This is just for fun - maybe "Bella vino" could be interpreted as "Bella, vino?" someone asking a beautiful girl if she wants some wine. The second one could be "Bella, vestiti!" asking her to get ready to go out.
You guys are much more forgiving and creative than I am. It appears that cose Italiane are "in" these days. That's all well and good, but merchants rampantly name their businesses using incorrect grammar, gender matching, etc. and it drives me nuts. We should make a list of them. Or maybe not....
OK, here's one for the list. Near us in suburban Boston is a new restaurant that claims to be Tuscan, named L'Andana. The name supposedly came from "Lontano" -- far away -- but the owners, I guess, thought L'Andana looked or sounded better, so they made up the meaningless name.
There's a home decor store near my house with the name of Ché casa. The website says that it means "What a house" but I'm not certain about the use of ché with the accent in this context. I was taught that ché is short for perché which has a different meaning than che (without the accent). In any case I guess it should be: Che casa!
Roz, They stole the name - as they admit - from an establishment in Tuscany. Googling reveals that L'Andana is Alain Ducasse's relatively new place in the Maremma. "L'Andana" has nothing to do with "lontano"; an "andana" is the strip of land between two rows of trees.
That's interesting, Zerlina, because whoever does L'Andana's PR then is misinformed. This article from the Boston Globe has the "lontano" story, and I'm pretty sure I remember reading that also on their menu, since we did eat there a few weeks ago.
What exactly is the meaning of LaGroceria ? It's not an Italian word and there's a similar word in Spanish - grosería- which means rudeness but this is an Italian restaurant in Cambridge and a very well known one.
Wine can be a lot of things (strong, light, dark, vinegary, etc.) but cannot be beautiful! Even if you correct the sign to "bel vino" (this is grammatically correct), it still does not make sense.
itarchivarius Take a look at the title of this page Che bei vini da tavola I think when Bello (bel/bei) is used in this way it should be translated into English as "fine" wine/s not beautiful - Fine table wines.
Originally posted by David: You guys are much more forgiving and creative than I am. It appears that cose Italiane are "in" these days. That's all well and good, but merchants rampantly name their businesses using incorrect grammar, gender matching, etc. and it drives me nuts. We should make a list of them. Or maybe not....
Oh David, I am with you! I have no forgiveness for this kind of stuff. With internet and other forms of communications, there is NO excuse for a restaurant owner not to email somebody or somehow find someone who can tell him or her if their Italian (or Spanish, French...) is correct!
If I can sidestep to Spanish for a second, in DC there is a restaurant (it is originally from NYC I think) called Rosa Mexicano. I always wonder if it is a mistake or if it might be named for a lady named Rosa Mexicano?
Yes, Rosa Mexicano is in NYC - not sure whether the DC pre- or post-dated it - right across from Lincoln Center. Good food, actually! Funny, for all my finickiness, that one got by me.
The food was good, but the service left a lot to be desired. I guess they were still working out the kinks since it's a fairly new place and has gotten a lot of PR. But they screwed up the bar order twice, and then left us waiting for our main dishes for about an hour. We arrived at 7 (with a reservation) and were still waiting for our meal at 9:00. We did have a primo before that, but it had been long gone.
The manager was making the rounds and I told him about the service problem. So, score one for them, he did comp us the main courses, which was especially good because I think the prices are pretty high.
But then they still messed up our checks: there were 3 couples, and we asked to split the bill 3 ways. We didn't pay enough attention to the bottom line until we got home and discovered that each of our 3 credit cards had actually been charged half of the total bill! So then we had to spend a lot of time playing phone tag to straighten that out.
Sorry to get so off-topic here, but you did ask, David....
- Roz
P.S. I also wonder, after what Zerlina said above, if their bit about getting the name from "lontano" might be a ploy to keep Alain Ducasse from coming after them for stealing the name of his place. Which reminds me that in Nice I saw a Holiday Inn advertising a restaurant called "Chez Panisse," which I don't believe Alice Waters had anything to do with.
I've always wondered about the origin of the name of the resturant in Florence "Il latini". Is it named after someone named Latini? If it's "the latins" it should be i latini.
