Thus Café Faux Pas hangs its shingle just like Defilé, Flambée, La Brise, La Perle de Prague, La Provence, Le St.-Jacques, Le Terroir and Les Moules. Most of these places aren't French-owned; several of them don't serve French food or French wine or have French-speaking staff. They are merely names.

There was a time when fine dining in America meant French cuisine, and all the best restaurants there had names like Le Cirque and Le Bernardin. Many still do. But a more recent trend in the United States seems to be single-word conceptual names without an article: Chow, Craft, Prime, Veritas, Industry. Other fancy restaurants play on the renown of the celebrity chef who runs them, such as Daniel Boulud's DB Bistro Moderne and Wylie Dufresne's WD-50, or Jean-Georges Vongenrichten's Jean Georges and JG.

Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but I can't think of a single restaurant in Prague that carries the name of the chef who runs it. Most of our names are also not single-word concepts without articles, though Square and Pravda fit the bill. Overwhelmingly, however, restaurants of note bear foreign names: It's Square, not Čtverec or Náměstí.

Looking at the 50 restaurant listings in a recent week's Night & Day, 14 are English, 11 Czech, 11 Italian, three Japanese, two French and nine "other," ranging from Pakistani to Turkish. The top 20 restaurants in a recent edition of the Gourmán guide had just nine clearly Czech names, 10 if you count the Franzouský restaurant in Obecní dům.

Does it matter? Not particularly — you can't eat the name, after all. But literalists would say that the name should serve some purpose. For them, there's nothing more confusing than a name with no real meaning, especially when it seems as if it should have one. To flambé is a culinary technique wherein you cover a bit of food with brandy and set it aflame, as in crepes suzette; Flambée is also the name of a noteworthy restaurant in Old Town. The last time I visited the restaurant, though, I couldn't find anything flambéed on the menu. As the French might ask, a quoi ca sert? (Ca sert a rien.) At least at Les Moules they serve mussels.

There is a wonderful restaurant just outside of town, I'm told, called L'Auberge de Provence. I've never been, in part because I'm skeptical of a restaurant that uses such a place-specific foreign name. What makes it a lodge in Provence? We're a thousand kilometers or more from Aix. Why not just call it Český hostinec?

The reason, of course, is because names are meant to suggest something beyond their literal meaning. They connote as well as denote, and for many, the connotations of a French auberge differ from those of a Czech hostinec. The owners of the new restaurant Efes have said that they chose the name because they wanted to serve cuisine from the rich tradition of all Anatolian cultures, not just Turkish, and the classical city of Efes seemed to reflect that better than, say, Istanbul.

And sometimes, connotations shift almost overnight. The restaurant Ariana changed its name from Kabul very soon after the 9/11 attacks were tied to Afghanistan.