This Tiny L.A. Restaurant Turned a Former Parking Lot Into Its Secret Ingredient and the Menu Is Better for It
A few blocks from LAX, a Westchester restaurant is making a convincing case that the freshest thing on the menu should not come from a delivery truck. Tomat, a modern Californian restaurant founded by Natalie Dial and chef Harry Posner, grows seasonal vegetables, herbs, and fruit in a nearby urban garden, then lets that harvest shape what diners see on the plate.
It is a small but unusually ambitious idea for a neighborhood spot: Take a former parking lot, remove the concrete, build an edible garden, and connect its changing harvest to a restaurant menu that moves with the seasons. The result is not a farm-to-table slogan pasted onto a menu. At Tomat, the garden is part of the restaurant’s operating rhythm, influencing the dishes, the seasonal shifts, and the broader effort to make a dining room near one of the world’s busiest airports feel rooted in its own corner of Los Angeles.
A Garden Grows Where Cars Once Parked
Tomat opened in 2024 in Westchester, the L.A. neighborhood near Los Angeles International Airport, as an all-day restaurant with pastries, coffee, lunch, dinner, drinks, a rooftop terrace, and private-event space. But its most intriguing feature is not inside the three-story building. The restaurant’s urban garden sits a few blocks away, turning a piece of nearby land into a working source of produce for the kitchen.
Harry Posner and Natalie Dial worked with Solis Gardens, formerly known as Urban Farms LA, to transform a disused parking lot into a productive garden. The project removed 4,000 square feet of concrete and remediated the site for edible growing, with seasonal vegetables, fruit trees, and herbs now part of the landscape. The stated goal goes beyond supplying the kitchen: the team says the conversion is intended to improve habitat for native birds and insects while helping replenish the water table below.
That is a notably different visual from the restaurant’s surroundings. Tomat is close enough to LAX that airplane noise is part of the neighborhood’s daily soundtrack, and Time Out reported that planes pass over the nearby garden every few minutes. The garden itself occupies an unexpected stretch near the LAX In-N-Out, which makes its rows of edible plants feel less like a romantic countryside postcard and more like a very Los Angeles answer to what local food can look like.
The restaurant’s name has its own personal backstory. Time Out reported that “Tomat” was a childhood nickname shared by the married owners, whose professional lives previously took very different forms: Posner worked in medicine, while Dial worked in global health. Their restaurant is now a meeting point for food, hospitality, community, and a localized version of sustainability that is visible rather than theoretical.
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The Menu Lets the Harvest Call the Shots
Tomat describes itself as a modern Californian farm-to-table restaurant, but its approach ties itself deliberately to seasonality rather than a static list of signature dishes. Its official site says the breakfast, lunch, dinner, pastry, wine, and cocktail offerings are “shaped by local produce and our urban garden,” while the restaurant’s menus follow California’s seasons.
That means the garden is not merely decorative landscaping for guests to admire. Reporting by the Los Angeles Times found that Tomat’s menu is partially guided by the garden and that the restaurant aims to source as locally as possible, “sometimes even pulling from the restaurant’s own garden.” For diners, that can translate into a meal that reflects what is actually growing nearby rather than what can be shipped in year-round.
The kitchen’s point of view is also broader than a straightforward California-cuisine label might suggest. The Los Angeles Times reported that Posner blends British and California influences, while a later profile described his menu as drawing on his British upbringing, Irish culinary training, Persian heritage, and experiences baking in Italy and cooking in Tokyo. One example the paper highlighted is barbari bread paired with roasted tomato butter, a dish that connects Persian influence with a produce-forward California sensibility.
The local focus does not mean the food is presented as austere or overly precious. Tomat operates as a daytime café and bakery, then transitions into a more composed dinner destination. In its profile of the restaurant, the Los Angeles Times noted that pastry chef Bex Tilton was brought in to lead the pastry program, offering items including Danishes, croissants, and sausage rolls shaped by the freshest seasonal produce available.
Why This Is More Than a Cute Farm-to-Table Story
Los Angeles has no shortage of restaurants that cite local sourcing, farmers’ markets, and seasonal cooking. Tomat’s distinction is its unusually close relationship between the garden and the kitchen. The restaurant is working with a physical piece of land in its own neighborhood, and the project invites diners to think of fresh produce not as an abstract virtue but as something grown a short distance from where it is served.
The Los Angeles Times described Tomat as a business that uses vegetables from its urban garden and aims for near-zero waste, linking the model to both climate considerations and lower food costs.  That does not mean every ingredient on every plate comes from the garden, nor does Tomat claim that it does. The restaurant’s own description says its food is shaped by local produce and the urban garden, while outside reporting characterizes the menu as partially guided by what the garden yields.
Still, that distinction may be exactly what makes the project credible. A small garden cannot supply every need of a full-service restaurant, especially one offering pastries, daytime service, dinner, cocktails, and events. But it can influence how a kitchen thinks: what gets planted, what gets preserved, how dishes shift, and which ingredients become the stars when they are at their best. Tomat’s owners have spoken about the discipline of learning what a garden can realistically grow and consume, with one stated principle being to “plan six months ahead.”
For Westchester, the restaurant also brings a little surprise to a part of Los Angeles that is too often treated as a place to pass through on the way to a terminal. Tomat sits at 6261 W. 87th Street and currently serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner from Wednesday through Sunday, with weekend all-day service. Its story is ultimately simple: a former parking lot now grows food, a nearby kitchen makes room for that food to lead, and diners get a more specific sense of place with every seasonal change.
