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| VNO: Good place for reading |
Before the world went haywire, I was in a silent book reading club -- a friendly group that met in the side room at VNO, the wine-inspired joint on Midland Street. The idea was to quietly read for an hour. It’s like, if you can imagine it, high school study hall with an open bar.
It turned out that reading for an hour was no problem but keeping quiet was. At one session, I ate potato chips left over from dinner. Nobody stared, but I became obsessed with keeping my mouth shut while chewing and it was hard to concentrate on the book. Ordering a drink required making hand signals to the waitress – who politely avoided saying anything (or laughing).
It’s an odd thing to do in a bar but not so out of place at VNO, which is a rather quiet place anyway with good food and a full bar. In a hectic world, calm prevails here.
Of course, unsavory things have been known to happen in the back rooms of bars the world over. But this is actually a side room, not a back room, with piles and shelves full of bottled wines for sale along with two tables near a fireplace. Nothing apparently unsavory goes on, unless you count sweet wine.
The whole place has a split personality. The official name is VNO Wine Warehouse & New Age Restaurant. Despite the emphasis on wine, the front room is more of a modern-looking sports
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| Sue on the job at VNO |
A couple of afternoon visits found it really quiet and mostly deserted inside, in part because there’s outdoor seating both on the street in front and out back. Put it this way: Social distancing wasn’t a problem.
Lately I’ve been in the mood to try new things. So for a beer, it was a Sparkle American Lager from Petoskey Brewing ($5). It’s very light; a Bud Light might have been just as good.
The menu includes various burgers and sandwiches, tacos and wings, with daily specials (except Monday and Tuesday). Going along with the New Age theme, it was a good time to try a meatless Impossible Burger ($13). It was fine, though with a slightly different taste than beef. Of course, buried under cheese and onions, it was hard to tell.
Then looking over the bottles behind the bar, one called Skrewball jumped out, either because of the misspelling or its odd sheep logo. (This came shortly after an unexpected recent try-something-new incident at a 7-Eleven -- walking in to buy a newspaper and walking out with a paper and a dill pickle Slurpee. Unsolicited but grave advice on the Slurpee: Don’t do it.)
Skrewball turns out to be described as peanut butter-flavored whiskey, which sounds like it could be as bad as the pickle Slurpee. But a shot of it on ice ($4.50) turned out OK, probably because it
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| Bottle of Skrewball |
The Impossible Burger, by the way, is $1 more than the other burgers on the menu -- a Pat LaFrieda steak burger, a buffalo burger, a turkey burger and a black bean burger.
Amid all that, a request for a good old Manhattan turned out just fine ($7, made with cheap Black Velvet).
Plenty of wines are available, of course. The side room has tons of bottles – all vying for attention with goofy names and labels (Among them: 19 Crimes, with police mug shots of old criminals; Cooper, a white wine with a drawing of the vineyard’s mascot dog; and Broken Dreams, with a drawing of a monkey scratching its head as someone falls into a barrel) and lofty descriptions. For instance, the Broken Dreams is said to have “subtle aromas of golden apple, lemon curd and Moroccan chamomile.”
But nobody seemed to be buying any wine during the day; Sue, who has tended bar for many years, said wine is more popular in the evening.
VNO is located toward the western end of the Midland Street district, across from Brooklyn Boyz and an empty building that last housed Banana Bay. It currently opens at noon every day, till 8 or 9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 10 p.m. Friday-Saturday and 8 p.m. Sunday. (Old city directories show the space was formerly occupied by Carrigan’s Pharmacy, the Pharmacy Sports Bar and the Big House Sports Bar.)
The only games are on a state lottery machine. There’s no happy hour. (“I’m happy,” Sue said when we asked.) TVs in the afternoon had soap operas and the rerun of a Tigers game. The men’s room is large and clean, with framed ads to look at.
The walls inside VNO include cute wine-related signs, such as “Love the wine you’re with,” “A day without wine isn’t over yet,” “Wine: How classy people get wasted” and “Wine is like duct tape. It fixes everything.”
Thanks, but I’ll stick with the duct tape.
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See Doc’s report: At VNO, an inconvenient (and New Age) veritas
VNO Wine Warehouse
& New Age Restaurant
512 E. Midland
989-460-0116
About this blog ...
We pick a place in or around Bay City, walk in one day (thus avoiding nighttime crowds and potentially loud music), check it out and write about it. It's an excuse to get together for drinks, an excuse to explore the city and an excuse to write.
The hairy guy, a.k.a. Harry, wears glasses and hearing aids that are stylishly color-coordinated with his gray hair, met his wife in a bar, doesn't drink all that much and is moderately friendly. Doc has much less hair, a few more college degrees, a history of drinking a wee bit more and (fair warning) grew up with a pool table in his basement. Harry moved here just because he likes it; Doc grew up here, left and came back.
Want to join us at a bar and write about it? Anything (well, almost anything) goes. You don't have to be a famous author; we can even fix your bad spelling. The only firm rule is that we don't ask for, expect or take any freebies or deals from places we’re writing about. And at least one of us is reasonably able to drive when we leave. If you want to join us (we won't force you to write anything if you don't want to), email barsofbaycity@gmail.com.
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