Alphabet soup

By Christopher Hirst

Food and drink are no longer enough. Increasingly, restaurants also provide customers with a puzzle—why do they have such baffling names? Recent London openings include Karpo, which sounds like an intriguing cross between Kafka and Harpo Marx, but is actually the “Greek goddess of fruits of the earth”; 10 Cases, which might suggest a link with Sherlock Holmes but in fact refers to an idiosyncratic wine-buying policy; and the bar/bistro Soif, the French for thirst, but which some customers have taken to be a philosophical question—“So if...?”

At one time restaurants were almost always named after their founding proprietor—venerable survivors include Rules in London (1798), Keen’s in New York (1885) and Café Procope in Paris (1686)—but today the whole lexicon has been plundered. In those cities you can now dine in establishments named after an ancient dish of jellified pork (Brawn, in east London, serves food that is “honest and simple with a respect for tradition”), the ship on which Darwin developed his ideas about evolution (Beagle, which stresses it “is not named after the dog”, and aims for “creative American cooking”) and a man best known for beating naughty children (Au Père Fouettard, near Les Halles, where the manageress apparently “runs a tight ship”).