L.A.'s Most Interesting New Restaurant is a Mile Away from LAX

There's much to talk about Tomat, a delicious, ambitious neighborhood restaurant in Westchester

Photographs by David Gurzhiev

Harry Posner and Natalie Dial.

The story of Tomat is not your typical restaurant story, not that there is a typical restaurant story. But here’s what makes it particularly unique. For one, it’s owned by Harry Posner and Natalie Dial, a married couple who met in The Gambia while working as an MD and Doctor of Public Health, respectively, and eventually found their way into running a restaurant. Secondly, it’s located five minutes away from LAX, occupying two floors and a rooftop in Westchester, not exactly where one would expect an ambitious new restaurant to land. Third, Tomat cuts no culinary corners.

Since late October, Tomat has been humming within a snaking strip mall anchored by a giant parking lot. The glass-walled restaurant is accented with forest green tiles, burnt-orange leather seats, and blonde wood tables, and sits beside an independent bookstore, behind a Staples, and just around the bend from Ayara Thai, Westchester’s best-known restaurant. In the mornings, Tomat serves coffee alongside pastry chef Bex Tilton’s fruit danishes, sausage rolls, and miso chocolate chip cookies. In the evening, they dish crudo, salads, seasonal sides, locally caught ike-jime fish, West Coast-raised meat, warm madeleines, and sticky toffee pudding. When I went for dinner in December, I was pleasantly impressed by a hunk of hot, fluffy Barbari bread smeared with roasted tomato butter, the tender fried Mt. Lassen trout and “chips” paired with briny herb tartar, and a juicy bone-in Peads & Barnetts ribeye served with fennel slaw.

The Barbari is a nod to Posner’s Persian mother, while the fish and chips are inspired by the Ashkenazi preference for salmon, offered off-menu at London’s Jewish-owned chip shops in place of haddock. As for the pork, Peads & Barnetts’ pigs are of the British Berkshire breed, and thus not unlike the meat his English father would have sourced for his family’s dinner table growing up. Posner was born in L.A. but raised in rural England, where his parents moved their young family to live a country life, raising chickens, tending fruit trees, and growing vegetables. His paternal grandparents were greengrocers in London, while his maternal grandparents in Iran butchered their own lamb and made their own alcohol. Such an ancestry and upbringing made it so that Posner remained passionate about food even after pursuing a career as a doctor. In 2019, he took a break from medicine and enrolled at Ballymaloe, a cookery school in Ireland famous for its holistic, farm-forward approach and alumni of cult-favorite chefs, including

Clare de Boer

(Stissing House, New York) and Max Rocha (Cafe Cecilia, London).

Meanwhile, he and Dial, living in London then, considered moving back to L.A., where her family has roots in Westchester. In the 1940s, Dial’s great-grandmother started a real estate company, passed down to her grandfather and then to her mother, who purchased the building now occupied by Tomat in 2017. When the previous prospective restaurant tenant pulled out in the summer of 2019, Posner and Dial took the opportunity to settle down in Los Angeles and open a restaurant. “Both my parents are from Westchester, and it’s gone through so many iterations. [There used to be a lot of] mom-and-pop shops, and it was very pedestrianized and walkable. Then in the ‘80s, a lot of big box places came in, and it kind of went through an identity crisis,” Dial says. “So many people just associate Westchester with being near LAX and think it’s not really worth stopping by.”

Dry-aging fish.

The adjacent El Segundo community of Surfridge was bought out by LAX in the ‘60s, bulldozed in 1975 to make room for the airport’s expansion, and then turned into the El Segundo Blue Butterfly Preserve once it was realized that the area was home to an endangered species of butterfly. The emptying out of the coastal development catalyzed a transformation of Westchester, forcing local businesses and restaurants to close in response to the exodus. Today, with the recent revival of Playa Vista as a tech hub and a rise in home purchases throughout the area during the pandemic, Posner and Dial maintain that a “village-y” mentality has resurfaced in Westchester, driven by high-earning families in need of quality neighborhood restaurants to dine at. “That’s where we wanted to come in,” says Posner.

When the couple attended a neighborhood council meeting to announce their application for a liquor license, often a contemptuous hearing for restaurateurs looking to serve alcohol, locals were thrilled to learn of Tomat. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh my god,’ we go anywhere except Westchester to eat. We go to El Segundo, we go to Culver, Manhattan Beach, Venice. There’s just nothing here for, they called it a ‘date night spot,’” says Dial. “We wanted to create somewhere you could dress up for and have a great cocktail, not just wine. We love having families, too. Kids are always welcome.”

Between receiving the keys and opening the doors to Tomat, a project that became five years in the making, Posner and Dial had a daughter and started a family of their own. Although they were held back by COVID-related delays and bureaucratic red tape, in the end, they were able to create their dream restaurant, with an open kitchen flanked by a custom live fire grill, a second pastry kitchen, a dedicated event space, and a rooftop where they could grow native plants and entertain guests with a front-row view of planes flying in and out of LAX. They cultivated trusted relationships with farmers, fishermen, and ranchers to source superb local ingredients, a tenet of many of L.A.’s best restaurants. And they built out systems for dry-aging fish and meat, crafting pastry from scratch, and fermenting garums, misos, and sauces in-house—all pillars to their program that are decidedly less common in kitchens across town. Furthermore, they planted a 4,000-square-foot garden in collaboration with Urban Farms LA, which is currently yielding passionfruit, Fenugreek, turnips, wasabi radishes, and turmeric.

Behind-the-scenes of Tomat’s back-of-house.

Before she met Posner on that fateful research trip to West Africa, Dial grew up in rural Montana in a family that hunted elk and antelope, then moved to San Francisco, where she fell in love with food from all different cultures. In The Gambia, a trip to the local fish market to buy tiger prawns and make mackerel sashimi was a pivotal early memory in her and Posner’s relationship. “It was super fresh, it was caught that day, but using the bluntest of knives in the student-shared kitchen was… sketchy,” he recalls. “It was sketchy and adventurous and hilarious, and I was like, ‘Yes, this person. I like him,’” she adds. They only had English mustard on hand, no wasabi, but it worked (as a result, you’ll sometimes see raw fish paired with hot mustard on the menu at Tomat). In the following years, they met up in various cities, traveling to New York, Japan, San Sebastián, and Israel, with eating as a focus. “It was always our eventual plan to go into food and do something different than what we were doing, be our own bosses, and create our own world in that way,” Dial says.

Tomat’s ceramic fermentation pots are coincidentally made in Montana.

Tomat bills itself as a California farm-to-table restaurant. In reality, they’re pulling from so many different directions, all personal, which is why it works. For example, the winter lettuces are tossed in a roasted yeast dressing inspired by the hippie health food store in Dial’s Montana hometown. As a chef, Posner’s influences span his Persian and Jewish heritage, English classics like brandied prunes and meat pies a la St. JOHN (a restaurant his father once dined at weekly), Basque wood-fired cooking, and techniques he picked up during a brief stint in Japan. The “chips” in his Ashkenazi fish and chips are comprised of Japanese sweet potatoes, broccolini, and shiitake mushrooms in place of russets or Yukon Golds, battered in rice flour and Seafarer Kolsch from Three Weavers Brewing Company in Inglewood, then fried like tempura. The most important driving force of Tomat’s ever-changing menu is the market. Recent thrills have included Cara Cara oranges from K & K Ranch, Garcia Organic mangoes, and Rosalba chicories from The Garden Of.

Their shared thirst for adventure and knack for fermentation, spurred by backgrounds in science, converts into blatant ambition within Tomat’s kitchen. Posner’s flavor arsenal includes a pungent, deep-ocean uni garum and five gallons of kanzuri, a chili paste fermented with koji meant to age for two years. Currently, on the dinner menu, he’s offering 2 Peas In A Pod Brussels sprouts brushed with housemade corn miso, sprinkled with an elotes-inspired spice mix, and served on the cob. While these techniques might seem more suited to the back-of-house at Noma than a Westchester neighborhood restaurant, Tomat knows who they’re catering to. For Posner and Dial, bridging the gap between their own creative fulfillment and providing comfort to their guests is the ultimate goal.

A wine education map for staff set up inside the second-floor event space.

They’re learning as they go. A Japanese sweet potato ice cream, which I adored, was not very popular amongst guests, nor were any dishes starring lamb. Duck, however—dry-aged with saffron, pomegranate, and walnut—has been a hit. An XO sauce Posner made using whelk, a sea snail commonly found on European seafood towers, didn’t go over well when listed on the menu. Then he started incorporating it into Tomat’s weekend-only savory pies. “It adds the most amazing flavor, and everyone’s like, ‘What is in this?!’” he says. Three months in, Tomat is already gelling with Westchester. They count regulars who come in every morning for pastries and once a week for dinner.

Westchester will continue to transform in the coming years. This summer, the Staples building in front of Tomat will be demolished to accommodate a six-story assisted-living facility, and another seven-story mixed-use retail and apartment building will break ground behind the restaurant. The construction, Dial notes, will be a massive interruption. Still, they’re excited about the long-term benefits to the neighborhood, which has been historically zoned for single-family homes. “Westchester has a particularly strong business district and very deep community engagement,” says Dial. “So far, we’ve found that the community has really shown up for us. And when guests align with what we care about—good farming practices, quality produce grown in and around L.A., and really delicious food—this certainly becomes a meaningful pursuit for us.”

What pushes Tomat’s potential beyond a beloved neighborhood restaurant is its proximity to LAX, the portal from which most of us leave and re-enter Los Angeles. On the way to the airport for a morning flight? A good start to a dreadful travel day would be a cappuccino and a croissant from Tomat. Just landed, starving, and in need of a delicious meal? In ten minutes, you can be tucked into a two-top at Tomat with a martini on the way.