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.

So, herewith are a few notably bad Boston restaurant names from my personal Hall of Shame:

• Mooo... -- A romantic luxury steakhouse making a cutesy, lame joke at cows' expense? And WTF kind of omission does that ellipsis represent? Maybe, "Mooo..., despite the tee-hee name, is located in XV Beacon, a $500-a-night Beacon Hill boutique hotel, and is every bit as costly and pretentious as you therefore might expect.”

• Prose -- Actually a pretty good chef-owned small restaurant in Arlington, but the name leads you to expect the prosaic, not the lyrical, on the plate. This bit of self-sabotage is matched only by the chef's famously grumpy attitude toward customers.

• Blunch -- A terrific little South End breakfast/lunch place that sounds uncomfortably close to onomatopoeia for vomiting.

• KO Prime -- Winner for Most Ironic Name, as this expensive Downtown hotel steakhouse does not serve prime-grade beef, but the same choice-grade meat you can buy plastic-wrapped in Styrofoam trays at Johnnie's Foodmaster.

• BOKX 109 -- "I know, honey, let's go to that cheesy 'Vegas-style steakhouse' in Newton named after a slaughterhouse term for a carcass container." “Oooh, yum-o!”

• No Name -- The retirees on cut-rate package tours dining by the busload at this Waterfront tourist trap of a shore-food joint probably don't appreciate the dull irony of this moniker.

• Basta Pasta – You'd think a pasta specialist would want to signal its abundant portions. "Nope! We're just Enough Pasta!”

• Big Papi's Grille –Red Sox slugger David Ortiz is one of the most lovable sports personalities in Boston history, in no small part thanks to his epic contributions to ending the local nine's 86-year championship drought. But I think it was a mistake to telegraph his involvement in this place, as anyone with a lick of dining-out experience knows that restaurants owned by athletes usually underwhelm. Predictably, the reviews have been mediocre.

• Strip-T's – It's hard to bust on a modest indie restaurant in Watertown, the kind of place that serves good American food with nothing over $15, but that name makes me gnash my teeth. Nobody equates hoochie dancing with fine dining.

• Chung King Rick's Cafe -- A pitiable Billerica brown-sauce American-Chinese restaurant/townie bar, filled with customers who seem equally desperate for and hopeless of escape. "Of all the greasy-eggroll joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

• Boloco – This small local burrito chain didn't bother me until a fellow Chowhound pointed out that the name can be read as “bollock-o”. I'll wager that, despite the current rage in Boston for offal, the owners weren't trying to evoke the image of bull testicles. (The true etymology isn't much more appealing, an abbreviation of “Boston Local Company.” Bleh.)

• uBurger – Actually a not-bad pun in the making (the German “über”, indicating superiority, crossed with “burger”), but nobody pronounces it as anything but “you-burger”.

• Violators of my “dubious possessives in restaurant names” bugbear -- I documented this nagging peeve of mine on my blog entry, "But There Is No Mr. L'Espalier!". To quote that essay: “Is there really a Mr. Soya at Soya’s? Does a Ms. Zebra sit on the board of Zebra’s Bistro? I’d love to believe there’s a Pepper Sky running Pepper Sky’s Thai Sensation – she sounds like the star of a 1960s TV show about a secret agent who favors Mod fashions – but I suspect the truth is duller.” Add Harvard Square Spanish/South American/Central American whatsis Conga's to this shamefully growing list.

• Island Hopper – A pretty passable Back Bay restaurant with a fun pan-Asian menu, but I wonder whether its Indonesian owner is aware of the usage of "hopper" in some quarters as slang for “toilet”.

• Mamagoo's – Why call out a humble Fresh Pond sub shop? Because it used to be called “Mr. Magoo's”, presumably until it got a cease-and-desist letter from the lawyers at Columbia Pictures, which owns the old cartoon character. Change one letter, drop a period, and voila! You're no longer violating copyright law -- now you're “Mamagoo”. Um, ew.

• Smoken' Joe's – I haven't tried this Brighton barbecue joint yet, but I cringe at that misbegotten spelling. I have to assume that “Smokin'” was taken, but that alternative looks dumber than Snooki.

• Stork Club – I imagine this South End spot would like to attract the same multi-racial clientele that flocked to its predecessor, Bob's Southern Bistro. Guess it overlooked the fact that the original Stork Club, one of New York's most famous cafe-society nightclubs, was notoriously inhospitable to African-American celebrities. Oops. (Tip of the hat to esteemed fellow Boston Phoenix restaurant critic Robert Nadeau for spotting this unfortunate irony.)

• Thaitation – A fine little Thai storefront in the Fenway with a nearly nonsensical tongue-twister of a name. What does the “-tation” stand for? Citation? (Might make sense, given the nearby parking situation.) Mutation? (Not so appetizing.) A play on “titration”? (Ugh: not a chem lab term!) Puzzling.

• Pu Pu Hot Pot – A serviceable, very reasonably priced American-Chinese place in Central Square, but honestly, do we need to give twelve-year-olds another reason to snigger?

In the Stupid and Bygone category:

• T.J. Scallywaggle's -- Winner, Cognitive Dissonance Division. Sounded like the kind of hideous chain restaurant that serves Steak Quesadilla Towers and Shrimp Poppers, was actually a vegan pizzeria. Its also-a-vegan-pizzeria successor Peace o' Pie may have a groaner of a pun for a name, but at least it's consistent with the presumed leftie-activist sensibilities of its owners and customers.

• Apocrypha – As the name suggests, this extremely precious Needham restaurant has since been expunged from the canon of still-operating establishments.

• INQ -- An awful Newbury Street restaurant with an equally-awful name, though not as gobsmackingly imbecilic as its successor, Luigi and Roscoe's @ INQ (also mercifully closed.) The legacy of naming inanity in this location continues to this day with Cafeteria, which reflects the owners' mistaken impression that putting air quotes around the name of a would-be chic hangout serving $12 Pineapple Cosmos is ever-so-fascinatingly droll.

In the Not As Dumb As It Sounds category:

• Moby Dick – I'd originally guessed that this Persian kabob joint near Symphony Hall was a seafood place in its prior incarnation, and the owners simply were too cheap to get a new sign. Wrong: it turns out there's a famous restaurant in Tehran by this name, which also inspired the popular DC-area Moby Dick House of Kabobs chain.

• Bull McCabe's -- The name of this sweet little Irish pub in Union Square (Somerville) sounded to me like the kind of casual-dining hellhole that Anthony Bourdain would call "TGI McFunster's". This just proves I'm not so well-read: in fact, it refers to the protagonist of beloved Irish author John B. Keane's play The Field.

• Lord Hobo -- Several friends urged me to flay the name of this Cambridge beer-geek bar for verging on mocking the homeless, but I consider it a different animal. To me, it evokes a quaint, possibly rural British pub, echoing an ancient English tradition of consciously quirky public-house names. Further, I admire its marketing effectiveness: the name alone has engendered a lot of discussion, which I'll speculate was partly the owner's intent. In other words, deliberately vs. unintentionally unseemly is a non-trivial distinction.

At least Bostonians can take solace in the fact that, despite the howlers I've cited here, we have nothing as patently, crudely nudge-nudge-haw-haw as Crabby Dick's (a Delaware seafood shack), Phat Phuc Noodle Bar (a London Vietnamese restaurant which I'm certain was not named to honor its literal translation, “Happy Buddha”), or The Money Shot (a Chicago comfort food joint). As for my not making any more cheap jokes here, you're welcome.

The 2009 Devil's Dining Awards

I handed out a lot of recognition to Boston restaurants and bars in 2009: the annual Stuff Magazine Dining Awards; a Boston-centric “Ten Worst Dining Trends of the Decade” essay; and "2009: The Year in Cheap Eats", a year-end best-of list from my "On the Cheap" column for The Boston Phoenix. Seems like there's never enough room to shower kudos on every restaurant that deserves it: ditto the loud raspberries that ought to be sprayed at the crass, the ridiculous, the fraudulent and the shameless. But my blog has no space constraints or gentler-minded editors, so herewith I present a few more citations at year's end: call them the Devil's Dining Awards.

• Best new cocktail trend. Authentic Tiki drinks. Forget about Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong and Mai Tais at suburban Polynesian restaurants: craft cocktail bars like Drink and Eastern Standard are reviving the authentic, 30s-vintage Tiki-bar mixology of Don the Beachcomber and his heirs. This is not a trivial endeavor, requiring house-made infused syrups, fresh juices, and many obscure spirits and non-alcoholic ingredients, including a battery of unusual rums, pimiento dram, Cherry Heering, Velvet Falernum, etc. But the results are breathtakingly complex, beautiful, and potent. Kitsch plus craft equals serious fun.

• Worst new cocktail trend. Bars aping the trappings of craft cocktail bars and speakeasies but forgetting to bring the craft. Golden Age cocktails on your drinks menu, Prohibition era décor, and passwords at the door aren't enough. Building a real craft cocktail program demands training, hard work, study, and commitment, much like a fine-dining kitchen. Here's a hint: if you don't know how to consistently make a decent Sazerac, what glass it should be served in, why you might use Cognac instead of rye, and why the hospitality with which you serve it is as important as how well you make it, you're a faker with a very short shelf life. Here's another hint: if local cocktail maven Lauren Clark of the inestimable drinkboston.com isn't writing favorably about you, you probably suck.
  

• Saddest budget-restaurant closings. Oran Café, a homestyle Moroccan restaurant in East Boston that only lasted for an eyeblink; Uncle Pete’s, a fine little purveyor of barbecue in Revere that could not survive its owner/pitmaster's passing this year; Rangoli, the Allston restaurant that introduced dosas and other South Indian specialties to Boston; Reef Café, a fantastic Syrian joint in Allston that was the definition of family restaurant: mom in the kitchen, son out front; and Poppa B’s, the Mattapan soul food standout that served Boston's best fried chicken (and by extension its best chicken & waffles) – but at least will survive as a Codman Square takeout place.

• Worst trend for occasion diners. The death of the restaurant dress code. Nowhere in Boston does this hurt worse than at L'Espalier, whose new landlord, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, nixed a longstanding jackets-required rule. You can now spend $400 commemorating your silver wedding anniversary while staring at a table full of louts bedecked in Ed Hardy ballcaps, t-shirts, jeans and sneakers. One hopeful counter-trend, as recently reported in a New York Times feature, is that a younger generation, taking cues from pop-culture touchstones like Mad Men, is finding that a slightly nattier style distinguishes them favorably from older schlubs who can't be bothered to don a jacket. Here's hoping that inclination gains momentum: no one needs to see tracksuits and hoodies when they're dropping a bundle on a big-number birthday dinner.

• Local restaurant blog of the year. The tandem of Boston Restaurant Talk and Boston's Hidden Restaurants, a trove of restaurant reviews, discussion boards, and news of Boston-area restaurant openings and closings. Required reading for anyone obsessed with finding (and writing about) hidden gems in Greater Boston. Marc also does a great job of covering restaurants in lesser-known stretches of New England beyond the 128 beltway.

• Proof that the South End is over. The March arrival of Stephi’s on Tremont, an injection of bleached-blond Newbury Street faux-glamour into a once-colorful ‘hood already overrun with white-bread Chads and Muffys. Meanwhile, atmospheric inky-hipster hangout Pho Republique, an original trailblazer on now-restaurant-lined Washington Street, closed after eleven years of upholding the neighborhood's artier, funkier, more multi-culti heritage. Sic transit gloria.

• Best replacement for a departed star. Trina’s Starlite Lounge. Cambridge and Somerville heshers and hipsters alike lamented the death of the Abbey Lounge, a unique hybrid of townie dive and live indie-rock club. Then an all-star lineup from renowned neighborhood-bars-with-great-food (like Silvertone, Highland Kitchen, and Audubon Circle) stepped in to create a retro-cool haven of lawnmower beers and casual Southern-inflected cuisine. Manny, I mean, Abbey Who?

• Nose Cut Off, Face Spited Award. To the former landlord of Bella Luna, the Milky Way Lounge & Lanes, and Zon’s, whose 85% rent increase convinced Bella Luna and the Milky Way to relocate (sans tenpin lanes) to a splendid new space in The Brewery complex, and forced Zon’s out of business. Cunning revenue-enhancement plan there, fella.

• Best use of a potato (tie). Tater tots at Garden at the Cellar and potato pancakes at Café Polonia. The lowly kiddie-meal croquette and the usually-soggy hash brown get exalted treatment at these two underpraised spots. In both cases, the result is ungreasy, crunchy outside, creamy inside -- tasty enough to mitigate a thousand freezer-case insults. Spuds got respect.

• Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial “Hell is Other People” Award. To Lord Hobo, for the licensing tribulations it endured from its abutting neighbors and the City of Cambridge, who apparently believe that all bars should close at 10pm and only serve food. We presume these folks have forgotten the Windsor Tap, the frightening drug bar that used to occupy the spot where Lord Hobo now serves fine food, classy cocktails, and what may be Greater Boston's best lineup of craft beers. Ingrates.

• Foie Gras Poutine Award for Extraordinary Food in an Unlikely Setting. To Pupuseria Mama Blanca, a superb little Salvadoran joint in a remote residential corner of Eastie, further camouflaged by operating in a space that looks like someone's house. Easy to miss it, but don't.

• Best actual poutine. The so-called “mix grill sausages” at Pops Restaurant in the South End, which tops beautiful hand-cut fries with cheese curds, short ribs, and sausages of rabbit, duck and wild boar. With too much quality in the ingredients and refinement in the preparation to be mistaken for the classic cheapie Québécois drunk food, it still hits all the requisite animal-fat-laden, guilty-pleasure notes. Fernet-Branca, please!

• Most Biblical disaster. The January fire that destroyed an entire block of beloved independent restaurants: Thornton’s Fenway Grill, Umi Japanese Cuisine, Sorento’s Italian Gourmet, The Greek Isles, Rod Dee Thai II, and El Pelón Taqueria. The fact that no one was hurt is small comfort to devastated owners and bereft locals. If there is a God, he’s an angry God, one who probably dines at Applebee’s. (Some faith-restoring news: a long-delayed rebuilding program for the block is apparently back on track.)

• Most lopsided hotness-to-skills ratio. The bar staff at Whiskey Park: undeniably fetching, but seemingly hired with mixology experience optional. With luck, your stylin’ barmaiden’s $300 hairdo, bewitching décolletage, and almost hoohoo-level hemline will distract you from the fact that your $14 Manhattan is as warm as bathwater, and possibly made with gin.

• Tom Brady Award for Best Upgrade at a Position. To Coppa Enoteca, the Italian small-plates spot that just opened in the South End in the former home of The Dish. The latter was a lovable but uneven little neighborhood joint that eked out an existence from its great patio and spillover trade from the Franklin Café across the street. Judging from the consistently amazing food (with house-made salumi and pastas a highlight), terrific cocktails (making the most of a beer/wine/cordial license), and early patronage by seemingly every chef in town, it's hard to imagine how Coppa's team of Ken Oringer (owner), Jamie Bissonnette (chef), and Courtney Bissonnette (GM) doesn’t repeat its flaming success at Toro.

• Most deserving of a wake-up call. Any restaurant in 2010 that still has a busy, gimmicky, Flash-heavy website. If you have a slow-loading video for a top-level landing page, your web designer has sold you a bill of goods: Web surfers have hated that hokum for ten years now. If diners can't access it on an iPhone or Blackberry, your whizzy, music-playing, over-animated website is putting you behind the times – and deflecting potential customers.

• Smartest decision by a big local chain. Legal Sea Foods' hiring of Patrick Sullivan, former owner of The B-Side Lounge and a major progenitor of Boston's craft cocktail revival, as its beverage program manager. That's good for Legal, and good for anyone who wants to see serious cocktails brought to a wider audience.

• Wrong Place, Wrong Time Award. To Guillaume Schmitt, food/beverage manager at Sensing Restaurant, the Fairmont Battery Wharf's pricey, pedigreed French restaurant, who greeted a guest wandering around the bar looking for help with a snarling “Go wait back at the front door!” That guest turned out to be Mat Schaffer, the Boston Herald's lead restaurant critic, who duly name-checked Schmitt to lead his review of Sensing. Oopsie.

• Most wished-for return. Copley Square's charming food stand Jack & the Bean Bowl, which brought some much-needed al fresco deliciousness to the stodgy and street-food-averse Back Bay. Their summertime run of serving up fresh, tasty, cheap bowls of vegetarian and vegan beans, rice and fixings was way too brief. Come back, Jack!

• Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy Award. To the Brothers Andelman of Phantom Gourmet fame (Dan, Dave and Mike, a/k/a Smarmy, Greasy, and Bobbleheady), for their lucrative whoring on behalf of their TV show’s advertisers. This kind of naked money-grubbing ineptly fig-leafed as unbiased reviewing might be easier to take if the boys could authoritatively discuss anything that wasn’t “ooey-gooey, smothered with cheese”.

• Best doubling of menu options. The new charcoal-grilled pastrami sub at Speed's Famous Hot Dog Wagon, which before served only a hot dog, albeit Boston's best hot dog. Grilling makes this sandwich a bit lean for deli purists' tastes, but terrific pastrami from Newmarket Square neighbor Boston Brisket Company helps. We'll be keeping our ear on the rumor that Speed's may seek a permanent home in a South End storefront, which would make its fabled street food accessible to many more Bostonians.

• Most embarrassing bit of Bostonian provincialism. The pitiful hand-wringing accompanying the news that legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer might convert the Pink Palace, a shuttered Boston Common restroom, into a Shake Shack. Sample objections: “He's from, gasp, New York!” “We call them 'frappes', not 'shakes'.” “We need something 'Bostonian'” – never mind that the competing proposal is from a one-time operator of a failed New York restaurant whose theme-parky concept includes hawking “Freedom Trail ketchup”. Forget about doing actual research on Meyer's reputation for restaurant hospitality (on which he literally wrote the book), sustainable sourcing, and upstanding citizenship in the neighborhoods in which he operates – let alone actually sampling the food that his much-admired kitchens produce. How did we get our reputation as unworldly, navel-gazing bumpkins, again?

• Cleverest new street-food concept. Clover Food Lab, a vegan/vegetarian food truck for people who aren’t vegetarians or vegans. With the vivid flavors of Clover’s sandwiches and salads, nobody seems to miss the meat, and its fresh-baked popovers and hand-cut fries are shockingly good.

• Funniest unattributed restaurant criticism. Found in TV ads for Strega, in which owner Nick Varano continues a longstanding promotional campaign based on third-rate mobster-wannabe shtick that leans heavily on paid-for endorsements by bit players from kaput-in-2007 series The Sopranos. The hilarity stems from one TV spot in which Verano claims, “Shtrega serves what some people call da bes' Italian food in da city." This conveniently ignores the large body of professional and amateur critical opinion that calls Strega's décor hideously kitschy, its Italian-American fare thuddingly average, and its prices breathtaking, e.g., $43 for a veal chop. There's “some people”, and then there's “some other people”.

• Best tribute dish. Short-rib tacos at Myers + Chang, which accurately mimic the phenomenal flavor of Kogí truck tacos, the L.A. street-food sensation. Unlike many of its upmarket-taco competitors in Boston, M+C has memorized a crucial page from the taco-truck handbook, the one that specifies two tortillas per taco to avoid a drippy, disintegrating mess. And like Kogí, M+C tweets a lot, though arguably this seemed hipper before nine hundred other Boston restaurants got on Twitter, too.

• Gigantic Balls Award. To Barbara Lynch, for moving forward with plans for a springtime opening of Menton, her empire's new flagship restaurant in Fort Point. This luxury establishment will feature Italian cuisine, French rigor in the preparation and service, and eye-goggling prices: $85 for a 4-course tasting, $145 for a 7-course tasting. The online kibitzers seem evenly split between “That's insane in this economy” and “If anyone can make a success of it, Lynch can.” Me, I'd welcome another occasion-dining venue in Boston that isn't a steakhouse and maybe asks guys to wear a jacket. Whichever camp you fall into, you have to admit: gigantic balls.

• Little Guy Triumphs Award. To South Street Diner, for successfully defending its right to operate 24 hours a day, something it has done since 1947. Rich-jerk owners of nearby luxury condos, newcomers to the diner's Leather District neighborhood, tried to crimp its hours to 2am but couldn't turn back the tide of popular support. Moral: folks that crave perfect silence shouldn't move to dense urban neighborhoods.
  

Here's hoping 2010 finds you not believing the hype, supporting local establishments, getting out to Chinatown, Eastie, Allston and Dorchester to sample authentic traditional cooking, treating servers with respect (as documented in Patrick Maguire's fascinating new blog Server Not Servant), and tipping large. Na zdraví!