A fair deal
Tomato Cafe’s pizza, pasta and salad buffet simple but satisfying
“You get what you pay for” would be a good slogan for a few restaurants, but Tomato Cafe in Northeast Albuquerque seems determined to trademark it.
The nearly 25-year-old buffet in a small strip mall off Paseo del Norte is not great, but it’s not bad either — it’s just fair. For $9.99, you can eat all the limited selection of pizza and pasta and salad and soup you want.
The ingredients are fresh, and the flavor is fine, but nothing in the buffet is particularly inspired. The salad bar is little more than lettuce, carrots, tomatoes and dressing, and the selection of thin-crust pizzas is equally narrow, depending on your timing. The pasta bar is slightly more promising, with four types (including gluten-free options) and at least six homemade sauces, but the flavor is closer to cafeteria food than fine Italian dining.
The word “buffet” usually implies a wealth of options, but Tomato Cafe draws the limit at the absolute basics.
During a recent visit, there were two soups available: roasted tomato basil and vegetarian posole. The housemade tomato soup was thin but tasty, with large disks of carrots and other vegetables. Adding grated Parmesan improved the flavor.
The salad was good, but chunks of lettuce required a knife, and a few more options might have made it more memorable. Some pepperoncini or olives would have gone a long way.
The pepperoni pizza was good but not great. The crust was thin and the toppings even thinner, but for $10, that’s fair enough. Plain cheese, barbecued chicken and supreme pizzas were available during my visit, but they were just as thin. “Breadsticks” were also available, but they were really just a pizza with no toppings cut into strips. Might as well just eat the crust.
The pasta bar had a lot more to offer. Spaghetti, polenta, a glutenfree option, and corkscrew pastas were paired with a few homemade sauces, such as marinara, marinara with sausage, marinara with mushroom, and alfredo. The
Al dente spaghetti covered with plain marinara was good but also not great, a pleasant reminder of the $10 price tag. A somewhat unexpected but welcome side dish was the green beans sauteed with garlic, which were very good.
But the best part of the meal, by far, was the giant spinach and ricotta cheese ravioli, made by hand and perfectly tender and savory. The ravioli alone are worth the cost of admission and would have made a good meal on their own. You probably wouldn’t bring beloved house guests here to impress them with local cuisine, but if you needed to feed a busload of high school football players, Tomato Cafe is definitely your place. Service is fantastic, and the atmosphere is not much different from a chain salad-bar restaurant, though it does serve beer and wine, so keep an eye on those football players.
There’s also a soft-serve ice cream machine, the ultimate sign of a familyfriendly buffet. Vegans and vegetarians will feel at home here, with lots of meat-free and gluten-free options, including glutenfree pizza crust that’s available on request. The restaurant also has free Wi-Fi and they offers event catering.
If you don’t require endless options, if you’re in a hurry or on a tight budget, and if you’re willing to drink Pepsi (which costs restaurants less to serve than Coke), then spending 10 bucks for all-you-can-eat Italian food at this humble little spot is perfectly fair.