If our writings have some purpose is that of test those who read that a restaurant is a crossroads between art, physiological need, entertainment and trade and that with so many great gentlemen sitting at the table is not easy to properly serve everyone.
We have referred to all the elements of interest we have found in this business to reinforce the idea that whoever enters this territory should carefully take care of every detail, systematically evaluating them and taking nothing for granted.
One of such details is the way we condense the essence of our culinary and business proposition in words.
Words are codifications. An individual takes an idea and translates it into terms delivered by speech or writing to others who, based on these, recreate the original idea. As both individuals previously share knowledge of coding systems such as language, alphabet; concepts attributed to each word, etcetera; this process is possible.
Calm down now ... we are still in the AlaMesa’s Blog and not in a newsletter on philology, a science we revere but do not master. But it's true: we often are force to explain what our restaurant is about availing exclusively of words.
And that's where we clash with unexpected obstacles, some of them of such a nature, that some minutes before realizing that they affect us, were a source of pride for us. Think about it, Spanish is an elaborated, complex language. Cubans are gregarious, talkative, and extroversive. For practical purposes, this cultural confluence implies that we tend to accumulate words and words during the process of transmitting one or several ideas.
It is not even an error or a misuse of language, its simply part of who we, Spanish speakers born on this island, are. In ordinary conversation, this has no significance; things become more complicated when it comes to the subtle art of attracting someone to our establishment.
Long texts, adjectival and pompous deter the reader or hearer. The core information (what, where, who, how, when, how much) dispersed and difficult to access (instead of being disposed in a handful of lines available to the receiver) make contents less useful and prevent it from replicate.
The fast pace of modern life dismissed that recurring image of Westers and films set in the European Middle Ages in which a peddler stopped the normal course of life of an entire village for hours while promoting his product. Now you have less than one minute or 256 characters and must take advantage of them even if it means taking a spear and assaulting Don Miguel de Cervantes.
For the record, this is not an invitation to violate the rules of language, that would be counterproductive, but to gain enough knowledge to optimize the transfer of ideas.
Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth in one of their novels ("The Space Merchants", 1953) describe a future world in which true poets have to work on advertising. Imbued with this logic, it is easy to admit that the condensed metric of haiku has been replaced by the slogan.
The cultural and sociological environment of the average Cuban living on the island compels him to replace slogans with mottoes. This is a statement based on empirical experience and not fully supported by sociological or statistical experiments and as such can be challenge by our readers. However, it is clear that comparatively our training in the construction of mottoes is overwhelmingly greater than our training in the construction of slogans. Also in most cases we don’t even notice the differences between them.
The first difference lies in concept: a motto is an entire, whole idea, while a slogan is just a trigger. A motto is an internal element to an organization whose purpose is to unite its members around this idea, to lead them to identify themselves with it. It is intended to create esprit de corps.
Slogans on the contrary, are meant for potential consumers, people outside the organization. The purpose of slogan is to disturb, to induce in consumers different ideas all converging to attract and compel them to consume a product.
A slogan can have almost any length between 4 words and the first 2 chapters of Don Quixote (this, of course, is an exaggeration, but not a great one). In a slogan on the other hand, 5 words is a luxury few can afford, 3 a risky bet and less than that is the standard.
Its purpose is to adhere to the mind of the receiver prepared to emerge at every opportunity available as a reference that will bring the product to mind. That can not be achieved with a tirade (or at least few have done it).
Finally and most important, one of those words, or that word, MUST be a verb.