Columnist John Katsilometes: Eateries need the right name

Joe's Crab Shack is a fine name for a restaurant, prompting images of a single person -- in this case "Joe" -- operating a no-frills eatery specializing in fresh crab and crab-filled food items such as crab cakes and crab Twinkies.

One can easily envision sun-splashed patrons padding around in sandals and cut-off denim shorts, cracking crab and sipping tea from frosted glasses.

Yep. Joe's Crab Shack. Great name. Better than the restaurant, even.

Fellini's works, too. It's the Italian bistro down on West Charleston. The name is that of famed movie director Federico Fellini, and the place is fittingly shrouded in a Felliniesque dankness. It's classy but murky, just like his films (minus the graphically disturbing sex scenes).

Fellini's is un nome bono.

A similar mental picture has been painted by the Outback Steakhouse chain. The very name implies an eatery frequented by grizzled Paul Hogan types. Blue jeans, flannel shirts, leather vests and tattered cowboy hats are always welcome at the Outback.

Bellagio is also prone to embrace single-named restaurants. The seafood spot is the gracefully unpretentious Aqua. The restaurant specializing in Asian noodle dishes is Noodles. The steakhouse is Prime. If Bellagio had a hamburger stand, it'd be called Patties.

Hotels face the uniquely tricky task of bestowing an apt title on 24-hour cafes. The key is to give the joint a catchy title that doesn't remind customers of diesel-fouled I-15 truck stops. Palace Station calls its around-the-clock cafe the Iron Horse as a tribute to locomotives (the soot salad, incidentally, is the house specialty).

But a more befitting name for an all-hours spot is Carson Street Cafe at the Golden Nugget or Courtyard Cafe at the Orleans. They sound quaint, clean and inexpensive.

Buffets would seem difficult to name, given that the most appropriate title for all of them would be Long Line to Food That's Been Sitting Under a Sneeze Guard for a Couple of Hours. But Mandalay Bay provides some character with the Bay Side Buffet, and as the name suggests the restaurant overlooks the hotel's 11-acre tropical lagoon.

It requires a deft and creative mind to craft an ideal name for any restaurant. When the task is botched, the name can actually embarrass rather than benefit the business.

To wit: The Hard Rock Hotel recently expanded to 670 rooms and has added four new restaurants. Just days ago it opened a characteristically trendy Mexican food place to compete with the south-of-the-border fare offered by nearly every other major hotel-casino in the city.

The restaurant is Hard Rock owner Peter Morton's creative inspiration. Chef Tacho Kneeland, fresh from Mexico City, runs the kitchen and the decor is corrugated metal, weathered wood and unshielded light bulbs. An ambitious project, indeed.

And through painstaking research and market testing, the astute minds entrusted with marketing this high-quality Mexican restaurant surveyed a myriad of clever and catchy title possibilities.

They could have chosen something related to a rock 'n' roll motif, like Rockin' Taco or Salsa Santana's.

Instead, they decided on a name sure to elicit snickers from any guy who ever snapped a towel in a high school locker room:

The Pink Taco.

That's way funny. Dude.

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