’re in a restaurant with an exposed kitchen, count the number of plates that emerge without anyone sticking a spoon in them.

Sadly, the prevalence of substandard ingredients will only spread as the commercialization of organic and natural produce reaches fever pitch. Mass production isn’t always the solution.