When I lived in France there was a restaurant chain called ‘Flunch’. I always thought it was a bit dangerous naming your eatery after the noise made by vomit hitting the bottom of a bucket, but then I remembered that the ‘Happy Eater’ restaurants, which once graced many a dual carriageway roadside across Britain, chose an icon of somebody putting their fingers down their throat as their corporate image. It was a kind of disclaimer, or so they told me as a child when I spilled my insides all over the slide in the play-area.
America seems to have also taken the name game seriously. In California there is a chain of fast-food restaurants called ‘In-n-out Burger’. As they only serve burgers, I do not go in there, but it’s probably just as well. However, my new favourite place in Davis is the little 50’s style diner known to locals as ‘Murder Burger’. Their tagline reads ‘So Good, They’re To Die For’, and they really are. I had an ostrich burger (while staff made possibly real noises of slaughtering an ostrich in the kitchen) and a huge, ultra-thick peanut-butter milkshake. It was an overwhelming experience. Their title dish is a massive 1lb burger called ‘Annihilation’, that if I ate red meat I would try, but it would probably kill me.
Their sign no longer reads ‘Murder Burger’, but goes by the moniker ‘Redrum Burger’. When they opened a second branch about eight years ago in a different town (one less liberal than Davis), some locals complained about the name, so they held a poll among their faithful customers to change the name. The winner, by a mile, was actually ‘Murder Burger’, but they went with the runner-up. Of course, nobody in Davis ever calls it ‘Redrum’; that would be so, like, not cool.
In a world of Taco Bells (read: ambulance sirens) and Burger Kings (read: throne up), Murder Burger sits comfortably, even if the clientele doesn’t.
petescully 