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SAFER WATERS?
Tsunami sushi bar wonders what’s in a name
BY MIKE MILIARD

There’s a boatload of Asian seafood restaurants in Brookline. Their names range from the evocative (Fugakyu, which sounds a little like a samurai swordsman’s swearword) to the prosaic (Chinatown Seafood, simple and to the point). But between those two Coolidge Corner establishments sits one sushi bar whose moniker has lately gained a new and unwelcome association.

Tsunami, whose logo shows its "T" rendered as a tall and cresting wave about to engulf the rest of the word, was very quiet during lunch hour this past Monday. A lone couple dined in the corner; a waiter and a sushi chef bided their time behind the bar at the back. On the walls, fish-shaped kites hung lazily. The silence was sculpted only by water burbling gently over pebbles in a small fountain by the window.

Tsunami. A word that just two weeks ago signified merely a half-grasped abstraction, a distant possibility, now evokes something all too horrifically real. Small surprise, then, that a restaurant named after one might not be high on most diners’ lists. In fact, however, owner John Wu says he hasn’t noticed a precipitous decline in customers since the "the terrible incident" of two Sundays ago. "The economy is slow in general compared to two or three years ago, there’s no doubt about that," he says. "But there’s not been a significant drop."

Still, Wu — who’s originally from Taiwan and, thankfully, doesn’t know anyone affected by the disaster — was naturally concerned that the eating public might react adversely to the new connotation of his restaurant’s name. "That’s exactly what I was worried about since the occurrence on Sunday, that my name would now suddenly become a bad rap. But actually, that hasn’t happened so far." Even so, he says, "there have been three individuals — one was my customer and two others were pedestrians — mentioning that now the word tsunami is associated with this big destructive image [and] that perhaps we should change the name. Although that does not represent a majority of my clientele, it does make me think."

But he’s not ready to take drastic action quite yet. "Of course, changing a company’s identity is extremely difficult," Wu says. "We’re a small, family-run restaurant. For the last three and a half years we have established quite a nice reputation for ourselves in a mega-city for sushi bars — there are 14 in Brookline alone. From my perspective right now, things are still okay. Right now, I don’t see the impact. But if I do, then I have to seriously consider marketing myself otherwise."

Tsunami is located at 10 Pleasant Street (Coolidge Corner), in Brookline; call (617) 277-8008.


Issue Date: January 7 - 13, 2005
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