A recent dinner at Mon Ami Restaurant and Historic Winery on Catawba Island in Port Clinton brought back dim memories of the last time I ate there, probably 20 or more years ago. All that I recall are a cozy little dining room, fieldstone walls, lots of vineyards, flowers, and foliage, and a meal that didn t quite live up to such a glorious setting.
You won t recognize the place, a friend from Port Clinton told me recently. No kidding a trip there over the Labor Day weekend made my eyes pop.
What I saw was a massive parking lot swarming with cars, a long conga line of diners at the entrance waiting to get in, a cavernous dining room, a lounge with a huge wraparound bar and bandstand, and a smaller dining room filled with dozens of people taking advantage of the $28 all-you-can-eat Saturday seafood buffet, a feast if I ever saw one. And out on the lawn were dozens more customers enjoying a festive dinner and music under a canopy of trees.
From a small winery established around 1872, Mon Ami has grown like topsy. Several owners and winery cooperatives have come and gone since then. Sometime around 2000, the historic winery itself was supplanted to make way for a much larger restaurant. The result is a food and wine enterprise that dominates the Catawba Island landscape, offering live entertainment, happy-hour buffets, wine tastings, and Sunday jazz brunches.
As for the food, I ve heard a few grumbles from people who think it often fails to live up to expectations. Despite a few quibbles of our own, we found the food to be very good indeed especially so accompanied by crisp pinot noir and splits of champagne brought to the table from the Mon Ami cellars two stories below.
Our round of meals included sensational drunken mussels and walleye bites as appetizers; a novel salad of mixed greens, bleu cheese, apricots, cherries, and walnuts with white balsamic vinaigrette; tasty perch fillets, a succulent bone-in Kansas City strip steak, and angel hair pasta studded with small shrimp, feta cheese, and olives galore.
Also on the menu are the likes of baked brie, king crab legs, pretzel-crusted halibut, frenched pork chops, sandwiches, and desserts. Appetizers range from $6 for chips and salsa to $25 for a shrimp, king crab, and lobster tail platter, while entrees fall into the $12 to $33 range. Wine is also quite reasonable, from $18 to $25 for a bottle of champagne (excluding the $195 Dom Perignon) to $15 for a bottle of Mon Ami pinot noir.
The restaurant doesn t honor reservations or call-ahead seating, and with so many people queuing up for a table, we felt sure there would be a long wait. But when we reached the desk we were whisked to a window table, followed by a friendly, very busy server who was so well-versed in the menu that it hardly mattered that the water didn t arrive until midmeal.
We didn t think much of the mushy crab cakes or the plain mashed potatoes in need of butter. But how could we complain about the mussels, swimming in a divine nectar sauce that begged to be drunk straight from the pot, or the fried baby spinach, lending such a delicate crunch as garnish on the appetizer sampler? As further compensation, the perch vied with the walleye for tenderness, green and black olives enlivened the angel hair pasta, and the brawny Kansas City strip was as juicy and flavorful as a steak can be.
To get to Mon Ami from Toledo, take State Rt. 2 east to State Rt. 53. Go north on 53 for 1.5 miles. Turn left on Wine Cellar Road.
Contact Bill of Fare at fare@theblade.com
First Published September 11, 2008, 9:08 a.m.
