Matt Orlando: For a restaurant to exist, you need to amass people, ingredients, emotions, ideas — like, all these things have to come together for a restaurant to exist. Therefore you need to amass all of these things.
Jenia Nelisova: I mean, we came up with so many different names. I think at some point we had even thrown out the word “novel", but we couldn't use it because Corona was a novel virus.
Beau Clugston: I mean, every name is stupid until you say it 20 times and see it on paper and see it in the newspaper.
Hello and welcome to the Recipe — a podcast about the new generation of restaurants and the people behind them.
My name’s James Clasper and, in this episode, we’re talking restaurant names
Nick Mash: I don't think I'm particularly, maybe, that good at naming restaurants. I called it The Salisbury as it was on Salisbury Road. The Chamberlayne I called the Chamberlayne because it was on Chamberlayne Road.
Rasmus Christensen: “If it's too weird, too difficult to pronounce or anything like that, well, it doesn't stay on top of our customer's mind.”
Jonathan Tam: “The direct translation is “Yes, thank you” or “Yes, please”, you know. It sounds very polite and it's one of the first things I learned, because that's what we use in the kitchen here in Copenhagen. You know, instead of “Yes, chef” or “Oui, chef”, you say, “Jatak”.”
“What's in a name?” asks the heroine of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Well, up to a point. I mean, it might not matter to Juliet what family name Romeo has.
But restaurant names? They’re a very different kettle of fish.
Much of the time, you see, a restaurant’s name is the very first thing you have to go on.
It’s at the top of the newspaper review. It’s written on the awning or above the door. It’s what you get whenever you ask someone for a restaurant recommendation or two.
And, with apologies to the Bard, even in fair Verona, I imagine diners being picky about any new tavern with a stinker of a name.
So, in this episode, we’re going to hear from a branding strategist who helps restaurants choose the right name.
Amy Dennis: “Naming is probably one of the hardest jobs we encounter, in all honesty. Naming is not easy. It is not simple and it is one of the things that I would say are the most opinion-based decisions that a restaurant owner is going to make.”
But as something of a word nerd, I’ve long been intrigued by restaurant names and I wanted to talk to some owners to find out what their restaurant’s name means and how they came up with it. So in this episode I’d like you to join me on a whistlestop tour of restaurant names.
Among other things, we’ll find out which Latin American eatery gets confused for a Kanye West album, which restaurant took its name from the English-Esperanto dictionary, and which acclaimed chef found the name of his restaurant on a website called Word Hippo.
But to get us going, I want to go back to something Philip Linnemann, of the Copenhagen branding agency Kontrapunkt, told me when I interviewed him for episode five.
We were discussing the various touchpoints that give a restaurant a way to communicate its brand identity, and when I asked him about the name, he said this:
Philip Linnemann: Well, you can say the name is one of the first interactions you have with the brand. So you want to make sure that the name, to some extent, represents the story that you're trying to tell. Then there are some, you can say, more ‘hygiene factors' that you also want to ensure. Like, often it's good with a relatively short name, easy to pronounce, those kinds of things. But the starting point should always be the story. The more personal, the better, I would say.
So, with that in mind, here are three restaurants that I think tick all those boxes.
In a second or two, we’ll hear from two acclaimed chefs in Copenhagen — Jonathan Tam of Jatak followed by Beau Clugston of Iluka.
But let’s kick things off with Nick Mash, who launched two of London’s most successful gastropubs, The Salisbury and The Chamberlayne, in the 1990s, and whose current venture is The Mash Inn, an award-winning “restaurant with rooms”, just outside London. Now, you might think that Nick had named The Mash Inn after himself — but it turns out there’s a rather lovely story about how it got its name, one that began when Nick bought a rundown old pub called The Three Horseshoes.
Nick Mash: One of the big driving factors really was how the internet and everything had come on so much and sites that are so important now for launching — I mean, if not so important, probably the be-all and end-all nowadays — and, you know, being The Three Horseshoes for a very, very long time, and I did want to stick a stick, I did want to make a mark, and I kept looking online at the Three Horseshoes — dreadful reviews, everything was dreadful about it — and I thought, how long is it going to take me, if I call it The Three Horseshoes, to be able to get rid of all of that crap and get people to realise that it's new. So I realised I've just got to start again. I don't want to inherit anyone's shit. I want to create my own and I think that was quite smart because we'd probably still be struggling out of it, and so whatever confusion it caused and people got wherever, it didn't matter. What mattered was this place needed to be reinvented. That’s just the end of it. And then with Dad being unwell and stuff, yeah, just called it — I mean, I know it's my surname too, but much more importantly for me, it was looking at everything that he had done and achieved and the respect and — you know, when he passed away, he was serving chefs with a total of something like 120 Michelin stars. I mean, he was just the most amazing … he just did so much. You speak to Raymond Blanc, or you open Raymond's cookery books and there's a picture of that in the back. He was that guy. You know, without an amazing supplier, which we often find in my kitchen — that's the key and, of course, again, so many people disrespect their suppliers and it’s like — no, without all of it, and if you're that person, then what are you like with your staff? Do you know what I mean? That doesn't make sense. And he taught me that, or I learned that from him, and it only seemed appropriate to name it after him.
Beau Clugston: My name is Beau Clugston. I’m the chef-owner of restaurant Iluka here in Copenhagen. I mean, every name is stupid until you say it 20 times and see it on paper and see it in the newspaper. But when I first created the name, I wanted a short word, a feminine word, something that can be pronounced because it's English. I wanted something that translated in Danish, quite feminine. quite nice. So Iluka or Iluka. It has a double meaning because it also means… I don't like to tell people a lot of things, it's just if they ask, then everything has been thought of. So the name actually means “by the sea” in Aboriginal, native Australian, and in Denmark, we are surrounded by the sea. But it's also one of my first food memories. So Iluka is very close to my hometown of Coffs Harbour, Sawtell, and it's only a few hours’ drive and that's where we used to go camping, surfing, fishing. And it's a national park on the ocean, so Iluka is a very big food memory for me, so it has a double meaning. No names ever come easily. Honestly, we had around five or 10 shortlisted. I had no rules. The only rule I had was nothing to do with my name. Iluka needs to be its own identity. We got down to 10 and then we got down to five, and then the more I kept saying “Iluka”, when I’d seen it on paper, when I had that strong connection to it, the meaning, then I knew it was the right word.
Jonathan Tam: The direct translation is “Yes, thank you” or “Yes, please”, you know. It sounds very polite and it's kind of one of the first things I learned because that's what we use in the kitchen here in Copenhagen. Instead of “Yes, chef” or “Oui, chef”, you say, “Jatak”. So when you're in an intense kitchen environment, like high pressure, you know, saying, “Yes, please” or “Yes, thank you” doesn’t really make sense. But that was like my first Danish word. And then as I learned more with the language, you'd see that it’s used in so many ways. It is used in a very polite way, like, if you serve someone, they just say, “Oh yes, thank you, Jatak”. But then at the same time, you could also be like, “Hey, should we go out and have fun tonight?” You'd be like, “Jatak”, you know? So there's just so many positive ways and I think it’s kind of a fun word that's kind of tying up with how things started here for me.
***
That was Jonathan Tam, of restaurant JATAK, in Copenhagen.
Of course, a restaurant name doesn’t have to be personal.
Sometimes it’s the location that dictates what it’s called.
Nick Fenton: My name is Nick Fenton. I'm the manager-director at restaurant Henne in Moreton-in-Marsh. We derived the name from the town of Moreton-in-Marsh. It used to be called Henne Mersh, which translates loosely to “marsh hen” — old English for “hen”. We chose the name Henne as it kind of relates to the locality of the restaurant, as we're a local, sustainable and ethical business. We thought it had some relevance to keep it as local to the town as possible.
In that light, of course, you could also say that it’s Henne’s concept — being as local as possible — that also inspired its name.
Another good example of the concept dictating the name comes from Ann Lee of the Core restaurant group in Oslo, whose holdings include Mexican restaurants La Mayor and Vaquera Verde.
Ann Lee: One of the most fun aspects of opening a restaurant is that you get to decide on all these things — you know, when you have this sort of board and you come up with all the different names, and some words that you try to use in daily conversation, you see if it works. Then you do research, of course, on has it been used by someone, how would this word look in different contexts. Through people you trust, you ask them and you kind of have this image in your head that starts to form. For example, Vaquera Verde, originally, when I was scheming of an idea of a vegetarian restaurant, I wanted to call it Cowboy Green, and then Cowboy Green was going to be this trendy, plant-based thing, and then on Mission Street, there's this vegan Mexican place called Gracias Madre. And the menu there really made me want to have a Mexican plant-based concept in Oslo. But we wanted to kind of be more feminine, so we changed it to Cowgirl Green, and then in Spanish the closest with Vaquera Verde. So that's kind of where the name came from. And so different names have evolved. La Mayor as well, since we thought Vaquera Verde was the small little sister, La Mayor would be, like the idea in our heads, the big grandma, the big boss. And that's what it means it's kind of like the head don. Like, if you have a mafia family and the grandma at the helm of the family, she is La Mayor. So that's kind of how we imagined the two places.
In a similar vein, Simon Nilsen came up with a lovely name for his restaurant last year — albeit one that breaks Philip Linnemann’s rule about having a name that’s easy to pronounce. Here’s Simon on what I would call restaurant Aster.
Simon Nilsen: So the name came from sea aster, which is a flower growing along the coastline of Norway. It grows only in special environments and is only found in one place, which is by my cabin. And it's rough and robust, but it's delicate, it’s fine. It has a really nice taste to it. We were just sitting and brainstorming names, we just agreed that Aster sounded kind of posh and fine and a little French, but not too posh and, well, not too fine either. We kind of made a mistake. We should add a little apostrophe on top of the E. So we have like Ast-ER, but people call it AS-ter. But technically it is.”
Thinking even more conceptually, Matt Orlando, the owner of Amass, went for a name that reflected the very idea of a restaurant.
Matt Orlando: It's the literal meaning of it — to amass — because, for a restaurant to exist, you need to amass people, ingredients, emotions, ideas — like, all these things have to come together for a restaurant to exist. Therefore you need to amass all of these things. I actually didn't go through many names. I mean, what I did is, I liked the idea of like gathering and I don't know if you've trawled around on Word Hippo? Amazing. But Gather was such a lame name. So I just put it into Word Hippo and all these synonyms came up for it and Amass was one of them. And when I saw it, I was like, “That's it. That's the one.” So only one click on Word Hippo gave me the name.
And Matt wasn’t the only restaurateur I talked to who can thank the internet for his restaurant’s name. Turns out Claus Henriksen landed on the name MOTA following an unsuccessful bid to preserve his anonymity on the world’s best known social network.
Claus Henriksen: I apparently needed to go on Facebook and I really didn't want to. It was because we made internal notes, which we sent to each other, and if we needed to do it for the staff, it was the easiest way to do it. I didn't want to write my name on it. And I did a lot of cooking with hemp and these different things. So we found this word, “Mota”, it’s a slang word in Spanish, for cannabis. And for me, it was a very good thing. It was okay. It simply just stuck. So now it's just called Mota and then actually I liked the name because I think it's simple and it's easy, and our popup was called Atom, which was just switched around. There’s so many words in these things.
Music to my ears, Claus. Music to my ears. There are indeed so many words in these things. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention to our episode titles, you may be aware that I’m fond of puns.
But when it comes to restaurant names, I’m ambivalent. I mean, it’s one thing for a bakery to call itself Bread Pitt, or a florist to land on Back to the Fuchsia.
But restaurants with punning names? Well, it implies a degree of mirth that I don’t always want to go into the making of my food.
In general, then, I think it’s better to err on the side of caution and go for more subtle wordplay — as the following two Copenhagen restaurants do.
André Rossi-Tryde: My name is André Rossi-Tryde. I'm the co-founder of The Sixteen Twelve and Cadence restaurants in Copenhagen. When I was thinking about the concept for what became Cadence, the question was always: we've done The Sixteen Twelve, which was a crazy experiment to see if we could do this, so what would be the next step, the next kind of iteration of that? And obviously we knew that it had to reflect us as people. We knew that something really important to us was music, but how do you kind of communicate that in a way that also says “brunch”? For me, at least, it was really easy to come to the point where I was like, “Okay, it needs to be about some sort of a musical term or activity, that also has a duality that really people can connect with, in a lot of ways”. So “cadence” came up. I had it in my mind for a while. Obviously, it means the rhythm of emotion or activity. In cycling, it means the pedaling pace. And so that's the musical side of it. When you apply that to people's lives, life has a cadence. People have rhythms, they have rituals throughout their day. A lot of people will wake up and they know exactly what they're going to do for the first 30 minutes of the day because they do the same thing every day. That is cadence.
Rasmus Christensen: My name is Rasmus Christensen. I'm one of the co-founders out of six of Pico, which is a pizzeria with two pizzerias in Copenhagen. In a language called Esperanto, it means pizza. So we looked into that and we could also see that pico is a very small number, so our pizzas are small as well. So that was, “okay, that’s two things there” and suddenly you see the contraction of pizza and Copenhagen, the two first letters of each word, and then “boom”, that was just three things. That's perfect. Let's go with it. And three is a lucky number as well, right? And three pizzas when you order the Pico Trio and, like, oh my God, that's just perfect. A name is important for a restaurant, because the first thing is, if it's too weird or too difficult to pronounce or anything like that, well, it doesn't stay on top of our customer's mind, but it also has to kind of mean something special to the business. It's a lot of Googling. It's just a process of when you suddenly there's been like a hundred names before that we’ve been trying, once someone gets an idea and someone's really excited about something, but people are going like, “Nah, it’s not really good”. But when you finally hit that one and everyone says, “Yeah, that makes sense”, then you know that's fine. Then the second stage starts because if you write Pico, you can write Pico in a thousand different ways,right? And that can change the perception of how you see the logo and the name itself. Should you be called Pico Pizza or is it just Pico? Or is it the Pico Pizzeria? Should you write Pico Pizza Copenhagen or like, et cetera?
All good questions — and ones that the next speaker thought he had answered when he chose a short, sweet name for his Latin American eatery back in 2019.
Qasim Khan: My name is Qasim Khan. I'm the head chef and owner of Donda. So Donda is a Kanye West album…. So, a while back I was involved in a project where I wanted to call it Donda. I think I just searched for rare names, women’s names and then Donda showed up and I was like, “That's a pretty nice name.” And it kind of stuck in my head and I did not know Kanye's mother was named Donda, and then we bought this place and I told my partner, “I think we should call it Donda”, because there's no other eatery or restaurant in Europe, or anywhere, called Donda. It's also a name that, let's say, in a couple of years, we wanted to open a new place... Donda could also be an Indian name, or you could call an Indian restaurant Donda, or you could call a Japanese restaurant Donda. So it's quite hard to pinpoint its origins and that for me is nice. And of course that no one on Instagram back then was called Donda. So for us, the hashtag Donda was about us, not a fucking album. So yeah, that was it. And it's a Senegalese name, I think. A lady's name. We had an old Senegalese lady who walked past and saw we called it Donda and she showed me her passport and she was named Donda, and she had never met anyone who was called that. She thought it was super nice that we called it that. Marketing-wise, it was just super easy. It looks nice and it's easy to say and if you have a simple, unique name on Instagram, then it's also pretty easy to kind of make that happen. We had a couple of reviews on our Google saying, “Thank you, this album was super nice.” Jesus, man, we have nothing to do with that. The only thing I regret is that we called it Donda CPH, like Copenhagen. We should just call it Donda because .. yeah, fuck that. Now I think Kanye has a copyright on that in America, but whatever.
Copyright concerns aside, Qasim is sticking with Donda — as he should — and has plans to open a spinoff deli, called, yes, Donda Deli.
Of course, there are times when it makes sense to change a name. As we heard earlier, Nick Mash changed the name of the pub he bought from The Three Horseshoes to the Mash Inn to avoid having his new restaurant associated with all the negative reviews racked up by the previous owners.
And if you decide to change the cuisine or the concept, a new name makes sense too.
That’s what happened when the owners of Souls, a Copenhagen-based restaurant that specialises in plant-based food, decided to elevate its cuisine and rebrand itself as Ark. Here’s Jenia Nelisova, the restaurant’s creative director, whom we met in episode five.
Jenia Nelisova: Sometimes you might have, like, the worst name, but it just sticks with people and once you’ve built a brand around it, it doesn't matter anymore. In some ways, a name doesn't really mean much, once you've created something that people like. I mean, you can be called Eggplant for all I care, and that works. But, as we were maturing, and as we were figuring out also that, if we're going to do this, we're going to do this right from all ends and we're going to do the branding right, and we're really gonna have it as a neat little package, when we were talking about renaming here, I mean, we came up with so many different names. I think at some point we had even thrown out the word “novel", but we couldn't use it because Corona was a novel virus. I mean, we went back and forth so many times and then it was maybe even, I want to say a week before we were supposed to, not open, but we were supposed to at least have a decision made so that we could get the signage done, we could have our website open, so much was resting on this name, and the chefs had prepared a pitch and everything, it was so cute, and they came with a piece of paper ready, like a school presentation. But the moment he set down the paper that said “Ark”, they didn't need to present anything. We just knew right then and there. Like, that's perfect. It's three letters. It's short. It has such a history. We're not religio us at all, so we don't look at it from that sort of perspective. We look at it more as a vessel that preserves life. And so it was spot on. And a lot of the logo work that went into that afterwards also happened very organically and quite quickly. The entire visual identity that grew out of that was, I mean, it was like all our dominoes aligned. I don't know the expression, but that one, everything just lined up for us.
***
That was Jenia Nelisova of restaurant Ark. And I think Jenia makes an interesting point about names — that it may be the worst name, but if it just sticks with people and you’ve built a brand around it, it no longer matters. In other words, in that respect at least, a rose by any other name really does smell as sweet.
But why take the risk of getting it wrong?
And that’s where today’s main guest enters the picture.
Amy Dennis is the founder of Nice Branding Agency. Based near Nashville, Tennessee, it provides a range of services from business branding to marketing strategy.
But what caught my eye was their body of work in restaurant branding — and restaurant name development, in particular.
According to their website, the Nice Branding Agency “combines industry research with brand strategy to create options for a restaurant name that will roll off the tongue.”
To find out how they go about this, I called Amy recently and began by asking her how her agency had carved out a niche branding restaurants.
Amy: We had a few restaurant clients and then that kind of snowballed into some others and then some others and then some others. And then we found ourselves really loving that space. So we spent a couple of years just honing in on restaurants and perfecting our process and our operations to where we could essentially position a restaurant, name a restaurant, build all the materials needed to go to market, from logo to website to menus, anything that's needed from a print standpoint, looking at how things are served, what things are being served, what the staff is wearing, what maybe happens after the visit and then also the interior. So, we really just kind of developed this whole entire, what we call, just branding a restaurant and all the steps that you need to go through with a branding team. And it's been great.
Superb: Let me play the devil's advocate or be the potential client who comes and has a meeting and says, “I hear what you're saying, but, you know, why should I care about branding my restaurant? You know, I'm a good cook. Why can’t I just open it and get on with it?”
Amy: You know, I've always wanted to do this experiment. I always wanted to do it. I want to open up two restaurants, like exactly the same location, exactly the same food, and brand one, and leave the other to whatever and see what happens to prove that point. Because I don't think I can … I'm very accurate and meticulous and reasonable and I don't know that I can just prove it by saying, “Hey, branding does matter”. But I mean, experience and the visual culture that we live in today, you're going to get ROI on your brand, it's just not exactly tactically measurable as other kinds of metrics are in business. You do have only one chance to make a first impression and that's really, I think, where the brand comes into play because if you can impact somebody when they walk in with a brand or hit them in the right position as they visit your website or come to your social channels, that's all brand, you know? That's all kind of the experience that people are feeling and seeing and what they're thinking about your restaurant. If you don't do that, you may have lost them for good. If you do that well, they may go tell five to 10 people about your concept and how great it was and how cool it is and they need to go check it out. So that's really the power of a brand. I do think people are successful with restaurants without branding. But I do think that there's kind of this trifecta of restaurant success and it has to be good food, good operations and good brand. And a lot of people just overall confuse the terminology of the brand. They think it's a logo or they think it's, you know, a combination of their logo and their colours and their fonts. But really, it’s anything. Anything at all that comes in contact with the consumer and it's about how that makes the consumer feel. So you, as the restaurant owner, have the power to influence how people feel, but you must do it through the avenues of brand — which are multiple avenues.
Superb: Talk me through some of the steps and the questions and the processes that you go through with customers to determine a name.
Amy: Naming is probably one of the hardest jobs we encounter, in all honesty. Naming is not easy. It is not simple and it is one of the things that I would say are the most opinion-based decisions that a restaurant owner is going to make. What we have found over the years with naming is that it's not about naming, it's about positioning. It's about the foundation. It's about the purpose. It's about the story. It's about the narrative. It's about what the position of this restaurant is in the world. Why does it matter to people? And that must first be determined to successfully name. So we have a process called foundational branding, where we sit down with our customer and lead them through a session that oftentimes is three hours, oftentimes is three days. It just depends on the amount of substance that is there that we need to absorb. So we learn everything about them that we can: their past, their future, their goals, their target market, what they're serving, how they're going to serve it. Everything we can figure out about them — their competition — you know, is this going to be a one-restaurant location or is our goal to grow from five to 20, to a hundred? Like, learning everything we can. So we walk them through those questions. That really gives us a really good idea of what's in their head and what they're seeing. Then we take it in and do our own internal research, looking at the market, the competition, what's around, different people within that same genre of food. And then we put together a positioning statement, which is a one-liner. We put together brand attributes, which is how internally your brand is going to act so that externally people see that. We put together descriptive paragraphs, a brand story, and a few other foundational verbal statements. And then we do visual directions. So our visual directions are in the industry known as mood boards, but they are three different boards that visually articulate a feeling and a sense and an aura for your brand. So once we have that verbal branding done, and we have that visual direction selected, the client will select one of those. They will all work, but they will select one that gives them input without taking us off-course. We kind of have the foundation for the brand and who it is and what is. Then we can name, right? Then we can use words that start that story or are a good vessel for holding that story or that position.
Superb: Is it always the case that there are different push and pull factors for each customer or each client? For some, it may be about honing in on a personal story that will provide the name, or for others it’s about finding a name that works to sell the cuisine. Does it have to be a name that's going to work well on a business card or with a logo? There are always lots of different factors right on the table. How do you kind of sort through them all and decide which ones have priority in which ones matter less?
Amy: All of that is very true. There's always some kind of angle that we're looking for. The good thing about our naming process is once we've gotten all the information we need to get, we summarise that to our team. So our team is built up of multiple age groups, diverse interests. We go over that with our entire team. So our entire team is all hands on deck for naming because we need as many ideas as possible. Once we do that, everyone has time to sit and think, to dream, let it be in their heads, see what comes to them. Once we have given the proper amount of time for kind of just brainstorming in our own creative mind, we all come back to the table and everybody throws their names into the hat. So we typically cover a wall with, you know, everyone may come with eight names, 12 names, I don't know how many, but I mean, there have been times when we've covered an entire wall with a hundred name options. Everyone’s telling the name, telling the words, what’s behind it, what it means, why they chose it, that type of thing. So then from there we really start paring down and, you know, we're looking for clarity. A name has to be clear. You have to be able to say it. You don't want it to be said one way or this way or that way. We want to make sure that there's not a lot of room for pronunciation situations because that's just gonna dilute the brand over time. We're trying to find something that's memorable but something that's just going to stick. Something that's very interesting, something that's gonna make somebody take a second look when they hear it. And then also, is there anything that we can think of that might shift this the other way? Is there anything that could be wrong? What are the problems with this name? And we kind of just start scratching it down, eliminating as many as we can, that we can see issues with. And typically at the end, we're left with a handful of names. And then that's when we kind of do voting, internal voting, and the ones that win are the ones that are presented. We narrow it down to three. Once those are selected, that's where we really start looking into domain names and then looking into, is there another company named this? We run it through the dictionary — the Urban Dictionary — just to make sure there are no meanings that we're not thinking of that might come back to us later. And then we just do a general trademark check for it. That's really what our process looks like and that's how we get to the names we come up with. And then one thing that’s really important in our process is, we always feel if there's something cool to a name, we can figure out a way to twist it, to make it work, around those speed bumps or hindrances that we may come up against. You know, in all honesty, what I've seen with naming from the projects that we've done, sometimes of the three names, there's not a winner in there, but it spurs the client on to the right name. So they start thinking in different ways and they say, “Okay, I love these names, but this is the one I want to go with”, but they would have never gotten to that one without the work of our team. So I think that's really important to note too. I think that, as much as people think, “Oh, hey, I'm coming in and I'm paying you for a service and I want you to nail it for me,” it really is a partnership. A lot of what we do is a partnership and it's not necessarily always going to be perfect the first time, as much as we strive to, just because it is an opinion-based, you know, subjective service that we're offering.”
***
That was Amy Dennis on strategies for coming up with the right name for a restaurant.
And, as Amy says, the keyword here is subjective.
At the end of the day, you see, there’s no magic formula for coming up with a name — and you can’t please all the people all the time.
There will always be someone who doesn’t like your name or who can’t pronounce it.
That said, I’m all in favour of names that help tell a restaurant’s story, that match the cuisine or concept, that reflect the location, and that engage in a little wordplay.
Oh, and here’s a tip — if you are thinking of naming a restaurant any time soon, go with a one-word name.
Of the World’s 50 Best restaurants, no fewer than 30 have just single-word names, including eight of the top 10.
And that brings us to the end of this month’s episode.
Next month, we’ll be talking about the relationship between the kitchen and the dining room with an industry legend who works at an acclaimed restaurant whose name breaks most of the rules discussed in this episode.
Garrey Dawson: Everybody has an opinion. Everybody has a feeling. Everybody has an eye. And everybody should be a part of that. And it's because everybody has this, that we can, you know, create something that's a little bit different.
In the meantime, if you want to read more about Nick Mash’s fascinating career in the UK hospitality industry, head over to superbexperience.com, where you’ll find the latest in our profiles series, The Specials.
This episode was written, produced and hosted by me, James Clasper, for Superb.
If you’ve enjoyed listening to it, help us get the word out by sharing it with your friends, family and co-workers. Many thanks again for joining me, I’ll see you next time.
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