Joe’s Italian Restaurant – Farmington, New Mexico
Is it disingenuous for restaurants to label themselves with titles and sobriquets they don’t quite (or at least not quite honestly) live up to? (Politicians do it all the time, so why not restaurants?) Is it pretentious and haughty to use labels with which English-speaking diners might be impressed even though we don’t know what they mean? Is it instead great marketing, a clever way to increase the number of guests? It’s something I actually ponder when visiting Italian restaurants. For example, when our friend Greg Hamilton introduced us to “Joe’s Restaurant” in Farmington, I momentarily wondered if it could possibly be good considering its humble name. Far too many Italian restaurants label themselves as trattorias, osterias and tavolas. Not…
