In this paper, a novel 2D direction of arrival (DOA) estimation approach based on tensor technique for the conformal array is proposed. In order to improve the estimation performance with low SNR and small snapshots, a third-order measurement tensor is constructed by exploiting the multidimensional information of the conformal array received data. Then, the desired signal subspace is obtained by the higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) of the cross covariance tensor. Finally, the DOAs could be estimated by the conventional subspace based algorithms. This approach enables us to get a better DOA estimation performance owing to utilize the multidimensional information and the cross covariance tensor method, especially in the case of low SNR and small number of snapshots. At last, the simulation results demonstrate the validity and the advantages of the proposed method.