We Don't Call It A Shrimp Dinner

Here is a small test. Read these two menus and decide which restaurant you would rather eat at.

The first one: Shrimp Dinner. Chicken Dinner. Fish Plate. Side Salad.

The second one: The Hot Girlz Special. The Anna Nicole Special. The Chrissy-Missy. Yo-Mama Shepherd's Pie. The Pork Chop Burrito. Hot Girlz Kool-Aid. Maggie-Lee Sweet Tea.

Nobody has to think about that for very long.

Named food is remembered food

A description tells you what is on the plate. A name tells you the plate has a history. "Seven shrimp and five wings with a side" is information. "The Hot Girlz Special" is something you can say out loud to a friend three weeks later and still remember exactly how it tasted.

It also changes how ordering feels. Asking for a shrimp dinner makes you a customer. Asking for the Chrissy-Missy by name makes you someone who has been here before — or someone who wants to sound like they have. Both of those are good for a kitchen.

The names are doing real work

Look at what is actually happening in that list. There are combination plates named after people, which means somebody in the family or somebody in the neighbourhood is attached to them. There is a burrito made out of pork chops, which is a joke and a genuinely good idea at the same time. There is a shepherd's pie with an attitude in front of it. There is a red drink and a sweet tea that both refused to be called "beverages."

That is a voice. Most restaurants pay an agency for one and get something worse.

The single fastest way to make this brand generic would be to rename the Chrissy-Missy "Combo #3."

And the sides are not an afterthought

Underneath the specials sits the part that actually decides whether a soul food kitchen is any good: collard greens cooked with smoked neck bones, mac and cheese, cheese grits, peas and rice, baked beans. Nothing there is trying to be clever. It does not need to be. That is the part where the cooking either happened or it did not.

The specials get you in the door. The greens are why you come back — and the reviews bear that out, because people who mention the greens tend to mention their mother in the same sentence.

Keep the vocabulary

If there is one instruction worth attaching to the entire brand, it is this: do not sand the names down. Do not translate them for people who are not from here. Do not "clean up the menu for a wider audience."

The names are the wider audience. They are the reason a stranger tells somebody else about this place.