It has been a little quiet around here, so I have been digging into my boxes of labels looking at the back side of them for a restaurant that I can write about. Tom’s Oyster Bar used to have four locations in the Detroit area and perhaps more, I think there is one left, but I remember reading that the original owner sold the business. I remember one time that we went to take advantage of one of his promotional specials back in the day.

The special was run on Monday and Tuesday of each week and it was a live Maine Lobster with corn and redskin potatoes for $14.95. It was at all of the locations, but we went to the one in Southfield, because it was the closest for us. We shared a Salmon Pate for an appetizer and it was more than ample for a dinner. That dinner was an actual steal back in the day, because normally a live Maine lobster was always listed at “market price.” In fact, that is how it is usually priced even today, to cut down on the price of printed menus, though with menus being printed off by computer, I am not sure if that is really a concern.

Since we weren’t going big time for dinner, neither was the wine and I don’t recall if they had a big wine carte or not. We had a popular price wine, even for restaurants, of Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve California Chardonnay 2001. The fruit is harvested from Monterey, Santa Barbara, Mendocino and Sonoma Counties and has been made for about thirty years now and one of the top selling California Chardonnays in the country. It is made in the “sur lie” method and aged for seven months in a mix of French and American oak and it really brought the creamy, buttery Chardonnay to the forefront as the pro-typical California wine. Some may be critical of it, but they have a bona-fide winner for the populace and this wine may have introduced a lot of non-wine drinkers to wine as it is an easy to drink beverage.