TOMATO., 4th Street, Casco Viejo, Panama

Rotten Tomato

TOMATO is the latest in casual Casco Viejo eateries. Interestingly, TOMATO is a chain. I saw another one in Albrook Mall, of all places. TOMATO: Soups, sandwiches and salads, I think the sign said. The sign on the new Casco Viejo locale just says TOMATO, in large, red block-letters. The name simple, and somehow modern. Tomato, one thinks, fresh, simple, essential.

We tried the door. To our utter dismay it was locked. One of us motions to try the other door when we hear the first door unlock, we are ushered in.

There is no one else inside.

Not knowing whether to sit and order or order at the counter we awkwardly shuffled around while simultaneously trying to make sense of the massive chalkboard spanning the entire wall above the kitchen, cashier, counter area.

The chalkboard resembled something akin to what you would imagine a severely obsessive compulsive neon-chalk-obsessed child could produce after a rigorous drawing session on a triple-dose of Adderol. Visualize massive chalkboards, side-by-side, they are completely covered with words, every other word is written in a different color of neon chalk, there are little doodles and infantile pictures in between, around, and on top of the words. The words attempt to communicate menu items. Although it is technically possible to decipher these items, the task is overwhelming, causing one to feel as if they are going have a spontaneous epileptic seizure, like those infamous Japanese cartoons.

Realizing that the process of decoding and selecting an item from the menu might be difficult, we decide to sit down.

Embedded somewhere within the maddening cacophony of colors, I thought I saw “Sausage and red pepper” listed under a heading that said “Waffles”. Ok, I thought, that sounds odd, sausage and red pepper waffles? Maybe I’ll try it. After ordering that and a cappuccino I turned to my fellow diners, who had ordered a turkey sandwich with a cappuccino, and nothing, respectively.

Then we got to taking in the rest of the environment. I felt like I was in a miniature model room designed by a drunken primate with a deeply contradicting set of values.

One of the first things I noticed was the prominently featured, bright green, Ecological Oven, which actually said “Ecological Oven” in bold letters across the front, just begging for an inquiry. Also notable was that there were no tomatoes in sight, not even on the menu. You would have expected at least a bowl full of tomatoes on the counter, or next to the cash register, but no.

Instead of tomatoes, all along the front counter was a presentation of every imaginable mini-Kellogg’s breakfast cereal flavor, like the variety packs your family would take camping when you were young, when your mom would always remark at the sheer excess of packaging and sugar. To sort of balance out the mini-cereal box barricade, just behind it, along the left half of the back wall (below the chalkboard) there was an impressive collection of mini chip bags. Your typical to-go mini-mart junk food, loaded with trans-fats, MSG and genetically modified corn derivatives. I began to feel like I was in a gas station. I glanced around for a Slurpee machine, but didn't see one.

The open-face refrigerator (highly illogical and energy inefficient), located at the far right end of the room, was half full of beverages: there was a neat rows of private label TOMATO. bottled water; there was not one, but multiple varieties of Vitamin Water, in plastic bottles as well; and there was Snapple (also encased in plastic). There were also four or five utterly pathetic looking, limp Iceberg-lettuce salads, diminutive portions wadded into bulky (plastic) to-go containers.

And there was this heinous wall-paper, what looked like layers upon layers of totally random, irrelevant images. Like the chalkboard, the wallpaper was basically just a tasteless visual distraction, I would have much preferred to stare at a neutral colored wall or the original calicanto underneath.

Aside from the generic tomato symbol in TOMATO's logo, there wasn't a sign of real tomatoes anywhere, not even a bowl of tomatoes on the counter. There weren't even items containing tomatoes in the menu. If there had been, the tomatoes would have been of a shitty quality.

Just before our food came, one of our dining party (the one who didn’t order anything), asked the waiter, “What makes your oven ecological?” After babbling something brief and totally incomprehensible the poor man proceeded into a five-minute torrent of further nonsense, something about how the oven was ecological because you didn’t need to use chemical products to wash it when it got dirty. It didn’t make much sense to me, but maybe I missed something.

Even though the coffees we ordered were clearly “for here”, they were served to our table in “to-go” cups, complete with little foldout cardboard handles.

And now that I think about it, my sausage and red pepper waffles were served with a plastic fork. (Was the plate plastic too?) Said waffles were barely worth mentioning, but I can break it down real quick. First of all, they were mini-waffles. The two halves of each mini-waffle were sandwiched around a little dollop of minced red pepper and processed meat. There were three of these mini-waffle-sandwiches, crudely served with a somewhat ambiguous white sauce in a small plastic cup. I tried a little bit an it was pretty bad, my best bet is that it consisted of salted margarine and aerosol cheese, 50/50, whipped together and microwaved, eaten warm.

Let me just throw this prediction out there: TOMATO will not last long in its new Casco Viejo locale, unless it is a) loosing money constantly, or b) a money-laundering front, or c) both.

The advice I would give to the people behind TOMATO? (That is, if they are actually trying to create a successful business). 1) Do away with the ridiculous neon nonsense covering your chalkboard. Erase it. 2) Neatly write the menu with a white piece of chalk. Use consistent lettering, as level as manageable. Get some alphabet stencils if need be. 3) Forget the multi-colored scrawl. Keep it simple. 4) Do something about all of the packaged food in your store, i.e. get rid of it. It is simply un-cool to sell so much godforsaken plastic packaging these days. And to display it so overtly is simply retarded. 5) Put a piece of duct-tape over the place on your big toaster oven that says, “Ecological oven”. For any remotely cognizant person that is interpreted to read, “We are full of shit.”

The most interesting thing we saw or experienced during this whole extravaganza was the following sentence written in noticeable, bold letters across a section of the chalk-board: “Tendre que salir a buscar paz en otro sitio.” For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, this means, “I will have to leave and look for peace in another place.” Well yes, yes indeed. Fantastic advice. And with that we left, whether we would find peace, we did not know.

Manolo Caracol - Casco Viejo, Panama

Paradise Lost

We’ve heard about Manolo Caracol – renowned as the preeminent destination for fresh, local cuisine in Panama City – now it’s time to go check it out for ourselves.

We can hear the din of a full house even before entering, the place is packed. Should we have made reservations? Once inside we loiter for a brief moment between a cork filled aquarium and a rack of green criollo bananas propped against a rustic wooden box, an artful detail, both subtle and in-your-face at the same time.

Once spotted by the somewhat zaftig Maître d’ we are briskly ushered past a bustling kitchen framed by a row of ten gallon galvanized steel buckets brimming with an impressive diversity of tropical fruit. This looks like it’s the real deal; fresh, local, abundant.

Our table is situated in the very back of the overflow dining area, Beyond our table is a floor to ceiling rack of beautifully presented jars full of herbs and spices, which partially masks an odd back-office area.

We realize that ours is not the most coveted table at Manolo Caracol, but we got here late and are lucky to have been seated at all, besides, the spice rack entertains. We peruse the many jars, recognizing some of their contents, achiote, coriander, mustard seed, even a small vial of saffron, and others.

When the waiter appears he mentions something about having to get up and walk across the restaurant to look at the selection of wines, which sort of put us off, so we go with a 2003 Garmendia that was sitting on the table.

The waiter brings out the wine, two glasses, and a basket of Panamanian baguette. He then takes the opportunity to inform us that the night’s fixed menu will consist of ten dishes, 85% local seafood.

Local. Every day we become more and more conscious about the earth’s diminishing resources and the increasing frequency of environmental crises, so we support going green and local whenever possible.

The meal begins with an amuse-bouche of small clams smothered in a zesty, putanesca sauce, all cleverly presented in a smart espresso cup. The clams are fresh, the sauce fantastic. Our palates are tickled; we are giddy with anticipation for the next plate.

Just as we finish this delectable concoction, our waiter clears the plates in a flourish and sets down a much-anticipated accompaniment to our Panamanian baguette, olive oil.

We top off the wine and go for the bread, taken aback by the noticeably high-quality of the olive oil, which had a particularly smooth front body, nice grassy tones, and a pleasantly sweet finish. There was an undertone of pepper, but not, almost like a Capazzana. Intriguing.

Initially, we were pleased to find that the next dish was drowning in said olive oil, citrus and onion. Aside from the oil bath, this dish consisted of what appeared to be a dry canned tuna. We couldn’t imagine this was actually the case, given this restaurant’s general modus operandi. This could be a salt cured mahi-mahi filet, but it tasted more like Starkist then ventresca.

Give us more olive oil.

Promptly, the apparently clairvoyant chef sent out a citrusy corvina ceviche, a hybrid of the Panamanian and Peruvian styles, submerged in a rather deep pool of olive oil and mixed with thinly sliced red onions, culantro, sea salt and pepper.

The salad follows. What initially appears to be balsamic drizzled, feta and romaine turns out to be saccharine, lemon juice and tamarind paste, slathered on leaf lettuce and sprinkled with Orville Redenbachers’ Movie Theater Butter Lovers Pop-Corn. Had we realized that this was going to be our last encounter with anything resembling fresh produce for the rest of our meal, we would have at least tried to savor this ridiculous melee.

What came next quite frankly blew our palates out. At this point we were at our limit, saturated with citrus, oil, and salt, yet this dish consisted of clams, again, and the same heavy putanesca, anchovy reduction, again, only this time in mountainous quantities. It was essentially the same as the amuse-bouche, but not nearly as amusing. A mountain of clams, in their shells, piled in a bowl of the once appreciated, now dreaded, putanesca sauce. This acidy, anchovy assault left us parched, our palettes blanched.

Salt. Oil. Acid. Oil. Our waters are empty. We need some more bread. One of us mumbles something semi-coherent about loosing sensation in parts of their tongue and perhaps some skin off the roof of the mouth. An odd, unfamiliar sensation is gurgling up from the depths of both of our stomachs. At this point we are actually worried, dare we say petrified, about what will come next. We so yearn for something fresh we even consider stealing some fruit from the buckets up front. Please, let the next dish be something other than heartburn.

Out comes a heap of nutty, rubbery, over-cooked shrimp, drowning in a pool of, you guessed it, oil; achiote and coriander infused, with a touch of citrus. It is hard to imagine being able to eat tomorrow, let alone sleep tonight.

Truthfully, what happened between the shrimp plate and dessert is somewhat of blur and were it not for our notes and shaky photographs, we would not have remembered the last half of the meal. It’s all a very vague, distant trauma.

There were these fried skate-cakes, smothered in corn syrupy tamarind goo. Oil, sugar, acid, tough fish. After that came another substantial mound, coconut rice and these peculiar, deconstructed tamales. There was also a plate of mayonnaise fish, species unknown, but undoubtedly local and organic.

At this point we had both been frightened and abused into a kind of horrific delirium, listlessly mumbling to one anther, occasionally exchanging defeated glances, but mostly just looking down at the table and moving our food around with our forks.

The dessert was only memorable for one reason: it consisted of two miso-soup spoons laid on an over-sized, round, white plate. In one spoon there was a glob of what basically amounted to under-gelatinized passion-fruit JELLO. In the other spoon were small cubes of canned pineapple, saturated in corn syrup, and then there was a shortbread cookie smeared with dulce de leche.

It didn’t dawn on us until later (at the time our minds were in a food-induced coma), but after thinking about it, one gets the feeling that this might very well be some kind of a punitive joke. Is the chef discreetly, and almost artfully, punishing us?

It is important to point out that each individual dish we were served could have been good in and of itself. But in succession the quantity and homogeneity of the ingredients simply did not work. Indeed, it felt as if the same thing were being served over and over again. Towards the end, eating our meal had felt like purgatory.

When you are offered a set menu by a restaurant, it is their responsibility to design your meal. Mindful pacing, order and variety are paramount to a constructing an artful dining experience. The diner is at the complete mercy of the chef, for better or fore worse. Here we were captives being force-fed, and for most people, that is not a pleasing dining experience.

Did we get our money’s worth? Yes! Would we have been satisfied with half the amount of food? Absolutely. Would we like to have seen something basic, vegetable-based and non-acidic to neutralize the volcano of acid burn we were both experiencing in our stomachs? You betcha! Did we stagger home and wake up in the morning with massive diarrhea, and did one of us experience heartburn for the first time in her life? Affirmative.

So what’s a good note to end this on? Well, if you want to feed your family for the next week, come to Manolo Caracol and ask for your whole meal to go. Pay your twenty-five bucks. Then walk down the street to the Chino and buy a bunch vegetables. Get yourself some Rolaids. Mix the Manolo’s with the vegetables, adding generous quantities of Rolaids to taste, or until the mixture is PH neutral. Bon appétit.