London comes to LA’s neighborhood of Westchester with the arrival of Tomat, a new restaurant by husband and wife duo Harry Posner and Natalie Dial. The new all-day establishment currently serves pastries and coffee in the morning, with dinner service commencing on October 30. In the evenings, it will serve a globally-inspired, local-produce-informed dinner in its dining room, plus additional bites and cocktails on the rooftop terrace. “We want to provide awesome meals for the community and be a great place as a meeting spot,” Posner says. “We want to be a central figure in the community.”

Tomat has been in the works since Posner and Dial moved to Westchester from London in 2020. The pair moved back just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic after another restaurant pulled out of the Westchester building they had their eyes on. “We’d planned moving back out here at some point, but not quite yet until this [opportunity],” Posner says. “The whole plan got put on the table. It was now or never.” With the pandemic delays, construction on the three-story building that houses the restaurant took three years, ending in mid-2023.

Posner and Dial always had their eyes on Westchester for a move back to Los Angeles. Dial’s family has lived in the neighborhood for over 90 years, dating back to her great-grandmother. Sandwiched between Playa del Rey, El Segundo, and LAX, Posner and Dial didn’t see any restaurants serving the type of cuisine they wanted to, at the level they wanted to execute. Posner noticed that neighbors especially wished to see farm-fresh produce in local restaurants. The restaurant name comes from a childhood nickname given to both Posner and Dial due to the proclivity of their faces to turn red in the sun.

In the mornings, Tomat serves croissants with chocolate, pistachio, and more, baked in-house on the second floor of the building in a separate pastry kitchen. A menu of Lamill Coffee and tea is also available, including espresso cold brew, seasonal fruit juice, and more. Seating is available in the restaurant’s light-filled ground-floor dining room or up on the lush rooftop.

Tomat will serve a dinner menu that draws on Posner’s Persian heritage, plus his experience at the prestigious Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, the Clove Club in London, and the now-closed Inua in Tokyo. The LA-born chef who moved to the U.K. at a young age is now reinterpreting childhood dishes with a new perspective. “It’s like when you’re thinking, ‘I hated that when I was a kid,’ but you have fond memories of it,” Posner says. “Then when you taste it now, you’re like, this is my favorite thing.”

Small dishes to start the meal include smoky barbari bread with roasted tomato butter, autumnal crudites with a walnut beet dip, chopped cucumbers with mint and koji, and dry-aged raw fish like bluefin tuna served with English mustard. Fried salmon takes inspiration from British fish and chips shops, which often have an off-menu salmon that’s popular among Jewish customers, while the roast duck with pomegranate is a play on fesenjān, a Persian walnut pomegranate stew, with elements of mole mixed in.

“We just want it to make sense to people in the neighborhood and on the plate,” Posner says. “This is delicious food, but it is influenced by our backgrounds, styles, and flavors.” The menu also features a pork chop with apple tomatillo sauce, miso-marinated black cod with Thai-style curry, Rancho Gordo beans with grilled maitake taking on the herbaceous flavors of ghormeh sabzi, tahdig-inspired crispy jeweled rice, and yakitori Brussels sprouts.

For dessert, Tomat serves a classic British-style warm sticky toffee pudding with butterscotch and vanilla gelato, fresh-baked pistachio madeleines, tangerine sorbet, a selection of cheeses, and more. Alongside dinner, Tomat also serves wine and beer, plus cocktails, including three takes on a martini, a Negroni made with Amass gin, and a Manhattan. Non-alcoholic drinks are available by request.

The menu at Tomat will change with the seasons and will be partly informed by Posner and Dial’s garden down the street. Though the garden’s output isn’t large enough to supply all the produce for the restaurant, Posner will use the garden as inspiration for the menu at Tomat. “Even if we’re not fully stocking the restaurant with stuff from our garden, we’ll know what will be coming in six, seven months, just from what we’re planning on growing there,” he says.

After four years in the making, Posner is most excited about having regulars from the community at the restaurant and introducing what they have to offer to first-timers. “We want to have people come in and be like, ‘I had no idea that Westchester was where LAX is, but, wow, there’s a place to go eat there.’”

Tomat is located at 6261 W. 87th Street, Los Angeles, California 90045. It is open every day from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. for coffee and pastries and opens at 5 p.m. on Wednesday through Sunday for dinner in the dining room and drinks on the terrace.