Ada, Alma, Alta, Aigo, Amano, Apero, Azabu… and that’s just the As.
For years Aucklanders have been rightly concerned about an array of hard-to-solve problems bedevilling our hospitality industry. Persistently low pay for workers, long, antisocial hours, the lingering impact of lockdowns on both patronage and staffing levels and a cost-of-living crisis crimping patrons’ ability to afford prices driven high by rampant inflation. It’s a knotty bundle of very important issues, but while coverage of them has rightly been prominent, there’s another situation which has thus-far escaped any kind of scrutiny: all our new restaurants have basically the same name.
There’s Ada. There’s Alma and Alta too. And Apero, Aigo and Amano. And Cassia, Candela and Copia. Cocoro and Cotto. Pōni and Pici. Lilius and Lillian. It’s getting really hard to figure out where you’re going, and for our addled attention spans to recall what differentiates these uniformly excellent restaurants from one another.
To be clear, this is not a critique of any individual name. Naming things is hard! Our website is called The Spinoff, and even I, who named it, struggle to really remember why. Many of these names will also have beautiful linguistic origins, which speak to the complex and intersecting realms of culture, condiments, ingredients and geography that go into cuisine. Or just someone thought they sounded cute, which is also fine!
Additionally, many of these restaurants have opened in the past few years, some within weeks of one another. Someone had to be first with these trends, coming up with an original name, only to wake up and find someone else, often multiple establishments, parked right alongside them.
Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that to the layperson scouting for a suitable venue to have a yum and somewhat fancy dinner with friends, whānau or secretly-loathed business acquaintances alike, it’s very confusing! I may well have been to some of these places, but can’t figure out where they are or what they’re about, because their names provide no suitably differentiated clues for my brain to cling to.
It makes you wonder what’s behind this hyper-specific abundance. The preponderance of As calls to mind the classic Yellow Pages tradie trope of hacking the alphabet by putting AA, AAA or even, audaciously, AAAA ahead of your actual name. And maybe it does have relevance in this era – Metro’s top 50 list is (mostly) organised alphabetically, which remains the dominant method of sorting names even in the cursed year that is 2023.
Even if it does serve to move you up the alphabet, if it’s unmemorable due to duplication, surely that cancels out your gains? It makes you appreciate restaurants with names which speak to different eras and values: Wang Wang Spring Pancake, which has a joyous energy; the piratical icon that is Swashbucklers; the mysterious neighbouring twin Mt Albert BBQ Noodle Houses; the venerable “accept no substitutes” and fiercely utilitarian energy of Tony’s Original Steak and Seafood Restaurant; the early internet vibes of iVillage.
These restaurants and many provincial hairdressers show what a broad and fertile area the humble name of an establishment can encompass. Surely we have reached the limit for this era’s tightly-bound naming conventions. Or at the very least, we can arrange for a temporary moratorium on the name construction which goes “vowel, consonants, repeat vowel” and its close variations, and embark on a more memorable and chaotic era for our fancy dinner plans.