I was at Walmart last week and they had a giant table of Roma tomatoes for a low price, like 69 cents a pound. Two middle aged, Middle East gents rushed over and filled 2 t-shirt shopping bags (not the little produce bags) with the tomatoes. A few minutes later I saw two more doing the same thing. Hmmm…
At that price, who cares? 
Googling tells me that, though tomatoes are a relatively recent addition to the cuisine in nations in the Levant, they’re commonly used now in a number of dishes.
I think “Middle Eastern Cuisine” is too broad to draw many generalities from. It’s a great big area with many varying cultures and local produce and food and cooking styles to draw from so you get a wide variety of cuisine from that area. Like saying Mediterranean cuisine (even harder to pin down).
Certainly tomatoes are a versatile fruit that have been adopted by cuisines worldwide so not surprising it shows up almost everywhere these days.
Afaik, there aren’t any tomato-based dishes on Middle Eastern menus, but they can be used, like in fattoush. And I’ve had shawarma and falafel wraps with tomatoes on them.
There are a lot of dishes like shakshuka which are made with tomatoes, peppers and onions that are popular in the region, especially for breakfast. When I worked in the West Bank, every Thursday was a pot luck breakfast for the staff and someone always brought a tomato based dish that you ate with fresh bread.
Israeli salad is usually tomato-based:
Plenty of tomatoes in Israel when I worked there, and certainly shakshuka in Egypt.
You may have seen people who work at the same restaurant, or the first set called their friends, or they’re doing a shakshuka-based fundraiser. Dunno if you can generalize to “Middle Eastern Cuisine” from what you observed.
I understand cherry tomatoes, roasted or raw, are extremely popular in Israel.
Tomatoes are such a useful sauce base. Saute up some onions and/or garlic, add tomatos and render it down, and you have the start of a sauce that can go in any number of culinary traditions…
The restaurant sounds plausible. There are several nearby. I do know that many of the people in the area are Lebanese. Maybe they will try Middle East fusion cuisine. Anyone for kielbasi shawarma?
Tomatoes are one of the food items that only existed in one hemisphere before the Columbian exchange. Before Columbus’s voyage from Spain to the Americas, there were no tomatoes in the Americas. So tomatoes could only have been found in Middle Eastern food after 1492. In fact, they were brought to the eastern hemisphere in the 1540s.
“there were no tomatoes in the Americas.”
I thought tomatoes originated in South America
I suspect that that was a typo; @Wendell_Wagner probably meant “there were no tomatoes in Europe.”
Yeah, I meant to write, “There were no tomatoes outside of the Americas.”
And the streets are paved with cheese.
The Afghani guys at my work have tomato slices with their lunch most days. They eat what looks like a deconstructed gyro: flatbread, tomato, onion, yogurt, lemon, pickle, and meat or chickpeas.
I think you’ve got that backwards - there were no tomatoes in the Mideast before the Columbian exchange.
As a Westerner who lived in Cairo for nearly six years, and in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Pacific for quite a few more, I find the question interesting but maybe too vague to answer robustly. Kind of like inquiring - “does European cuisine use a lot of basil?” Umm… yes in some cases, no in others? The question is too broad to answer with a useful degree of specificity.
The relevant cuisine I can sort of answer (without pretensions to real expertise) is Egyptian food. To start with, we need to define “ a lot.” In my limited experience, Egyptian food absolutely uses tomatoes, especially in salad and in bean dishes. Tomatoes were present in the cooking classes I enjoyed there (taken from both Egyptian citizens and non-local professional chefs).
But I’m not sure the use of tomatoes is so significant that rises to the level of “a lot.” Fava beans, aish (flat bread), olive oil, nuts, sugar, yogurt, and probably other items I’m forgetting off the top of my head, were certainly essential.
Tomatoes, AFAIK, were considered delicious and worth using, but did not rise to the level of “OMG there is no salt/flour in the house … no way can I cook unless I get some.”
Yes, as I and kenobi_65 both corrected above.
Of course, the Middle Eastern folks you saw were in the US, and might well have developed a taste for some foods that aren’t common in the land of their ancestry.