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| - MTO Cafe is a sight for sore downtown eyes. Anything original that falls outside the orbit of Freemont east and The Downtown Project is to be hailed out of the gate, and the good news is that MTO offers a fun menu, an inviting space, and cheerful service. Bonus points for mobile charging stations in the booths, a bottomless mimosa brunch, local delivery, special event suppers, vegan options, etch-a-sketches for kids, and a kitchen that likes to mix things up. These cats are hitting many right notes, and I'm happy to keep returning and supporting.
But there's a "but." It's small "but" but it's crucial and can be summed up with the following moral principle (which I think comes from Psalms, and say it with me): A Tomato is a Privilege, Not a Right. MTO touts itself as the place to get "fresh comfort food." It's a solid concept. People love diner fare like skillets and pancakes. People also love the idea of garden fresh ingredients. MTO has both! Together! Fried potatoes and eggs WITH ARUGULA! Pancakes WITH FRESH BERRIES! Montague, meet Capulet.
But then the plates arrive, several times in a row now, and there they are. Three desperate slices of roma tomato that have no earthly reason for existing. Three pale pink, dry, mealy, insipid round disks that make a mockery of the whole "fresh ingredients" concept. It's a larger and more generally disturbing societal trend, this habituated tastelessness, but it's particularly glaring at a place that hangs its hat on the notion of seasonality. A tomato, say it with me once again, is a privilege. It grows for a few months in the summer, arrives in our kitchens bursting with the juice of sun beams, and merely asks to be sliced thick and dressed with some sea salt and cracked pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Torn fresh basil if you have it. When you taste it you taste the earth and the sky while nymphs play the fiddle and dance. It is a near-sacred experience that we get to enjoy for a short time each summer, and then we pack away our longings until next year. We accept a life without tomatoes for the better part of the year. We ignore those crunchy, gassed-up grocery store imitations from Mexico. We hold out, we say "no," because we understand that proper tomatoes are worth the wait.
The existence of the pale, crunchy roma tomato is our collective failure as a consuming public. We should be better than this. We should all think we deserve better, because we do. The MTO kitchen staff can't fully be blamed for this sad culinary ritual, because apparently we have all of us simultaneously fallen asleep at the tomato wheel. But a restaurant that prides itself on fresh ingredients and seasonality should have a finer sense of what counts as fresh, and what doesn't, and if these pale pink impostors can sneak under the kitchen's radar then one's confidence is a little shaken. Don't settle for what your customers settle for, MTO. Not everything is fresh all the time. I'd happily settle for roasted red peppers, or pretty much anything pickled. Or simply nothing at all, which would be better than negative-tomato.
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