In trying to come up with a name for our restaurant, Dennis and I brainstormed through dozens of possibilities, hoping to somehow capture the essence of the place (which didn’t exist!) in just two or three words- what a daunting task! The name would have an effect on everything else we needed to determine- our concept, our logo and signage, the physical design of the place, the web-searchability... We were aware how important it was to pick exactly the right name, so we put out feelers to some of our friends and family members in hopes of getting more ideas to work with. We’d stick with one name for a few weeks, thinking we had found it, then we’d fine-tune our concept a little bit more and find that it no longer quite worked. This happened several times as we talked more about what the restaurant was all about, what our long-term goals were, and what image we wanted to project to our guests.

Then one day, one of our friends sent us an e-mail of ideas, including the names of some locally growing plants, thinking that they might relate well to our concept. One of them immediately caught our attention. Neither of us had ever heard of it before, so we looked it up on-line and found it to be a beautiful succulent plant related to the mustard green, which grows along coastal areas right out of the sand, and whose leaves can be eaten. That symbolized several things to us- local sourcing, edibility, and the ocean, from which we would get many of our main ingredients. We thought it embodied a lot of our ideas, would be fun to explain the meaning of it to people, be easy to remember, and had a catchy ring to it. Our name was born! We like to say that sea rocket provides a connection between land and sea, our two major sources for the food that we serve.