As the Vibe Shifts, Cool Restaurant Names Are Changing Too

Time travel with me briefly, won’t you? It’s the early 2010s. A self-serious, twenty-something me, fresh out of culinary school, books a trip to San Francisco. While there, I have to eat at one restaurant or I’ll die: flour + water.

I’d just had my epiphany that farm-to-table is better, so of course the scratch-made pastas tossed with Bay Area bounty and barely kissed with, say, giblet ragu, drew me in. As did the notion of this Very Serious Food served on naked-wood tables to a rockish soundtrack played a little too loud, with lighting so low even cool kids couldn’t see the menu, though we’d never admit it. Yet flour + water (no capital letters, thank you very much!) somehow loomed larger than all those details, as if the name itself—down to that plus sign—embodied my particular brand of hipster. This may explain my insufferable decision, made around the same time, to conduct all personal email correspondence exclusively in lowercase type.

At first, flour + water chef-partner Thomas McNaughton hated the name, which his partner David Steele came up with. The duo went several rounds over it—McNaughton from a payphone in Italy, where he was working at the time. “Then David’s like, ‘let me show you the logo,’” McNaughton tells me. That’s right, the plus sign got McNaughton too. And apparently plenty of others; f + w has spawned at least a half-dozen replicas since opening in 2009—including one that operated for years outside of copyright infringement reach, in Victoria, Australia.

That’s the thing about trendy restaurant names: You’ll walk down the street and notice that every third restaurant you pass has practically the same name. These days, it would seem that they’re all homages to women (as in Dear Margaret in Chicago), possessive first names (Lutie’s in Austin) or irreverently wordy (Plates By the Pound BBQ in Denver). But what makes a restaurant name cool? Does the name beget coolness, or does the coolness have to establish itself first?

“Restaurants are really key in shaping cultural trends at the truly local level,” says Helen Rosner, a New Yorker staff writer and longtime food writer. “Fashion can come down the runway; we can all talk about a certain famous cerulean sweater scene (from The Devil Wears Prada). But the most direct access on a day-to-day basis to the shifting tides of trends is in restaurant culture.”

flour + water (recently rebranded to a more grown-up FLOUR + WATER, because “cool” evolved) certainly wasn’t the first restaurant to dream up an elemental name, much like it wasn’t the first to serve Italian food with a hyperlocal bent or to install maddeningly dim Edison bulbs (McNaughton regrets how that particular trend got so out of hand, by the way). But perhaps no one else timed it so perfectly.

“flour + water had this lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” McNaughton says. “I have theories, but how that lightning hits is still totally unpredictable.” And just like that, every new opening had a declarative ingredient or method name, like “land & sea.” Or “stir.” They were “always self-consciously lower case, often finished with a period or broken up with a plus sign or ampersand because god forbid you use ‘and,’” Rosner says. Each decision suggested the sort of self-effacing minimalism you’d expect on the plate. Before you knew it, “airport kiosks selling garbage turkey wraps were calling themselves bread + green.”