ottawa foodies

I'm wondering out loud (in text) what would make a business owner choose a name that nobody knows how to spell. In the age of Google, searchability is paramount! Are they consciously trying to avoid being found or does it just not cross their minds as a concern?

I'm looking at you, Kichesippi Beer Company, Tennessy Willems, Ekko de Brasil , Jak's Kitchen, freshii, Xronos Fish and Chips. Even those that involve a clever play on words like Art Is In Bakery, Sweet Art , b/Side are exposing themselves to potential confusion.

I won't shop at most establishments with stupid names. Cannot think of any foodie type places, but what I mean is things like using a Z to pluralize instead of an S, or just general stupid names.

ei8teen, however it's spelled, ticks me off every time I try to find their website.

i already eat all manner of things (mostly-vegetarian) i can't pronounce and occasionally drink dumb sounding beer and scotch i wouldn't begin to say out loud ...

and so, by extension, as long as 7-yr old conscripted laborers aren't at the helm and the food has the potential to be tasty or relevant to my interests, i'm fairly un-bothered by how stupidly named the restaurant is or how i ended up there - google, word of mouth, yellow pages, and any other convenient messenger.

Isn't that sort of the unofficial mantra of this site? :-)

itchy feet, the point I'm trying to make is that all of the methods you suggested for finding a place (google, word of mouth, yellow pages, etc) are hindered by a hard to spell name.

By no means would I intentionally avoid a vendor with good products based on its name! My concern is that fewer potential customers can find them.

As one of the owners of Kichesippi Beer, I understand the point that Fresh Foodie is making. For us, the decision was a tough one but the name and the historical signifigance was important to us and we decided to proceed with it.

The way that we try to compensate for this is by keeping the website a simple one www.kbeer.ca

The stylized spellings lend distinctiveness to what is otherwise a completely meaningless or worse, forgettable name: i.e: Eighteen Restaurant, Artisan Bakery, etc. Nobody is likely to get trade-mark protection for those names as they are arguably descriptive, generic or both. So as I see it the strange spellings are NOT confusing per se, as they add a degree of distinctiveness that a consumer can (hopefully) discern.

FF's observation that these names are not well designed for internet searching is a good one and I can't say I've particularly considered this before. I think the take away point is if you are running a business it is paramount to ensure that your website is optimized such that misspelled queries of your business name will still return search results that include your site in the top hits. I have no idea how to do this but I understand that it is pretty standard web design practice.

As many will know, businesses often buy up misspelled versions of their domain names so that improperly entered web addresses will be redirected to the proper site. Further, I just noticed that both "eighteen ottawa" and "ei8hteen ottawa" return restaurant18.com as the first result in a google search, at least based on my current settings.

jpm, I appreciated the simplicity of your website name! Also, I just tried totally bastardizing the spelling of Kichesippi and Google still found it.

Google: kitcchissipi beer

Showing results for kichesippi beer.

Nice! :-)

if you can't find it on the internet, you don't deserve to eat there. :)

If it wasn't for Ottawa Foodies, I don't think I would have found Tennessy Willems' website!

Any restaurant with an uncommon name or odd spelling should really make sure the proper keywords are used for internet searches. Not sure if it's the intention, but Tennessy Willems' website doesn't show up at all on Google or Bing. That said, it doesn't seem to be hurting their business!!

I'm not so sure that the owners of Tennessy Willems' are all that concerned about people finding their restaurant on the web ...

But FF does have an interesting point. But I'm with Tracinho on the issue of distinctiveness, character and "branding" as long as names don't get out of control for no reason. Like multiple spellings for baby's first names that really are straight forward (or should be), i.e., Micaela, etc.

I beleive Tennessy Willems' is spelled the way it is for a reason, something about the names of the owner's fathers, grandfathers or uncles.

flexie, Tennessy Willems is named after the owners' two children. I believe you're right that they seem to be able to fill their tables just fine even with their abstruse title! However, that is only because their product is of exceptional quality. I'd expect a run of the mill pizzeria with that name would lose customers to one that is easier to look up.

Look for OughtawaFudiz.com coming soon! ;-)

Good thread, all very good points. I agree with tracinho in the benefit in coming up with a name that is catchy and not run-of-the-mill. Also the cool thing about Google, as FF illustrated, that you can pretty much butcher a name and still find it ('are you sure you didn't mean...?').

To clarify, I think Tennessy Willems was named after the owner's two kids.

And Xronos seems to be the Greek word pronounced Hronos/Chronos, using the Greek letter X (chi) pronounced like a guttural H, ie. nothing to do phonetically with the Latin X. If they had wanted the entire word to look exactly like the Greek word, it would be Xpovos, which would have been even more tedious.

Another place I won't shop because of a stupid name Three Bakers and a Bike

I'm just glad the trend for names like "the great american beef and booze emporium and eatery" seems to be over. Actually I tend to steer clear of anyplace that has "eatery" in its name.

Man, you guys sure are opinionated! I'll eat anywhere that has good food, and even some places that don't. :-)

I have to LOL at the Three Bakers and a Bike comment. I work in a shop in the neighborhood and often customers come to our store after visiting ones up around Three Bakers. Awhile back, this middle-aged British couple came in and couldn't stop talking about what a rude name that was.

www.peevish.co.uk/slang/b.htm

Cracked me right up! I can't walk past the place without an inner snicker now. ;)

On the other hand ... I guess you can have fun with names ;-)

acidcow.com

JDK

Fresh Foodie - late reply to simply acknowledge i understood your original point and its one i somewhat agreed with. Not 100% for the reason Tracinho raises and other related ideas around brand-ability (what the heck is a kleenex anyway? Or a frisbee?).

And also, the major point i ended up deleting from a longer initial reply was the one you and others ended up reinforcing - google is a heck of search tool! very accommodating of spelling variants, neologisms, malapropism, etc.

at same time, no intent to imply anything about your intentions wrt to including (or not) vendors with silly names.

The opposite, really: seems (me speculates) sites like the one you've built actually help normalize Google's returns by providing rich discussions, reviews, address info (when provided) google can index and cross-reference against its tsunami size thesaurus, etc.

i only have simple home-based experiments to base that theory on, but in this case it jives with the one mentioned here by Tourist and others - Tennessy Willia/ems, a restaurant damn near un-findable (by me) via iphone from car parked on side of the road on a v. cold night i really wanted to try em. ARGH!! A couple months later, and sure enough, Google returns (in my searches anyway) decent-enough results even w/ my earlier misspellings, pulling back entries to this very site, which in turn point back to TW's parent site, etc. A bit of latency showing up in google, but ok findability at the end of the day.

So, i think you've contributed, both directly and indirectly, in helping connect people to restaurants / vendors, however silly or idiosyncratic their names are - nothing u didn't already know! :-)

that said, the rationalist in me, in line with your original post, continues to be perplexed by the decisions certain restaurants take to ostensibly improve their bottom line / accessibility. in that vein, i am the dummie who once upon a time wondered out loud why kinki (another possibly ironic, but also a legit placename, reference) didn't want to change their splash page (Kinki?firstComment=30), lol-oh-lol.

Slightly off-topic: I've gotta say that I'm surprised that the slang for "bike" has become so well-known in Britain that its negative connotation has superceded its use as referring to an actual frigging bike.

Couldn't understand the hubbub behind the name until I thought of a certain "yo momma" joke.

Mother Tuckers in the ByWard Market changed their name to Tucker's. For obvious reasons . . .

Why choose a hard to spell name?

A lot of the good names are taken, many times by name squatters. However the opening up of top level domains should help with that (instead of .com, you could have .ottawafoodies).

Other no-no's are multiple syllables (ot-to-wa-foo-dies has 5), hyphens, etc..

It's hard to find a good searchable name.

The owner of Yummy Sushi was asking me how to get his restaurant to show up on a google search. People can't find it online to order takeout.

Tell the owner of Yummy Sushi he just needs to register the business with google and get it on the map. If you are he do not know how to do that I would be happy to show you. It is a free service. You register via the web, then they send a postcard to your address, with a code on it. Go back and enter the code and bob's your uncle. Then you have a "homepage" of sorts where you can upload photos, videos and so on.

Cool. I never did that before. I would have thought it would be difficult with a generic name like Yummy Sushi, or is it somehow location sensitive? Can you email me the link to the signup form?

www.google.com/places/

Name does not matter

Francis ... here is the story behind Mother Tuckers (Food Experience)

Feb 22 2008 Ottawa Foodies:

Forum - incredibly stupid food / resto names?post_id=6449#post_6449

PS: Fresh Foodie, Is there a way to get the actual post to come up and not just the thread when referring back to old posts ?

Captain Caper, yes one day I'll get around to fixing that. It bugs me too when I see it.

In the meantime, you can workaround by using a URL-shortening service like bit.ly to preserve the post info. For example, the post you referenced is here: bit.ly/mNUbvm

I really hate how so many people and restaurants they use the term DRIVE THRU.
I have even had business correspondence with that in it.

Someone had sent me papers and they were written something like "go thru the front door" or "walk thru the store" or something similar.

Just sounds so UNPROFESSIONAL when people write that.

Also the Mcdonalds DRIVE THRU guess we can all blame them for that bad spelling everyone uses now.

Not a food misspelling but my fave perfume has the most annoying spelling on the bottle.

Bvlgari!

Now how do you pronounce that (Bulgari).
The "V" is really supposed to be a U.

Prettytastyreviews, as a bit of a grammar nazi myself I share some of your concern; however, language is a flexible and evolving concept. The thru spelling is a legitimate alternative spelling of through in American English (as are nite and lite). You should be equally offended when you see color and flavor without the British u. ;-)

The V vs. U in BVLGARI can be easily explained by the fact that the Classical Latin alphabet had only a V and it was pronounced like a U.

Isn't "legitimate [...] American English" an oxymoron? :-)

I always use the American spellings (in the age of the internet it makes the most sense). The American spellings are largely the work of Webster (the guy who published the Webster's dictionary), who rationalized the spellings to the way the words were pronounced. He had a good reason for everything.

For example he said "z" should be pronounced "zee". The letter comes from the Greek alphabet and even the Greeks changed the name of the letter to zeta. All the words using "z" actually used the "zee" sound, eg. zebra = zee-bra not zed-bra.

I hate pronouncing 'Z' as "zee". Over the phone, "zee" could be mistaken for 'B', 'D', and 'E', whereas 'zed' is a unique sound within the alphabet.

Good posts, FreshFoodie and Francis. I, too, like some of the American spellings. I believe 'thru' might have been initiated when used on large surfaces like painted on pavement (drive-thru, thruway, etc). A space-saver of sorts. They also use 'Xing' for 'crossing'.

As for the letter z...zed's dead baby, zed's dead.