Naming Restaurants

Since I wrote about a person's name the other day, I thought maybe I should make a comment on restaurant names.  When most people describe a restaurant to their friends, they often just tell them “Oh, you should go to Joe’s Restaurant. It’s sort of a certain style similar to …”   If everybody knows the address and the name, then friends can share new dining experiences with each other. The problem is that over here, we can’t read the signs and often we don’t know the name of the street so it’s a bit more problematic. Of course we could always just obtain the commonly found taxi cards (business cards of the restaurants that usually contain small street map identifiers to show a taxi driver so he can locate an address if he isn’t familiar with it … and we do use those, but its not as much fun.

So we make up our own names, often descriptive ones, to help us remember where they are, what we ate, and use common names to put on our expense reports so that the expenses aren’t challenged.

Typically, we use visual cues that can be seen from outside to make it easier to identify the entrance from the sidewalk. Even when we eventually learn the real name, we continue to use our names because, well, that’s more fun too (not to mention easier to pronounce).

Of course some are rather simple like The Noodle Place, The Brazilian BBQ, The Japanese Place and others like that, but we also get a little creative when an obvious choice is not so obvious.

I’ll explain.

Across the bridge in downtown there is a place that is locally famous for serving a pork meatball in chicken broth soup type of dish. The front entrance has the big 3 foot diameter decorative reddish/orangeish colored balls (that can have candles or electric lights inside them). However, since many places use these type decorations, our 1st choice of “orange ball restaurant” wasn’t descriptive enough. It also has waitresses that are surprisingly enough somewhat, um, ‘healthier’ in appearance than your typical Chinese, so we decided to call it the “Meatballs and Chubby Waitress” restaurant. It’s a pretty popular place and we learned that if you don’t get there early enough they may be sold out of the meatball dish, so we need to plan ahead for this (They also serve a smoked rabbit that is wonderful). We have eventually learned the real name (phonetically, it would be “Roo-Yee Schwinn” but we continue to use the Meatballs name.

About a mile or so from the hotel is a real basic place that has a very small interior but a large patio seating area outside. The food is good but very basic. Since 90% of the seating is outdoors the weather conditions play a big part in deciding to go there. So to maintain a customer base, the owners have used a huge blue tarp to make a roof to protect you from the heat of the sun, the rain, or the cold in winter. Our name for it? The Blue Tarp. We have no idea its real name.

Just a block from our hotel, there is a small place that has antique Chinese farm equipment on display one of which is a small flat bottomed boat. So, the name of this place is “The Boat.” Works for us. The real name we learned is “My Wife’s Kitchen” so we definitely continue to use the name “The Boat” because we figured our expense reports would draw too much attention from the auditors if I reported that I spent $30 on dinner in my wife’s kitchen!

Possibly one of our most favorite places is a little past The Boat. It serves a fabulous fish head soup and a spectacular snake that is piled high with big red chili peppers that will make you sweat like you have never sweat before. After you finish the snake, we pile up the peppers on a side plate exposing the broth and then order a bowl of noodles to dump into the broth. These may be the best noodles you have ever eaten!! But the unique item in the restaurant is a 3 foot tall statue of Mao near the door. So I dubbed it “Mao’s Restaurant.” However, our Project Manager pointed out that Changsha has a famous restaurant actually called “Mao’s Restaurant” so he thought we needed a different name and he changed my name to “Little Mao’s.” Perfect. We have always been drawn to this place. Of course we like the food, but it seemed that we have a fondness for this place we can’t explain. And then we learned the real name and the mystery is solved. The real name is … “My Bald Headed Friend”.

No wonder we all enjoy it so much – we are the exact target audience!