Introduction
Recently, at a meal with press colleagues, a Portuguese journalist discovered an ingredient on the menu that she did not understand: red cap. This fish, also known as scorpora, was described by the master of this restaurant as follows: “It is a very ugly fish, with many thorns and with toxic poison, which lives at the bottom of the sea.” In the entire description, there was no reference to gastronomy, nor anything to whet the appetite in front of this unknown fish for the Portuguese journalist.
Proper names of bars and restaurants
But this got me thinking about a question that has been on my mind for years: the proper names of bars and restaurants. There seems to be a certain tendency to give it derogatory names, names that do not evoke anything pleasant, but quite the opposite, names that are insults or words that refer to negative things. It’s a shame I can’t mention all the names I’ve carefully collected so as not to offend anyone, or judge the wine by the label, but I’ll try to give some examples where any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
Who would like to eat at a place called Els plats cremats restaurant or L’Esquerp del Port, at the Llardós bar or at the Salmó Nel·la bar, at the Can Carallot restaurant or at Josep Frustració’s? At first glance, it’s hard for me. We can blame it on reading too many Wittgenstein propositions or we can think that it doesn’t make much sense to use names that evoke scenes or things that go against the gastronomic act.
Not everything has to refer to the pleasures of the language and we have fantastic examples of neutral names, such as 035 or 14 de la Rosa, which play with the name of the direction in which they are located, and others which establish a consistency with what they offer, like Món Vínic or Muysca, or with some object inside, like the Torpedo Bar. There are also places that are simply called Siberia and have a frosted logo, and they offer good menus of the day.
However, the use of derogatory names is nothing new. I never went there because it closed when I was only 6 years old, but I know that there was a great restaurant on Passeig de Gràcia with Rosselló called La Punyalada (1927-1998), which was what the customers of the ‘Olympic Bar, perhaps because it seemed too neutral to them. However, let’s think about how to avoid having the city full of strange names that, more than places of hospitality, seem to have come out of a bad history novel set in the Middle Ages.
