AI is changing how diners discover restaurants just as merchandise, packaged foods and licensing make a distinctive name more valuable. KwangHo Lee’s upcoming Japanese restaurant shares a name with its building: One Bryant Park.
Driven by tight margins and changing discovery trends, restaurants are increasingly choosing names that function as defendable intellectual property for brand extensions like consumer packaged goods, merchandise, and digital content. While operators previously relied on keyword-stuffed names for search engine optimization, the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT—which parse contextual web data rather than exact string matches—is giving businesses the freedom to adopt more creative, personal, or distinctive names designed for humans rather than algorithms.

By
Matthew Kronsberg
Photography:
Amir Hamja/Bloomberg
