TBT's Peter Couture started thinking about Chef Robert Irvine's upcoming local ventures:

The names of celebrity chef Robert Irvine’s yet-to-open St. Petersburg restaurants — Ooze and Schmooze — got us to thinking about poorly chosen names. That eventually led us to a 2006 review in the London newspaper The Observer by critic Jay Rayner of a restaurant named ... Ooze. Rayner, it seems, shares our impression of the name. He writes: “Here’s what I want to know: why didn’t somebody stop them? Why didn’t one of their investors, hearing the name for the first time, say, for God’s sake no! Ooze is a bloody awful name for a restaurant. It’s a dog of a name. It shouts seepage. It bellows muddy outflow. Infected wounds ooze. Please try again.” Oh, and Rayner wasn’t that fond of the food, either. Chef Irvine, you might consider your countryman’s advice.

While we are playing the name game, The Guardian’s food blog has tackled the subject of the worst restaurant names in the world. One of the leading candidates must be that quaint spot for romantic dining known as Hitler’s Cross. The restaurant, in Mumbai, India, is adorned with images of the Führer. “We wanted to be different. This is one name that will stay in people’s minds,” owner Punit Shablok is quoted as saying by the Times of India. Table for two, please! Then there’s this Houston restaurant that sounds like it was lifted from one of Jay Leno’s humerous headlines: Crapitto’s. (Now that’s Italian!). And a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney, has done a study — “Onomastic Sobriquets in the Food and Beverage Industry” — on the subject. Her work includes a bunch of big words we don’t understand, but we got a kick out of some of the restaurant names. A sampling: Sir Loins, Pulp Kitchen, Grateful Bread, Pizzadelic, Aroma Borealis, The Angry Trout. Even some of Tampa’s finest are listed, most notably: Mad Dogs & Englishmen, SideBerns and the restaurant delivery service Dine One One.