12.5 / 20 How we score Thai $$ $$ What’s in a name? Does it matter that the new StandardX hotel in Fitzroy, part of a luxury chain of internationally owned hotels, tried to open as The Standard Hotel in the same suburb and on the very same street as the 159-year-old Standard Hotel, a beloved – and excellent – neighbourhood pub? After mediation , the US-based owners agreed to add that edgy X, but I’m still a bit baffled that it was an issue in the first place. When you put $60 million into a project, you might check to see whether there’s another business nearby with the same name, if not to be neighbourly then at least to improve customers’ chances of finding it when they search online.
(Speaking of which, if you type “The Standard Hotel Fitzroy” into Google, the native search results are all for the pub, but the sponsored results – shown above the others – are for the StandardX.) How about Bang, the new restaurant next to the StandardX lobby? Sure, it could be short for Bangkok – this is a Thai restaurant, after all. Or perhaps the inspiration was the bang-pop-pow flavours for which Thai food is known.
But there’s another, yes, edgier connotation that seems unmistakable, and, frankly, a bit cringeworthy. All of this semantic peevishness would be overkill if the business and the restaurant seemed particularly in tune with the neighbourhood they occupy or the culture from which their culinary inspiration is drawn. But the names matter here because they .
