Road Tripping: Tomatoes Trump Corn Palace
By Tomato Queen
If you find yourself driving the I-90 across country in the late summertime some year, you might be excited to know that the Corn Palace isn’t the only attraction near Mitchell, South Dakota.
Spezia, a mid-range Italian restaurant in Sioux Falls (about a half hour W. of Mitchell), offers a late summer “Tomato Fest” menu, featuring at least a half a dozen dishes that use heirloom tomatoes.
Was the Caprese salad the best I’ve ever eaten? Well, no.
The tomatoes were varied and beautiful: purple cherokee, rosso bruno, brandywine–but they were cold and refrigerated and hard, somewhat gummy and plastic, like most store-bought tomatoes that are picked unripe and have traveled a long way.
The niche market of heirloom tomatoes seems to be getting a foothold in the industry, and, well, tomatoes just don’t travel well, regardless of their pedigree. I think we all know that a fresh tomato is a fresh tomato is a fresh tomato, and there is no substitute for what local farmers can provide.
All in all, it wasn’t quite the taste of local freshness I had hoped for, but after a few days of road food, it was a treat nonetheless.
