In case you haven’t seen this already, check out MC Slim’s take on terrible Boston restaurant names. I’ve thought about Mooo myself but never really knew the whole story. He does make a lot of great (hilarious) points but I have to say, …I’ll always love “blunch.”
The word is SUCH a gem.
From MC Slim JB
27 Really Terrible Boston Restaurant Names
Choosing a restaurant name has to be one of the most difficult and significant decisions a new restaurateur has to make. A lot is riding on it: the name represents the only opportunity many potential customers ever get to decide if the restaurant appeals to them in terms of its concept, atmosphere, price, and the other intangible qualities it may connote. So I’m always amazed when a restaurant chooses a really terrible name.
I’m not just talking about the widespread misapplication of bistro and trattoria, though that annoys the deuce out of me. Properly used, those terms denote rather specific forms of relatively humble restaurants in France and Italy, but in the USA, they’re abused to mean practically anything. In Boston, they mostly get slapped on places that are too fancy and expensive to fit the traditional usage, and the offenders on that score are too numerous to mention. Rather, I’m here to cite the garden-variety-stupid, the what-the-hell-were-you-thinking, the where-were-your-friends-when-you-picked-that kind of restaurant naming awfulness.
Read the rest of the post HERE.
Thanks so much for posting this, Jessica! I’m sort of amazed at how widely this got picked up; it’s easily the most popular blog post I’ve ever written (maybe because it’s the silliest).
I did want to point out that I actually love Blunch (as show in my Boston Phoenix review that I link to) and many of the other places I lampoon in the piece. You can have a terrible name and still serve great food.