Any city has its share of things with silly names. Syracuse, my hometown, is a stellar representative of this tendency. I often wonder how businesses can operate with names that are diametrically opposed to the intent of their business, extremely unoriginal, or just plain odd. Actually, unoriginal is probably OK – this implies average, and what is a typical business but utterly average?

I found a nominee for Best Questionable Business Name category. Somehow, restaurants seem to be the worst offenders, possibly because they fail so often and new ones are starting all the time. Sometime ago my wife showed me an ad with great glee. She notices terrible names just as I do, and the ad was for the restaurant “Leftovers”. After I regained my composure, I read the ad copy, and apparently this establishment is a pasta place. They may even have good food, but the thought of making a special trip and spending money on warmed-over pasta does a fine job of cancelling any interest I may have had. I can imagine their brainstorming session: “hey, if we call it Leftovers, people will come because they’ll think they are getting a lot of food, yeah, great idea!!!” Maybe there’s something to that – quantity often supercedes quality here.

Sometime ago there was an a subtler example, a restaurant called La Bella Vino. If the proprietors were Italian, maybe they should have checked with Nonna first – she would have cringed at the name. Something like Il Buon Vino or Bello Vino may have been OK – if you have a masculine noun, you need a masculine adjective. Of course, this would have assumed a certain level of education, or at least enough attention to detail to actually run the name by someone who knew Italian. The other disappointing possibility is that they may have known it was wrong, but they just liked it anyway, or they cynically figured that people in that town were too dense to notice. In any case, the restaurant failed.

Alto Cinco, ostensibly a Mexican restaurant, has a name that I’d characterize as not terrible, just dumb. When you translate Alto Cinco from Spanish into English, you get “Hi Five”, of course.  Oh, how very cute, and meaningless in Spanish. They seem to be doing fine, though, so the naming curse has not harmed them.

Then there is “Bar”, which is, well, a bar. Appropriately named, but as unimaginitive as you can get. But I will give them credit – when they were about to open, they had a contest to name the bar, but apparently there weren’t any winning entries. Maybe if I’d submitted one of these, I could have won: “Face Down in the Gutter”, “Blottoland”, “Three Drunks in a Fountain”, “Hoards of Alcohol Molecules”, “Shag First, Talk Later”, “Very Scary in Burberry”, “Sex in the Sort of City”, “Martinis for Wienies”.

Even with this prosaic name, they seem to be successful. It’s a clean place with nice furniture where 20-something yuppies go to drink. So they’ve managed to survive the “curse”! In the interest of equal time, I may do another article about Syracuse places with good names – they do exist!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two bands who appear to be named after our favorite male appendage: 3 Inch Fury, and One Hard Krank! Now those are names that I can largely and firmly support! Bravo!

When going to dinner in the Syracuse University area, I ran across another beauty: What the Crepe.  At least the name does deal with what they sell.  And certainly “what the crap?” is a trendy phrase now, so it’s at least current.  But for me, being reminded of excrement isn’t necessarily conducive to stoking my appetite.  I’m sure the owners would be taken aback by this, or they never would have considered this name – sort of like the people who are amazed that having publicly viewable Facebook pics where they’re falling-down drunk and/or naked might have some negative effects.  Of course, if their intended audience uses this phrase all the time, maybe they’ll do just fine.  A corollary of Syracuse’s inability to name things is that in many cases, no matter how silly the name, it doesn’t harm the place.  A name may have a measure of immunity, partially due to being surrounded by other silly names.