Tables for One: Tomo
Feeling ugly? Go to Tomo!
All kidding aside (and explanation forthcoming), I went to Tomo once, this past summer, on the recommendation of my friends at Takahachi Tribeca. But I was not inclined to give it a review in T4One, because I’d gone on a Friday night, and been surrounded by collegian daters, all rather annoying. I gave it another try last night, because it’s only a few subway stops from home, and I’d decided I needed to treat myself to some sushi to cure my blues after paying a photographer nearly six hundred dollars to try and make me look like a model. (My agency has insisted that I need to cave and get what they call a “comp card.” This is essentially a 4×8 card with several cheeseball photos of a model posing in different outfits, trying to look marketable. Somehow, there’s nothing more depressing than trying to pass yourself off as marketable, based on photos of your face and body in different unreal situations, taken by a guy who’d much rather be shooting Halle Berry for a cover for “Vogue.”)
So after slowly and fitfully beginning to recover my dignity (and my own, more merciful self-image) at home for a couple of hours, I ran to Tomo. And voila, on a Sunday night: much more cozy. Japanese families and friends were occupying some tables, other tables were filled with regulars. I was offered a table even though there were plenty of diners, and a few waiting, which I appreciated. In fact, I was not the only lone diner—there was a very mopey little middle-aged guy who had the table next to me, whining for cutlery and water. If you were to observe us, you would see the do’s and don’ts of dining out alone. He was definitely giving lone diners a bad name. I was cheerful—overjoyed, in fact—to be being served instead of munching taco chips at home with the TV on. My waiters were gracious to me, very accomodating.
All food tastes better when you feel welcome and slightly coddled by the serving staff, but the sushi was perfect “en soi,” as they say. I ordered a miso soup to start, and it came in a nice, wide bowl swimming with wakame seaweed and soft tofu, and tasted as good and wholesome as my own home-made. The set sushi combinations are rather safe (not to say “dull”), the usual tuna, salmon, yellowtail and tuna roll. So I ordered sushi a la carte: two octapus, two squid, salmon roe, flying fish roe, an ume/chiso roll (not too salty, as it is in other places), a salmon skin handroll (this one, rather like a salmon jerky handroll, unfortunately, didn’t measure up to Gari’s), and my favorite as a last, melt-in-your-mouth taste, a cool, creamy sea urchin.
I was still hungry afterwards, so I ordered a vegetable tempura appetizer, which was light as a feather but nevertheless substantial enough. Since I was feeling a little under the weather, I didn’t order saké, but the water comes with a slice of lemon, and is very refreshing. It all came to about $47. That’s what you pay when you prefer a truckload of sushi to one tablet of Xanax, I guess! Still, one has to eat, and one has to cheer up. It was worth it, and I don’t do it every day.
Tomo
2850 Broadway (at 110th street, just outside the uptown 1 subway station)
(212) 665-2916
You can even order online: www.absg.biz/tomo
And if you want to see how models are made, click here.
