Time travel with me briefly, won’t you? It’s the early 2010s. A self-serious, 20-something me, fresh out of culinary school, books a trip to San Francisco. While there, I have to eat at one restaurant or I’ll die: flour + water.
I’d just had my epiphany that farm-to-table is better, so of course the scratch-made pastas tossed with Bay Area bounty and barely kissed with, say, giblet ragù, drew me in. As did the notion of this Very Serious Food served on nakedwood tables to a rockish soundtrack played a little too loud, with lighting so low even cool kids couldn’t see the menu, though we’d never admit it. Yet flour + water (no capital letters, thank you very much!) somehow loomed larger than all those details, as if the name itself—down to that plus sign—embodied my particular brand of hipster. This may explain my insufferable decision, made around the same time, to conduct all personal email correspondence exclusively in lowercase type.
At first, flour + water chef-partner Thomas McNaughton hated the name, which his partner David Steele came up with. The duo went several rounds over it—McNaughton from a pay phone in Italy, where he was working at the time. “Then David’s like, ‘Let me show you the logo,’” McNaughton tells me. That’s right, the plus sign got McNaughton too. And apparently plenty of others; f + w has spawned at least a half-dozen replicas since opening in 2009—including one that operated for years outside of copyright infringement reach, in Victoria, Australia.
That’s the thing about trendy restaurant names: You’ll walk down the street and notice that every third restaurant you pass has practically the same name. These days it would seem that they’re all homages to women (as in Dear Margaret in Chicago), possessive first names (Lutie’s in Austin) or irreverently wordy (Plates By the Pound BBQ in Denver). But what makes a restaurant name cool? Does the name beget coolness, or does the coolness have to establish itself first?
“Restaurants are really key in shaping cultural trends at the truly local level,” says Helen Rosner, a New Yorker staff writer and longtime food writer. “Fashion can come down the runway; we can all talk about a certain famous cerulean sweater scene (from The Devil Wears Prada). But the most direct access on a day-to-day basis to the shifting tides of trends is in restaurant culture.”
flour + water (recently rebranded to a more grown-up FLOUR + WATER, because “cool” evolved) certainly wasn’t the first restaurant to dream up an elemental name, much like it wasn’t the first to serve Italian food with a hyperlocal bent or to install maddeningly dim Edison bulbs (McNaughton regrets how that particular trend got so out of hand, by the way). But perhaps no one else timed it so perfectly.
“flour + water had this lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” McNaughton says. “I have theories, but how that lightning hits is still totally unpredictable.” And just like that, every new opening had a declarative ingredient or method name, like “land & sea.” Or “stir.” They were “always self-consciously lower case, often finished with a period or broken up with a plus sign or ampersand because god forbid you use ‘and,’” Rosner says. Each decision suggested the sort of self-effacing minimalism you’d expect on the plate. Before you knew it, “airport kiosks selling garbage turkey wraps were calling themselves bread + green.”
While plus signs and all-lowercase names were printed on what seemed like every restaurant’s window, there were also other trends brewing. If it wasn’t named for an ingredient or a cooking method, every It restaurant seemingly involved a word or two in Italian or French. Compère Lapin, Tartine, Barbuto, Barbuzzo. Wait, are those last two the same?
For the record, Val Safran, the partner at Philadelphia’s Safran Turney Hospitality who named Barbuzzo, did not know there was a restaurant already called Barbuto in New York when she came up with the name for her Mediterranean restaurant. Nor is she all that crazy about it, even though Barbuzzo might be the group’s most beloved restaurant. “It just is like, what does that mean?” she sighs. “I remember ‘buzzo’ meant, like, the belly of a pig in Italian, and ‘bar’ because it was the first time we had a liquor license. It is what it is.” (Editor’s note: buzzo translates more directly to “belly” in Italian.)
Barbuzzo may not have been first (nor especially endeared to its namer), but it seized on a cultural moment of restaurants named in the language of their cuisine—as if to legitimize them in the diner’s mind. Then again, Safran has a knack for naming in the zeitgeist, starting with Mexican restaurant Lolita, which she and chef-partner Marcie Turney opened in 2004, on through Little Nonna’s Italian American and retro Bud & Marilyn’s (named for Turney’s grandparents, who owned a restaurant in Wisconsin). “To me, a name has to roll off someone’s tongue and be memorable,” she says. “Certainly, we go for nostalgia too. But it’s also pretty random.”
McNaughton compares the process to naming a child. And, particularly if you’re an owner-operated indie restaurant on a shoestring budget, it’s no less stressful or financially taxing. Add to that the looming fear that the concept flops and you become the face of the next Fyre Festival. As Rosner says, “you don’t want to give something its own ironic headline.” We can’t help but wince in fear at the ballsy naming choice of the bar UNCOOL in Los Angeles whose status, thankfully, appears to be VERY COOL INDEED.
In decades past, consequential restaurants sported more functional, straightforward names, like the purported first fine-dining restaurant in New York, Delmonico’s, which the Delmonico brothers opened. In San Francisco, Tadich Grill, the restaurant opened by John Tadich in 1887, grills seafood; and the House of Prime Rib—well, you get the idea.
“I think [a restaurant] name is born out of the owner’s hopes and dreams and connections,” says Evan Kleiman, chef, author, and longtime radio host of KCRW’s Good Food in Los Angeles, who operated Angeli Caffe for 27 years. “Given that the primary driver of restaurant marketing these days is storytelling, and often the story that is told is a personal one, the name is a part of that story.”
The name could be a contraction (L.A.’s n/naka, for owner Niki Nakiyama’s first and last name), or denote a meaningful phrase (Mi Tocaya—meaning my namesake—Antojeria in Chicago). Or maybe it means nothing in particular, but a couple of dogs named Penny and Roma were sitting in the conference room when you were on the hook for a name (as was the case for McNaughton’s group’s latest, Penny Roma). If you want to say “fine dining,” maybe the name should simply sound elegant, like Suzanne Goin’s now-closed restaurant Lucques, Kleiman says, employing the dreamy French accent to drive her point home. Or maybe, as Rosner points out, you’re so attuned to the zeitgeist, like New York’s Major Food Group, that you’d prefer to shrug off fine dining and call your place Dirty French.
Rosner—who reports from the nexus of cool, a.k.a. Brooklyn—officially deems nostalgia the vibe once more, as evidenced by the return of Possessive First Name spots like Ernesto’s, Bonnie’s, Mel’s, and Bernie’s. Though she reckons it’s less a trend than a reactionary warm hug of comfort we’re collectively craving due to—well—take your pick: year three of a global pandemic, democracies worldwide teetering on collapse, increasingly dire climate reports.
Our common need for levity might also explain the unmistakable self-awareness and fun that’s taken hold in the form of the slightly absurd (Le Crocodile in Brooklyn) and playfully wordy: All Together Now! in Chicago, Magpie and the Tiger in Washington, D.C., and Here’s Looking at You in L.A. When the latter first opened, “I thought to myself, Well that’s just crazy!” Kleiman says. “But now it actually turned into that, in a way; it’s such a convivial place. And everybody calls it H-Lay, which is in and of itself fabulous. Customers turn everything you do into something else anyway.”
Isn’t that the ultimate goal? That by simply seeing or hearing a restaurant name, we diners can grab hold of—and retain—some moment in time, and everything we loved or aspired to. Then, as we repeat the name over and over, it gradually transcends whatever it was intended to mean in the first place, instead becoming part of the language we share with friends and fellow diners.
flour + water (sorry, FLOUR + WATER) and I may have long since embraced capitalization, but we will never, ever let go of that plus sign. And to this day, nothing makes me swoon quite like a barely sauced pasta on a nakedwood table in unbearably dim lighting.