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Bad restaurant names are a gift to the too-often self-serious world of dining. They remind us of the whimsy and folly of it all. But what makes a bad restaurant name? Like pornography, you know when you see it.

There’s no one thing that all bad restaurant names have in common: For some, it's the useless, unpronounced punctuation thrown in. For others, it's the crude racism or sexism implied in a thudding joke. For still others, there may not have been any affirmatively poor decision-making, but the name turns out to sound like a disease or an ailment — even having majored in English, I am not personally comfortable with the word “roister,” nor do I wish to be. There are so many ways for restaurants to fall short in choosing their names, and I only regret that we can't dedicate our lives to celebrating all of them.

But we can dedicate one week! Welcome to Name of Groans, Eater's quest to find the Most Truly Awful Restaurant Name in America. I'm Hillary Dixler, and I’ll be your host and commentator for the next five days. It's an honor to oversee these extremely important proceedings.

A while back, we invited readers to share their favorite bad restaurant names with us. The response was tremendous, and we narrowed the results down to 32 strongest contenders (some of which are now closed — but that’s okay! Check out our methodology at the bottom of the page). Over the next four days, Matt Buchanan, Helen Rosner, Sonia Chopra, and Greg Morabito will assess delightfully terrible restaurant names in four categories: Puns, Distressingly Sexual, Crimes Against Language, and Just Really Bad Names. The rules are simple: no ties, and no considering the restaurant's signage, menu, concept, or overall quality in the decision-making. This is about restaurant names. That's it.

On Day 5, the bracket winners will face off head to head, and we’ll crown our Truly Awful King. The winners get nothing but glory. The losers get nothing but dignity. And it’s not really clear who the winners and losers are, to be honest. Maybe they’re all of us! Whatever happens, I'll be here with you every step of the way.

We kick off our week of Truly Awful Restaurant Names with a promising bracket: PUNS. Puns are irresistible to restaurant owners who want to communicate their sense of humor and also their lack of concern for displaced embarrassment. The contenders do not disappoint. In alphabetical order, with all capitalization and punctuation intact, they are: A-Fish-o-na-do (Miami), Baguetteaboudit!* (Brooklyn), Burger Moovment (Elmwood Park, Illinois), Ciao Thyme (Bellingham, Washington), Fonduely Yours* (Mount Pleasant, South Carolina), Pork & Mindy's (Chicago), Thelonious Monkfish (Cambridge, Massachusetts), and Wrench & Rodent Seabasstropub (Oceanside, California).

Take it away, Matt Buchanan!

Round 1

Fonduely Yours

vs.

Baguetteaboudit!

The ponderousness of Fonduely Yours is breathtaking in its density — because fondue is, like, fucking heavy, while “fondly yours” is as archaically sentimental as that 10,000-pound heart necklace that sank to the bottom of the ocean in Titanic. And then to combine them so clumsily? From the name alone I can close my eyes and imagine my guts so leaden with molten cheese and commodity chocolate that they burrow through my pelvic floor and explode out my perineum, sinking into the earth until they reach its molten core.

There’s an elegant simplicity, however, to Baguetteaboudit! (exclamation point legally required) and the sheer amount of offense packed into a single pun, a lazy Sopranos-tinged *ism that would not be approved in any way by the Order of the Sons of Italy in America, in order to sell a product that is… not Italian but French? *several chef-kissing-fingers motions in a row*

Winner: Baguetteaboudit!

Wrench & Rodent Seabasstropub

vs.

A-Fish-o-na-do

It’s a bold restaurateur who, in our extremely squeamish times, deliberately puts the word “rodent” in the name of his or her restaurant. And yet the grossest thing in the name of Wrench & Rodent is the monstrous portmanteau (portmonstrosity?) “Seabasstropub.” It’s a gastropub? That serves... sea bass? Maybe only sea bass? Hmm. But all I want to know is: Would a true A-Fish-o-na-do actually call themselves that?

Winner: A-Fish-o-na-do

Pork & Mindy's

vs.

Burger Moovment

I mean, if you’re going to name your meat restaurant after a mediocre TV show that lasted a mere four seasons and was an unglamorous prelude to a beloved actor’s far more illustrious film career, why not this one, which began as a dream sequence on another television show — the one that gave us the duly expired phrase “jump the shark”? At any rate, it’s more inspired, by an Orkan mile, than the pun so lazy that the unpaid interns of the assistants of the copywriters behind Chick-fil-A’s “Eat Mor Chikin” cows would know better than to touch it.

Winner: Pork & Mindy's

Thelonious Monkfish

vs.

Ciao Thyme

The mind reels as it attempts to conjure a meeting between the proprietors of this restaurant and the estate of Thelonious Monk in which they explained, extremely earnestly, their vision of a restaurant — with jazz!!!! — and how naming it after one of the greatest jazz musicians to ever live was precisely the tribute that Monk so richly deserved. (“Well, cooking monkfish is almost EXACTLY like playing the piano because it has, like, teeth, and… also, jazz? Jazz. Yes, jazz.”)

How can a nonsensical pair of homophones like Ciao Thyme — “you see, it sounds just like the commoner’s expression for saying that it is time to eat, but they are fancy words (one of them is even foreign!), that is my crazy idea that I came up with totally on my own, in my brain, I didn’t have to write it down to map it out or anything, it just like appeared there” — compete with the rank entitlement of stealing a dead man’s name and bolting it onto a moniker for a truly ugly fish?

Winner: Thelonious Monkfish

Round 2

Baguetteaboudit!

vs.

A-Fish-o-na-do

This was a tough pairing — for the Italians, anyway, amirite — but then I just imagined two dudebros arguing over where to eat, slowly losing their chill and stating the name of their desired restaurant over and over again in a garbage fake Italian accent, crescendoing into a primal scream. “Eyy, let’s Baguetteaboudit!” “I’m a real A-Fish-o-na-do over here” and it’s intensely and immediately clear that we would just have to Baguetteaboudit!!!!!

Winner: Baguetteaboudit!

Pork & Mindy’s

vs.

Thelonious Monkfish

One bracket, two dead celebrities exploited and besmirched at the altar of heinous punning. But the distance between the TV show and the man is great enough that Pork & Mindy’s doesn’t feel as vicious of a crime as Thelonious Monkfish, which amounts to wanton disregard of both intellectual property and the English language.

Winner: Thelonious Monkfish

Round 3

Baguetteaboudit!

vs.

Thelonious Monkfish

Is it worse to wrong a man, or two entire nations? Is it more savage to mangle the baked goods that serve as a foundation for a national culinary identity, or all the teeming life that dwells beneath the sea? Is it more unforgivable to pun, or to portmanteau? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this pairing, that define the line between graceless wordplay and hardcore cringeporn. They seem to scrape at the deep and unknowable mysteries of the universe, and yet the truth is a clarion call resounding deep in the part of soul that processes language — jk I mean my prefrontal cortex because I don’t believe in souls — that there is no more punishing (lol) restaurant name than Thelonious Monkfish.

Bracket Winner: Thelonious Monkfish

Oh hi, it’s your old pal Hillary here, master of ceremonies and judge of judges, with some post-bracket analysis. We get off to an explosive start — literally. Even though Buchanan says Fonduely Yours elicits in him images of melty cheese firing out of his body, he wisely taps Baguetteaboudit! as the worse name. Fonduely Yours is clumsy but gentle; Baguetteaboudit! is violent. It inflicts its pun on you and then stabs you with an exclamation point! Buchanan errs, however, in not seeing that the tragic but ultimately harmless A-Fish-o-na-do is in no way more Truly Awful than Wrench & Rodent Seabasstropub. From left to right: What do wrenches have to do with rodents? Who wants to think about rodents while eating? How can anyone be expected to comprehend the horror that is SEABASSTROPUB ? I mean, I guess credit is due for keeping the second “s” on bass, but I can't with this.

Pork & Mindy's is clearly the winner of its showdown with Burger Moovment, and Thelonious Monkfish handily beats Ciao Thyme. Moving into the second round, Baguetteaboudit! beats A-Fish-o-na-do, which is good because I am still literally bleeding from the gaping wound Baguetteaboudit! delivered to my thigh. Thelonious Monkfish advances again, leaving Pork & Mindy's behind, which I'm also good with because I'm still not sure what Thelonious Monkfish is even trying to ~achieve~.

But oh, my friends, Buchanan falters in the final showdown. By this point, I'm certain Baguetteaboudit! will be the last thing I see before I die, covered in my own blood, just for trying to get a sandwich. Still, do you have the confidence to tell your friends you want to meet them at Thelonious Monkfish for dinner? I definitely don't. But I’m not the judge here, Matt Buchanan is. And so Thelonious Monkfish secures its place in the final four. Join us tomorrow for the next bracket of Truly Awful Restaurant Names, judged by Helen Rosner: Distressingly Sexual.

METHODOLOGY & INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER: The 32 restaurants included in this bracket-style showdown were culled from a list of hundreds of names submitted by Eater readers and editors over the past year, a surprising number of which are located in Boston, which is bizarre. Restaurant names that trade in racism, sexism, ableism, or any form of bigotry were not considered. The final 32 were grouped into four brackets according to category; seeds within brackets were randomly generated. To qualify for Name of Groans, a restaurant name needed to be all of the following:

1. On a restaurant located in the United States, that was either announced to open or actually open for business at the time of the call for entries (i.e., in the last year or so).

2. Not “awful” or “funny” simply because of a non-English word or name that coincidentally sounds like a weird, goofy, or dirty English word.

3. Subjectively determined by an Eater editor to be highly hilarious and/or deeply unfortunate and/or truly ill-advised. Judges were not allowed to use any information about the actual restaurants in their assessments of the restaurants’ names — no websites, no menus, no Yelp reviews, no photos — this is name qua name, over here. We’re passing no judgment whatsoever on the quality and integrity of these restaurants, the intent of their owners or namers, or whether you (or anyone) should visit them. We’re just having fun.

ICYMI: Day 2: Distressingly Sexual | Day 3: Crimes Against Language | Day 4: Just Really Bad Names | Day 5: The Winner!

* Now closed, but per our arbitrary rules (and due to exceptional potential for Truly Awfulness), allowed to remain in competition.

Editor (and person you should yell at if you’re mad): Helen Rosner

Contributors: Matt Buchanan, Sonia Chopra, Hillary Dixler, Greg Morabito, Helen Rosner

Graphics: Brittany Holloway Brown

Copy editor: Emma Alpern

Special thanks to Erin DeJesus, Mary Hough, Kristine Hsu, Milly McGuinness, Adam Moussa, and all the Eater readers and fans who submitted their favorite so-bad-they’re-good restaurant names.