This is a simple advisory: if all you care about is making a quick buck and couldn’t give a damn about the quality of the food you serve then you’re well advised to follow Tomo’s example. If, on the other hand, you like well-cooked fare in a comfortable setting then stay well away.
In the lobby of a shiny new office tower called The Cameron, a new all-day café servicing leisure lunch folks has emerged. Unfortunately, that’s about as good as it gets. The diner is divided in two and is separated by the lobby, which means that the food must be carried across a bank of lifts and through a mass of bodies to reach the second dining room. It’s awkward to say the least.
The main dining space itself is airy and casual, filled with plush leather and mass-produced two tops, while the menu is a Chinese adaptation of Western food – which loosely translates to pizzas, pastas, salads, sandwiches and desserts done to suit Asian palates, which is the main clientele here.
First up, our server told us the salads were big enough to share, which seemed possible. The truth was somewhat different. Our mozzarella and tomato salad at $98 would have embarrassed any mozzarella and tomato salad the world over. One cherry tomato split in half, two bocconcini (mini mozzarella balls) also split in half and about ten leaves of tired looking mixed greens covered in a squeeze of pesto (from a tube) sat limply in a small bowl. This is certainly very shareable because after just one bite you’ll be so disgusted, appalled and aggrieved that you won’t want to finish it anyway, and will instead fob it off to someone else. It seemed as though all the ingredients had come from the dead food aisle in the local supermarket.
Now for $128, I’m not expecting the world, but I am looking for something decent; a simple bowl of organic pasta and chopped vegetables perhaps. Chopped baby corn, a stem of broccoli, diced eggplant and squash, all fine and cooked properly but with no taste. Not from the vegetables, nor from the organic linguini. All we tasted was the generous sprinkling of parmesan. The chicken pesto pasta ($88) was a bowl of oil garnished with a small chunk of defrosted chicken which was tossed with what seemed like pre-chopped peppers and more pesto a la tube. But bravo, the pasta was right cooked just right: al dente.
Hours after our meal and we were still wondering how it had cost as much as it did, considering we received nothing but dead leaves and two fistfuls of pasta in a lobby in TST. This is food you would cook on a Tuesday evening after a long day in the office and eat out of a bowl in front of Pearl TV.
Frankly, in such a densely packed dining zone as Tsim Sha Tsui, Tomo doesn’t even warrant a second glance. If you choose to eat here, then you support subpar food at inflated prices.
Angie Wong
Shop 101-102, 1/F, The Cameron, 33 Cameron Rd, Tsim Sha Tsui, 2317 1722. Daily 11am-11pm. Meal for two: $350.