This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Harry Posner and Natalie Dial of Tomat, a restaurant that doesn’t just talk about seasonality, it lives it. We get into what it actually takes to grow your own ingredients while running a restaurant, from the early mistakes to the unexpected wins. They break down their Five Rules for Having Your Own Restaurant Garden, including why experimentation matters more than perfection, how to think realistically about what you can grow, and what it means to truly close the loop on waste. It’s practical, a little obsessive, and exactly the kind of conversation that makes you rethink where your food comes from.

There’s something deeply grounding about growing even a small piece of what you eat. It shifts your understanding of time, effort, and value in a way no delivery app ever will. You don’t need a full backyard or a restaurant budget to start. A simple planter box with herbs on a windowsill or balcony is enough. Basil, thyme, parsley, things you actually use. You water it, you cut from it, you watch it come back. That loop, small as it is, changes how you cook and how you think about food. It makes dinner feel earned in the best way.

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Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life.

I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with Harry Posner and Natalie Dial, the chef and CEO, respectively, of LA’s Tomat. Located in the Westchester part of the city, Tomat has the distinct pleasure of being here on the LA Times 101 Best Restaurant List and was named one of Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America.

They share their five rules for having your own restaurant garden and talk about the importance of experimenting with the produce you plant, understanding the ratio to reality of what you can grow and consume in the restaurant, and give you the perfect timing to plan for each growing and eating season.

It’s a fantastic conversation for anyone who’s fantasized about having their own garden, either at a restaurant or at home, and the desire to grow what you eat. So let’s get into the rules.

Meeting the Guests

Harry, Natalie, it is so nice to meet you. Thank you for making the time before your impending bundle of joy comes to join us in the world.

We’re so glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much.

The Origin of Tomat

It’s easy to say that most chefs or restaurateurs, especially in California, are driven by farm fresh ingredients from the market. You literally named your restaurant with a nod to one of California’s most famous pieces of produce. Why go all in on this concept.

It wasn’t even really inspired by the piece of produce itself, other than Harry and I both have that nickname, had it growing up serendipitously, independently of each other, because we turned red in the sun and looked like tomats or tomatoes. However, the official, the initial line before we were like, actually, the fun reason is a way better explanation, was that we are going to grow our own stuff.

We’re in California. We’re using as much local farmer’s market produce as possible. And our logo is a slice of tomato with a stem, the seeds. And we’re trying to show you we’re growing, we’re getting the best stuff. That’s why we’re Tamar.

Why Grow Your Own Ingredients

The dedication to the bit is something that we are very big on here at Five Rules. You guys are also very dedicated to growing your own produce, vegetables. Why is it so important to you to go that early and deep into the process of the ingredients you bring into the restaurant.

We work with some of the most amazing farmers, and there are some absolutely amazing people here that really work alongside us, especially when curating a menu.

My upbringing, being born in LA, then moving to England, my parents wanted to grow all of their own vegetables. I remember as a kid, we would go around and pick all the loquats and we had a loquat tree where we used to live. And it’s just so much fun. Now that we’ve got kids, you want to indoctrinate them in growing to show you what produce you have and how good it can be.

The Value of Growing Even One Thing

Restaurateurs these days are faced with so many challenges. Some might not even be able to make it to the farmer’s market while they’re spinning all these different plates in the air. The idea of starting and making your own garden can seem even more daunting than just running a regular restaurant. Why do you think it’s important to grow at least one thing so it can supply at least one thing to a restaurant.

It shows you how much effort goes into producing that one thing. I love that.

In the grand scheme of things, we have a tiny little plot. You think, okay, how can I get the most benefit. If I have a three feet by three feet plot, okay, I’ll just have things that grow upwards. I’m not going to plant one carrot, but maybe if I plant a bushel of parsley or thyme, that’ll be more than I’ll ever need.

So you just think how much effort goes into it and why the prices of certain things are so much at the farmer’s market, and why being in California, we have access to some of the best produce in the world.

Rule #1: Experimentation

I love how dedicated you are to this practice of growing your own ingredients, but then also encouraging others to do the same, which is why I’m so excited for you to share your five rules for having your own restaurant garden.

You touched on it a little bit earlier. Having access to LA’s farmer’s markets will give you access to some of the best strawberries, oranges, kale, apples that you may not feel you need to grow because at best you might just match their quality, which frees you up for your rule number one.

Our rule number one is experiment experimentation. We wanted to have a little plot that, yes, we’ll have some things that are maybe more staples, like the herbs that we can always continue to pick year round, but we have varieties of citrus, pomegranate, berries that even our favorite berry guy at the farmer’s market is like, oh, I’ve never had that and never grown that.

And now I’m being like, oh, well, we grew it here. You can grow it there. Do you want to grow it for us. And he’s like, yeah, let’s do it. And that is actually our Logan berries.

That’s incredible. When we moved from London, what blew my mind about the farmer’s markets there is that you could get way hotter chilies than you ever can here, which feels kind of ironic. And then they have this green called a spring green, which is this bizarre mix of a cabbage and a kale that I have never found anywhere near a green as good here. I’ve been obsessed with it since.

We have seeds. And one of our farmers is growing it for us. Incredible produce.

Rule #2: Grow in Feasible Quantities

Once you get a year or two of growing your own produce and actually having the doors open to your restaurant, you’ll have an idea of what people are eating, what they’re drawn to, but then also how much you need to grow so that you are balancing it out with the space you have and what you want to plant and what people are actually going to eat, which is a component of your rule number two.

Rule number two, grow in feasible quantities. The garden itself has been in the works, shall we say, for the last five years. Essentially, since we moved out here, there was one year the restaurant was stuck in plan check. We were testing a few different things. We put in a whole row of cucumbers.

Sure, we may have grown around 400 pounds of cucumbers that year. That’s a lot of pickles. A lot of pickles and a lot of bribery to neighbors, to friends. I don’t think there are enough people who eat cucumbers in our neighborhood.

We can grow a good amount of stuff like herbs. We can use a ton of herbs. Being able to just like, oh, we’re out of herbs. Let’s run to the garden. And pomegranate, we have one pomegranate tree. We get five pomegranates from it this year. It’s still in development.

You just need to be aware that certain things can go crazy. If I’m producing 1000 pounds of kale, am I going to eat 1000 pounds of kale. Maybe.

Rule #3: Close the Loop

That idea of not wanting to waste anything at a restaurant, especially when you’re growing, it does weigh heavily on a lot of conversations these days about creating a system that can support itself, which plays a role in your rule number three.

Rule number three is, if you have a garden, use it to try to close the loop on your own waste in whatever house or restaurant you’re in. That was an ethos that we had from the beginning, before we opened, before we even started the concept of the garden or of Tamat. We wanted everything to be as sustainable as possible.

And of course that starts with food practices within your kitchen. So of course, all of our food scraps are composted. We have coffee in the morning. All of our grounds go right into the garden. We even compost our menus.

We need all sorts of different types of composting materials. You have a lot of things that get wet as they start to break down, and then you need a bit of dry. Our menus, we print them every day because things change so much. It also helps us think about, can we reuse these vegetable or fruit scraps for something else.

And oftentimes they go right into our cocktail program for infusions. We’ve also noticed that our black trash bin doesn’t smell nearly as bad when we’re separating things out, so it feels like we’re doing it right.

Rule #4: Get Involved in Urban Planning

Doing it right and planning the design of your garden is a lot of times where people get really intimidated. Your fourth rule talks about why it is important to get involved with that process. What’s your rule number four.

Our rule number four is get involved in urban planning. And I get why that’s intimidating, and it feels like, how do you possibly get a foot in the door.

We started with this piece of land before we even ripped the concrete out. It was a disused car lot for the airport rental vehicles, and it just looked like an absolute trash yard. We sent soil out to labs to get tested. It all came back as if it were just sterile. Nothing had leeched through, thank God, but also there was just no sign of life.

For the past seven decades, it had been the other end of the spectrum. Exactly. The big thing with gardens is how do you water it. It’s a very expensive thing if you’re using potable water.

And on Westchester Parkway, which is a huge boulevard parallel to the runway at LAX, all of that is watered and irrigated with the purple pipeline that is recycled water from Hyperion. Exactly. So we’re one block away from where that stops. And we were like, we have to get that water.

It has nutrients in it, great for what we’re growing. It feels like a really important thing to do in terms of sustainability and our own economic costs of what’s going into this garden, but also advocating for other plots of land around Sepulveda and where we are to have access to that too.

So we, it took a long time, but we worked with the city, DWP, got our council people involved and got that pipe extended across Sepulveda. That’s incredible. It was really fun once we got it done. Once we got it done, it was amazing.

Rule #5: Plan Six Months Ahead

Being able to think about options and different ways of planning and approaching how to grow your own garden at a restaurant is also a giant part of the process. Your fifth and final rule talks about putting in that mental effort while looking further down the road. What’s your rule number five.

Rule number five is plan six months ahead. Add it to the list. Just think constantly about what you’re doing in the future. You have to. If you want to harvest something in September, you’ve got to plant it in January, February.

We’re very much telling all of our chefs, do you guys want to plant anything. What do you remember growing up with cooking with or something that we don’t know about that your parents used to make for you all the time. Give us some thoughts on what you want to add to the menu.

And we’ve had chefs be like, hey, I got these seeds from grandma or whoever. There was actually a guy who was hanging out really early morning by the garden. He sees me and he’s like, this is the most amazing thing I’ve seen. Here, I’ve got some chiltepin pepper seeds. I want to give them to you to try and grow. They’re the native of Chile to North America.

Incredible. We want to be planting and harvesting in six months time. It gives inspiration to our staff, to our bar program, to everyone in the restaurant and be like, okay, it’s a super seasonal restaurant, but we’re also growing our own stuff and I can have an effect on what we grow and have a little bit of ownership in this whole program when they’re like, oh, this is what you planted for me and now we’ve got it.

Closing

Really really fun. It’s such a beautiful idea, this intent to grow and to support your restaurant and the workers there and the creativity. Harry, Natalie, congratulations on everything.

If people want to come by the restaurant, see what you’re growing in the garden, just follow along with what you’re up to, where can they go.

You can go to our website, tomat.la, or follow us on Instagram at tamat.la, or you can just come right in.

Well, I will be crossing town very soon to come have a meal with you and to walk through your lovely garden. See you soon.

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