Ariel Kim
My inner child often escapes. She knows I cannot ground her — college students are tethered to nothing but air. Removed from home, life shifts around us like a giant rubix cube. Instead, she teaches me to be grounded in sensations. To relish thick, gusty winds that envelop me like a weighted blanket. To trust a taste as simple as Commons’ tomato-eggs to bring me home.
Every Chinese person I know was shocked to see tomato-eggs offered by Lotus. It’s an unexpected love story. If tomato-eggs is the classic ‘boy-next-door,’ then Lotus is the “it” girl. Everyone wants her or wants to be her. She’s hot, popular, bold — her devotees wrap around Commons like a conga line. But for some reason, Lotus picked tomato-eggs and his simple, small town charm.
The marriage of scrambled eggs and tomatoes is foreign to the Western world. After all, Chinese restaurants rarely serve it. It feels like a secret. Tomato-eggs is the definition of comfort food, often the first dish a Chinese kid learns how to cook. Having grown up on cafeteria lunches, I’d learned to lower my expectations when ethnic food was on a school menu. But to everyone’s surprise, Lotus delivered a rendition that tasted authentic, that captured the classic sweet and sour tang. Either they had a real Chinese person behind the menu or there was a Chinese Ratatouille hiding under their chef hats.
As the nosy person I am, I arranged to interview six members of the Lotus team to find out how they unlocked this cultural gem. Spoiler alert, the tomato-eggs dish — now off the menu — tasted authentic because it was.
The current menus for Lotus were developed by Executive Chef David Kuzma and Cooks Helper Sherry (Xuewei) Chen. Kuzma was the one who actually pitched the dish. He had traveled to Beijing around nine years ago, where he stumbled upon the combination of eggs and tomatoes. When he proposed the idea to Chen, who was of Chinese heritage, she brought it to life. Four years ago, Chen had started at Yale Hospitality as a dishwasher. When Lotus launched, she began to cook, striving to bring her own vision to the menu.
“Honestly, I didn’t think it was ever going to make it to the menu because it was such a comfort food,” Chen said. “The tomato-and-egg dish was actually the first dish I ever learned how to make … I was nine years old.”
The recipe for tomato-eggs is not something you get from a cookbook. It is simple, yet intimate — a tradition passed down. Francis Lam, a writer also of Chinese heritage, states in his New York Times piece that the tomato-eggs recipe would have to come to him through his people or not at all.
“Calling up my mother to ask her, I knew, would be like asking her to describe how to tie shoelaces: almost impossible to articulate, buried so deep in her muscle memory,” Lam writes.
Growing up in New Haven, Chen learned how to make the dish by watching her grandma. She would proceed to cook the dish whenever her grandma visited. Chen adapted the recipe for Lotus’ rendition, with the only modification being some added hoisin sauce. While this allowed the Lotus dish to capture the dish’s core flavors, naturally, it is impossible to match every Chinese individual’s way of cooking it. My mother’s tomato-eggs is usually juicier. Chen’s own sister likes to add a little bit of ketchup.
Seeking to learn my mother’s recipe, I watched her make the dish, taking pictures and jotting down notes. She found it amusing. To her, the way she cooks tomato-eggs is nothing special. To me, it is a family secret: the way her pillowy eggs float perfectly in a tangy pool of tomato juices. A generational gift.
“For me the secret ingredient is ketchup,” Commons-goer Yuen Ning Chang ’25 said. “It brings out a sort of sweet and sour tang, and you don’t even need sugar.”
Admittedly, my family uses sugar. But I trust the origins: my grandmother was always the one called up when her village needed good catering. My mother learned by watching her, emphasizing the slight tartness of the tomatoes and balancing the salt with a little bit of sugar. Now I’m her mirror. I like to think that her own inner child is at play, grounded in the inherited comfort written all over my face.
Chen and Lobsang Dolma, another cooks helper, described students regularly approaching them about the dish. I didn’t doubt it — I had already seen countless Chinese Yalies post the dish on their Instagram accounts, as if it were a beacon of Chinese culture.
“There are six of us sitting here talking about tomato-and-egg,” Adam Millman, senior director of Yale Hospitality, said. “Something so simple, but that is so important because it means something to you. It’s something that you and your friends grew up with and it gives you that little sense of comfort. As homesickness sets in, having that comfort of remembering that you ate it with your family at home is reassuring.”
Amid the usual instability of life, Commons offers consistency. Humans are creatures of habit. We like to be surprised, but not too surprised. We seek a constant flavor, something to ground us. Something to bring us back to a memory, to make college feel a little less lonely. It’s why I ate Lotus’ tomato-eggs multiple times a week.
As heartwarming as it was to see the dish brought to life at Yale, I must acknowledge that tomato-eggs is gone. Off the menu. In the grave. But I’m not too worried. Every time I return home during breaks, I see six juicy tomatoes on the counter and a fresh carton of eggs in the fridge. It’s a love language that sparks fluent dialogue between my mother and me. It welcomes me home. In a world that keeps on spinning, tomato-eggs manages to ground my wayward inner child, tethering her to generations’ worth of love.