Photogenic Tomacado Kitchen and Florist Opens a Second at WF Central

Photogenic Food at Tomacado Kitchen and Florist's New WF Central Location

Tracy Wang, Senior Editor | Jan 23, 2018 11:20 am | Add a comment | 1264 reads

Imagine you own a restaurant-building-robot. You set the dials to 2018, and it whirs its way through reams of hashtags, separates the influential from the unimportant, and scours foodie blogs before spitting out an avocado-slicked color-splattered ready-formed restaurant. That restaurant would serve healthy brunch options. It would cater to young professionals looking for a photogenic weekday pick-me-up. Its name might even be a portmanteau. And in Beijing, that restaurant would definitely be located in an up-and-coming mall.

Enter Tomacado, a café and florist combination expanding from its first incarnation in Jiaming Center to the trendy mall of the moment, WF Central in Wangfujing.

Tomacado sells the kind of healthy comfort food with an Asian twist that we’ve come to expect from today’s casual-dining restaurants. Avocado and tomato, as the moniker suggests, feature heavily throughout the menu, and the florist at the entrance makes for an attractive background for any serious selfie takers. The formula seems to be working, as the big space was packed with a largely female crowd when we visited on a weekday lunchtime.

The Tomacado honey-baked pumpkin salad (RMB 58) supplies a hefty portion of refreshing and well-seasoned salad, full of color and variety, and including, of course, slices of avocado and cherry tomatoes. With complex carbs from the pumpkin, lots of greenery and a protein hit from the poached egg, this makes for a balanced meal to get you through the afternoon slump.

Our favorite, however, was the osmanthus curry pork cartilage with rice (RMB 78), which is an upgrade on your standard Japanese izakaya’s curried pork with rice bento. Piles of veggies topped the rice, and the pork had been stewed in the osmanthus for hours, giving this simple and hearty dish a serious depth of flavor.

Food for the eyes as well as the belly is a running theme at Tomacado. Their take on Vietnamese-style spring rolls (RMB 78) provided some serious eye-candy, with strawberry, peppermint, and edible flowers balanced on the top of rice and wrapped with see-through rice rolls – unfortunately, these looked better than they tasted and could have done with a bit more seasoning. To continue the florist theme, they sell a dessert called “collagen peptide flower and fruit jelly” which looked like a flower blooming within jelly, although we settled for an equally as floral red velvet Swiss roll, which mixed rose petals into the cream, and made for a satisfactory ending to the meal.