Tom’s Seafood in Lakewood Expands Its Offerings Under New Owners

Since the late 1990s, Tom’s Seafood, at 767 South Xenon Court, has been a favorite local spot in Lakewood for picking up fresh fish and more. These days, the store is on its third set of owners — Maggie and Apos Kourakis — and has been rebranded as Tom’s Seafood & Gourmet Market to better fit the couple’s desire to bring more worldly flavors to the shop, which they frequented for years before taking the reins.

Just over two years ago, Maggie and Apos, both geoscientists and culinary fans who had long dreamed of opening a Mediterranean market, decided that owning the local gem was their next chapter. “When we bought it, the focus was primarily on fish, which it still is, but we’ve definitely grown the gourmet side of it,” Maggie explains. “We wanted to make it more of an international market.”

Shelves in the store are lined with foods like kombucha, kimchi, honey, chicken stock and more, and a great deal of its products come from local vendors.

Additionally, Tom’s offers goodies made in-house, like clam chowder and smoked salmon, and it's currently dabbling in fresh produce such as morels, as well; the couple has installed several shelves and freezers to house the new selection of items. Apos adds that a lot of them are goods that “you can’t really find anywhere else in Denver.”

But fret not, lovers of the original Tom’s, as the new owners have held on to the original store’s large offering of fresh seafood, with a massive case filled with fish, crabs, mussels and more — much of which is flown in directly from the coasts and is never frozen.

“It’s ever-evolving,” Maggie says of bringing more vendors into the fold, noting that she and Apos spend “hours” taste-testing products to make sure they’re the right fit for the store, even involving previous owners in the process. “It’s grown pretty organically,” she adds.

“It’s all specially curated by us,” Apos notes. “We have such little space that we try it all, and we’re like, ‘This is good,’ and we put it out there.”

The duo has hopes to expand someday, whether that means adopting the neighboring space and knocking down some walls, or moving into a bigger location altogether.

“We have people every day walk by and say, ‘You know, I’ve driven past here for twenty years and never walked in,’” Maggie says. “I would love to be on the main street [Alameda] or something like that. And I’d love to have at least twice the amount of space that we have now.”

Additionally, Maggie and Apos have talked about potentially opening a lunch counter to add to Lakewood’s food scene, with dreams of serving po’boys, ceviche and poke.

But so far, she says, being a small business owner has been “amazing." She gushes, “I feel like a lot of our customers are our friends, too,” noting that the couple lives nearby. “It is our neighborhood; it is our community, and it’s nice to feel like a big part of it.”
Being in Lakewood for such a long time, the store has amassed quite a following, and with quality products, Maggie and Apos are even seeing customers cross state lines to get their hands on some of the selections, while locals often come in several times a week. “It’s amazing to see how many fans we have that started as customers of Tom’s [the original owner],” Maggie notes.

Concludes Apos: “Then you have people who became rabid fans of the last owners and they’re still coming in, and then you have the ones, of course, that we’ve brought, so there are generations of customers, and it’s kind of neat."