In an age of careful branding, restaurateurs put a lot of thought into choosing just the right name. Rarely will they go to the trouble and expense of changing it.
Yet the chef Tom Colicchio is dropping the name of his newest Manhattan restaurant, Fowler & Wells, after learning that it has historically racist connotations. The new name is Temple Court.
Fowler & Wells, which opened last October, was named for a publishing company and scientific institute that once operated in a building on the same site in the financial district; that building was later torn down, replaced by Temple Court, the building that stands there now. The men who started the company, Edward Fowler and Samuel Wells, were proponents of phrenology, a popular 19th-century belief that the shape of one’s skull revealed characteristics like mental aptitude and personality.
The practice was frequently used to justify slavery and to advance a belief in African-American inferiority. Fowler wrote that coarse hair correlated with coarse fibers in the brain, and indicated coarse feelings; that, he wrote, suggested that people of African descent had poor verbal skills and traits that were best suited for nursing children or waiting on tables.
Colicchio, who has emerged as a strong liberal voice in food policy, and frequently uses his Twitter account to criticize President Donald Trump, said that when he and his team were developing ideas for a name, they understood that phrenology “was used for nefarious reasons” but had only a passing knowledge of it.
The connection, he said, seemed a harmless one. They even gave their cocktails names that referred to the era; a section of the bar list included a brain diagram and was titled the Phrenological Cabinet.
“I don’t think it was a bad idea to start with because we didn’t have any of the information we have now,” Colicchio said. “I have a fairly liberal persona and never in a million years would consider myself a racist, so it never crossed my mind.”
In a review of Fowler & Wells in January, The New York Times’ restaurant critic, Pete Wells, pointed out the deeper racial implications of the name, while acknowledging, “This is obviously not a side of phrenology that Mr. Colicchio, who is outspoken about his progressive politics, embraces.”
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