Tomato Jam Cafe

Flavor: Classic lunch-box fare

Ambiance: Imagine if Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm opened a café

Tomato Jam isn’t the easiest restaurant to find. When I first visited for lunch, I circled the parking lot of the Biltmore Avenue medical center where it’s located so many times I began to wonder whether the café‘s owners were in cahoots with the ophthalmologists of Doctor’s Park. Surely I couldn’t have been the first wannabe customer to race into one of the nearby eye doctors’ offices, complaining of trouble seeing the sign for Tomato Jam. It all seemed like a set-up.

But when I finally found the café, I realized there was no way its staff was capable of something so sinister. Not only does Tomato Jam serve some of the best workday lunches in Asheville, it’s one of the jolliest places I’ve ever eaten. As anyone who has had to endure a meal in a hospital cafeteria can attest, a mix of patients contemplating risky surgical procedures and doctors exhausted from fighting with insurance companies doesn’t always make for a happy-go-lucky crowd: All of the food is seasoned with gloom. Tomato Jam, which draws much of its clientele from nearby Mission Hospitals and is so medically oriented that a ramp leads to its front door, feels more like the canteen at rib-tickling doc Patch Adams’ clinic.

Sticking with the cinematic metaphors, there’s also a whiff of the Whistle Stop Café over at Tomato Jam. While Tomato Jam boils its ‘maters rather than frying ‘em up while they’re still green, the red-trimmed white plates, cookbook-lined window ledges and old-timey coolers filled with cold drinks seem just Southern and sunny enough to earn Miz Fannie Flagg’s blessings. And the restaurant has a female-dominated kitchen to boot, led by a brash Chef Charlie, who isn’t shy about ribbing her regulars or keeping her line cooks smiling.

There are plenty of regulars at Tomato Jam, which opened two years ago in a space that has housed a restaurant for much of the last half-century. When an acupuncturist recently gave up an office alongside the café, Tomato Jam took it over, almost doubling its square footage. On most weekdays, all of the tables are taken.

Tomato Jam serves breakfast and sells dinners for pick-up, but lunches are the restaurant’s bread and butter, so I timed my visits around the noon hour. The menu is pretty basic: tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, BLTs, burgers, pimento cheese, chicken breast, turkey breast and pork loin. That’s not a sampling: That’s everything on offer, not counting the changing menu of soups, baked goods and a daily hot entrée.

Tomato Jam has a very different aim than many restaurants, which try to make themselves memorable by fusing all sorts of unexpected ingredients to shock the palate. According to Tomato Jam’s mission statement, the restaurant “takes pride in creating wholesome, heart-healthy American food using the best natural and locally grown organic ingredients available.” Nothing fancy, nothing flashy.

Tomato Jam distinguishes itself by not botching the basics. Tuna fish? Chicken salad? How hard can it be to compose a good sandwich? Very hard, apparently, since so many restaurants have found so many ways to make a mess of lunch.

I’ve had egg salads that were too salty, too creamy, too mayonnaise-y and—all too often—too old. Tomato Jam’s egg salad is terrific: It’s very fresh, balanced and features firm egg whites that lend a nice texture to the dish. I also liked the chicken salad, which gleans a subtle sweetness from its dried cranberries and—thanks to the inclusion of diced apples—has a satisfying snap.

Garnishes—and high-quality meat—also make Tomato Jam’s burger, which is wrapped in a jacket of caramelized onions, roasted tomatoes and crisp green lettuce. The burger was served slightly dry, as was the barbecue chicken-breast sandwich I sampled, which came basted with a tomato-rich sauce.

Vegetarians have fewer options at Tomato Jam, but what’s available is startlingly good. I probably wouldn’t have thought to order the grilled cheese with vegan sausage had I not been in the company of a vegetarian, but I’d readily order it again. A plateful of creamy deviled eggs was a little too sweet for my relish-leaning tastes, but I’m a fan of both the green cabbage coleslaw and potato salad, which are offered as sides with every sandwich. The potato salad is lovingly made from redskin and sweet potatoes, which makes for a very pretty dish.

I have only one serious complaint about Tomato Jam: The bread is not worthy of the sandwiches. Please, Chef Charlie, use better bread. The plastic-wrapped, grocery-store-quality loaves Tomato Jam uses aren’t exactly duck bread, but they’re a bit too close to it. I don’t expect the café to embark on the laborious task of baking its own bread—heck, I haven’t even found time to use an automatic bread maker I was given for my wedding last August—but surely there’s a tastier bread to be found in this grain-obsessed town. Of the three bread choices (white, whole-grain and wheat bun), the multiseeded bun, studded with sesame, poppy, sunflower and caraway seeds, is currently the best option.

Still, Tomato Jam is well worth finding. To make it easier, here’s how to get there (according to the restaurant’s own Web site): “We are on the LOWER LEFT CORNER of the long building to your LEFT, behind Asheville Floral. Call us if you’re lost!” You can be sure someone very friendly will take your call.