Tomas Tatar is a tartare spokesman now, because his name is close enough

© Provided by The Gazette Tomas Tatar promotes some tartare (this works better if you read the caption out loud).

First things first: there are only two canonical pronunciations of Tomas Tatar — the correct one and the “TATAARRRRRRRR” version that local fan Derek Toulouse went viral for shouting a couple years ago.

Neither of those versions are all that close to “tartare,” but you’ll surely concede that they’re closer than, say, Romanov, Price or Kotkaniemi.

Thus, with a thudding sense of inevitability, we bring you news that Tatar is doing a tartare promotion for a local restaurant chain.

For each goal Tatar scores, Küto Restaurants will give customers a discount on the “tuna tatar” (get it?), according to a post on the forward’s Instagram . If you’re wondering how much tartare that might involve, Tatar has topped 20 goals in both of his full seasons with the Habs — one of which was abridged due to the pandemic.

There’s also a contest in which you can win one of 50 pucks signed by the forward.

Tatar’s involvement with the brand dates back nearly a year, when they first introduced the menu item that is maybe, kind of, almost named after him.

Having established that the Tatar-tartare similarity is enough to get a long-running promotional campaign, we should expect a variety of foods riffing on Canadiens’ names to appear any day now:

That’s something we can all look forward to.