To take a break from Sugar Week for a moment, I had dinner at Gertrude's in the BMA last night, and the restaurant was promoting its Lobsterama! special, held every Wednesday in August. I guess I was there on the wrong night.

The deal is you can get a 1 1/4 pound lobster either simply steamed ($27.95) or gussied up with crab imperial ($32.95) with all the fixings: mussels, clams, baked potato, coleslaw and corn on the cob.

Call ahead and reserve your lobster, though. They have only so many each night.

The menu also raised an interesting tipping question: how much to tip on deal meals. (I was there for the $10 Tuesday dinners.) The menu suggested 25 to 30 percent. I think you'll be more amenable to that idea if you read the comments from servers under my previous post on tipping creep. On the other hand, if people ignored the suggestion, at least the dining room was full. I guess 15 to 20 percent of a little check is better than 25 to 30 percent of nothing. And Gertrude's has ways of upping the total, like the $11 glass of house merlot.

(Algerina Perna/Sun Photographer)