Step 5: Shortlisting your name ideas

It’s weeding time! This is where you prune and pick only the best names for your restaurant. Your shortlist should have about 3-5 names off your initial list.

Picking your favorite unique restaurant name may be tough, especially if you used our restaurant name generator. There are a few things you need to consider when creating a shortlist.

1. Keep it simple. Good restaurant names should be unique, but mostly simple. Simple names are easily remembered.
2. Check for linguistics and context. Do a quick google search of your names to find out what they mean in other languages- especially your target countries. If any of them has an offensive meaning in another language, it’s best to go with a different name.
3. Sometimes owners choose names that later become controversial especially in overseas markets. Don’t make that mistake. Eliminate any chances of the name being misinterpreted as sexist, homophobic, racist, or offensive in any way to any community.
4. Tagline check. If you haven’t come up with a tagline at this point, take a pause and do that. It’s important that your chosen restaurant name aligns with your tagline, which is also your slogan.

It is your prerogative to decide the elimination criteria, but this checklist should help you shorten your list:

• Is the name culturally sensitive?
• Does the name capture the values and vision of your brand?
• Does the name align with your tagline? If you don’t have a tagline ready, you need to create it at this point and align it with your preferred app name.
• How relatable is the name to the target audience?
• Of the most relatable names, which ones are the easiest to remember?
• Can your target audience pronounce the name easily and accurately?
• How original does the name sound? You don’t want clichés and plagiarized names.

Reduce your list from the original 20-40 names to about 3-5 names.

From the list of 20 restaurant names I`ve shared on Stage 0 of this guide, here are my top 4 picks that I love most and why the name caught your eye.

1. WeirDough – Food puns will always grab attention, and this play on the word Weirdo is a great name for a bakery or a restaurant that specializes in baked goods
2. Backyard Barbeque – A straightforward restaurant name idea that immediately tells the customer what your restaurant is about
3. Côte d’Azur – The French word for the French Riviera is a great abstract and unique restaurant name for a fine dining ambiance and French cuisine
4. The Yellow Pepper – A catchy restaurant name, this name will keep your customers hooked and intrigued about your menu

Step 6: Background Check

Once you have shortlisted the best restaurant names, background checks are necessary. A background check might just save you from future legal battles and cases of misinterpretation. Here are a few things to do in a background check.

• Research Legality: You do not want to get in trouble with the law because you’re starting a restaurant business. So, find out if your intended restaurant names and taglines are in accordance with the law of your home country. Do this for each name on the shortlist. If any of them does not pass the test, drop that name and move on with the others.

• Trademark Check: to avoid cases of trademark infringement down the line, find out if your restaurant name or logo is already trademarked by another organization. If it’s not, you have the go-ahead to register it as your own trademark.

• Readability: Are your restaurant name ideas easy to read and understand? You can get an external opinion on the readability of your restaurant name and tagline. If it’s not, you have the opportunity to fix that because you’re not creating it for yourself alone.

Step 7: Get some Feedback

You have narrowed down your 20-40 name list to 2-3 names at this point.

Simple step: It’s great to have the opinion of a third-party when you’re done with the primary checks. Their opinion may differ from yours, but it’s mostly objective criticism so that’s okay. You can show a list of your final 2 club names to;

1. People who run  or own a restaurant.
2. Your target audience.

If you’re asking your ideal audience, ask the first thing they thought of on hearing that name. Ask a restaurant owner how they think an audience would interpret your name ideas.

Once you get feedback, go back and figure out if their response was in favor of your restaurant name or not. Ask yourself if the name evoked the thoughts, you had imagined it would.

Pro Step: If you want to go deeper with the feedback step you can reach out to opinion shapers, industry leaders, your ideal customers, linguists, and tech futurists for their opinions.

• Tech futurists will help you predict and reshape the future prospects of your new restaurant name within the global tech space.
• Linguists will advise on the name’s readability and lingual appropriateness.
• Opinion shapers and industry leaders will help you predict the restaurant’s probable reception in the real world.
• Ideal customers will tell you whether the business name represents a need they would purchase.

Pro tip: Don’t rely too much on feedback from biased people, especially fans, friends, family members, and colleagues. Seek the opinion of brutally honest critics.

Step 8: Check if the name is available

You have come a long way in trying to name your restaurant. Now, the final step is to check if your name and extension of choice are available for domain registration. You can use our name availability checker to run a quick check after you have generated name ideas for your restaurant. Our free tool shows you which domain extensions are available, and will recommend logo ideas that correspond with your business name. Or you can Google the shortlisted names to ensure that they aren’t plagiarized. Looking up the names will also give you an idea of what each name might mean to different internet users.

The restaurant name generator and availability checker are highly recommended, to make your restaurant stand out from the rest.