A new restaurant in Mumbai

is called “Hitler’s Cross.”

A huge portrait of a stern-looking Fuhrer greets visitors at the door. The cross in the restaurant’s name refers to the swastika [originally a Hindu icon – SP] that symbolized the Nazi regime.

“This place is not about wars or crimes, but where people come to relax and enjoy a meal,” said restaurant manager Fatima Kabani.

Now that is some serious PR spin! All you need is “our consumers tell us that…” and it’d be in the top 10 of all time.

It reads like a marketing class exercise (or dare), doesn’t it? Find some way to take the most negative thing imaginable and productize it or present it as a benefit or a brand.

The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in Nanjing, China offers a seemingly inevitable user experience: permission to abuse the staff. You can break stuff, yell, or even hit the folks who work there (one wonders if this would be any fun if sanctioned). Local psychology students are also available for personal counselling. Argument Sketch, anyone?

[via Slashfood]

This post from Own Your Brand! reminded me of my Spin/brand riff earlier today.

Knowing all this, I’m still puzzling on the pieces of a pattern I experienced last night at a local Taco Johns.

As I entered the establishment (“restaurant” seems a bit overstated for a fast-food place), a young man appeared to be walking out. Then I realized he was in a Taco Johns uniform and he wasn’t walking out, he was opening the door for me. I was actually being greeted and welcomed into a fast-food joint. That has got to be a first!

I felt my “fast-food pattern” breaking and a new one taking its place. Cool.

Since it was “Taco Tuesday” I was ordering for my whole family at home. It’s a large tribe made up for four generations, but I digress. They love their taco sauce, so I was instructed to ask for extra hot and mild sauce which I did. I always ask for extra hot and mild sauce – that’s my pattern.

Now, the last piece of my puzzling pattern encounter – after the “warm and fuzzy” door opening, warm greeting, hospitality experience, when I’d returned home, I discovered they forgot the to include any hot and mild sauce. They always do, unless I remind one more time when I pick up my order. So much for the new pattern – back to old reliable.

The Seattle Times defines some of the fancy-shmancy words that we’re encountering more frequently in restaurants, including:

Beluga lentils
Burrata
Confit
Day-boat scallops/Diver’s scallops
Guanciale
Hanger steak
Kurobuta pork
Mache (aka lamb’s lettuce, field salad, corn salad)
Marcona almonds
Paddlefish caviar
Panna cotta
Saba
Squid ink
Togarashi
Wagyu beef

The article is well-intentioned, but futile, isn’t it? I look at that list and haven’t encountered too many of ’em, but can think of other terms that eventually prompt each person around the table to glance up and mutter “What the hell is Ponzu sauce?”

Menus are my favorite thing to good-naturedly gripe about (note that most of my other gripes are not good-natured). It’s increasingly difficult to make the leap from the menu text to its basic concept, then to a visualization the visual, and then the taste – in order to decide if this is something one would want to eat.

I always cite the (since redesigned) Denny’s menu as a great example – it showed an overhead view of a plate with the actual item on it. Denny’s obviously doesn’t want to add the descriptors, it’s outside their brand…while other restaurants revel in the preparation verbs such as hand-picked, slow-churned, drizzled (and the occasional confusing-as-hell newfangled term, causing us all to look up and mutter “What the hell is ‘flash-embrizzled?’ “).

Next, stir in the geographical adjectives. Tuscan morels, Curincherria oysters, St. Endouille-upton-Styme pickles.

I am occasionally fortunate to go to some restaurant where even if I can strip away the adjectives (okay, that would be chicken breast with mashed potatoes and veggies) what ends up arriving is something that looks nothing like this:

Instead it’s some …creation…something amazing and invented as well as delicious. That’s a rare occurrence, of course.

I was in Houston a few weeks ago and saw this Buddha-like Ronald inflatable. Perhaps Ronald is our new prophet.

From the New York Times, Indian workers in San Francisco and Redmond, WA can order Indian food delivered for lunch from some small businesses that echo, in some fashion, the tiffin delivery seen in cities like Mumbai.

The Oriental Curry Shop

is a Japanese restaurant we saw in a mall in Hong Kong (called Times Square).

Here is their corporate mascot

and here is how s/he looks in “real life.”

Sure, they use the whiteface version in illustrations, but then they’ve got a half-life-size statue of the blackface version right in front of the counter, and toys and more of the same character.

Obviously, racist images are not universal. Hell, we can’t even use the word oriental here, can we?

Last week in Newark I was taken to an interesting Portuguese restaurant. One dish we ordered (Rodizio

) involves many courses – until you say stop – of huge chunks of meat on giant skewers, three at a time, usually. The skewers were dripping. Many contained something wrapped in bacon.

See more pictures here

.

We had a really nice lunch at a fancy-type of Italian restaurant in Midtown yesterday. I just spent 3 minutes on Google maps to see if I could find the name if I knew where it was, but really, it’s too much of a chore and if anyone really cares, they can write me and we’ll figure it out. At any rate, here are the appetizers and the freebie dessert plate. Looked and tasted great! No entrees because maybe we were too hungry when they came?

I created a flickr tag “autophagia” for any signs of animals preparing to serve and/or eat themselves in the name of cuisine.

I’ve started things off with the Chick -N – Coop Hof Brau sign in Daly City, CA, depicting a chicken in an egg-cup serving up a platter of chicken. Mmm, mmm, tasty!