How to tell if a restaurant is good (according to its name)

It seems like a question Barbie would ask, but we actually intone it like Sherlock Holmes: What does your restaurant's name mean? If you do the exercise, you'll see that the answers range from the apathetic to the sentimental ("it was already called that," "Google prioritizes starting with A," "it comes from my maternal grandmother"). There are as many answers as there are names, but I'm clear about it: the quality of a restaurant starts with its name.

And you'll say: What does something as superfluous as the name have to do with a chef's culinary skill? To begin with, a name with history implies that we are dealing with a project that has a high chance of being personal and, therefore, of opting for better ingredients, more carefully crafted menus, and a closer treatment. It can also indicate that the team considers itself a big family and that the establishment has a higher chance of remaining open for longer.

From a bad name, on the contrary, it can be inferred that there is no global conception of the project, that it is not planned long-term, and that the team may not feel linked to it. Here, not only answers like "I don't know why it's called that" or "it was given to me" come into play, but also more subtle ones like "we put a Japanese name because we serve that type of food, like baos and pad thai." A full-blown red flag.

In reality, what's important is not so much the name itself as the story it hides. A good example is Kintsugi, the new author's Japanese restaurant at the Ohla Eixample Hotel. Despite what my inner Holmes might have thought, this name is not a passing fad. It turns out that, on a plane trip, Mozambican chef Héctor Ribeiro broke several plates. Since he couldn't afford the cost, he decided to study the Japanese technique of kintsugi (reconstruction of a broken object with a gold resin) and reuse them. Some of them are currently used in his establishment, where you will also see imposing knives made by himself (Còrsega, 289).

Another of my favorite names is La Gormanda, an establishment led by chef Carlota Claver and her partner Ignasi Céspedes (Aribau, 160). Here a double meaning is hidden: on the one hand, it is the feminine of gourmand, which we could translate as gluttonous, and, on the other, it pays homage to the best recipe of Claver's grandmother, snails a la gormanda. It is no coincidence, in fact, that names conceived by couples are very well thought out.

We see it with Alapar, the restaurant of Jaume Marambio and Victoria Maccarone. With this name, the establishment located in the old Pakta not only emphasizes that it is a couple's project, but also that the dishes on the menu are served at the same time (Lleida, 5). On the other hand, the love story between two cities is present in Baló, a play on words between Lena Maria Grané's Barcelona and Ricky Smith's London (Déu i Mata, 141).

Family names are equally indicators of a good restaurant. In the case of Raffaelli, the establishment itself has three rooms named Gioia, Viola, and Greta, the three sisters under this Italian surname (Luis Antúnez, 11). The family patriarch Tao, for his part, uses his nickname in Mandarin, which translates to peach, to name the Chinese restaurant Melo-Jia, which would mean "Melo's house" (Còrsega, 250). And one must not forget the popular Xemei, with which Stefano and Max Colombo emphasize, with a word from the Venetian dialect, that they are twins (Paseo de la Exposició, 85).

Family names are equally indicators of a good restaurant

And foreign names also serve to announce the gastronomy we will find in each place. Like the Taberna Llamber, which borrows an Asturian word that translates to "to pass the tongue over something or someone or to taste something sweet" to anticipate its Catalan-Asturian fusion (Fusina, 5). Another good name, which takes us to Mexico without falling into obviousness, isPiñata Cantina, a cocktail bar perfect for playing with ancestral flavors (Casanova, 19).

Along the same lines, La Doppietta avoids banalities linked to Italy to give all the prominence to the double clutch that Italian drivers used in the Mille Miglia race (Pere Calders Passage, 4). And the Asian restaurant Boa-Bao, of Portuguese origin, not only plays with the concept of good in that language (boa) but also refers to treasure in Mandarin (bao).

Foreign names also serve to announce the gastronomy we will find in each place

On other occasions, the names refer to the street where the business started. This is the case with La Balmesina, the gourmet pizzeria on Balmes street that bets on long-fermented sourdoughs (Balmes, 193) and withSyra Coffee, which opened its first coffee shop on Siracusa Street, at number 13, and, as a nod to its founder Yassir Raïs, changed the i to a y. Other place names that mark the origin of a previous business include essential establishments such asXerta,Sagàs, LasarteorOria.

Finally, and as a general rule, one should always look at places whose names cannot be explained in a single sentence. This is the case with Virens, the restaurant conceived by Rodrigo de la Calle at the Almanac Barcelona hotel. Here, the chef proposes Mediterranean cuisine with organic and honest products, and for this reason, he chose a name that means green, in Latin, and which also refers to the botanical effect by which the first shoots of plants emerge (Gran Via, 619). Shoots that, like good names, are at the origin of great projects.