There are many things that go into making a successful restaurant: a good menu, location, luck, and good background music piped into the store all factor in, but a big chunk of success comes from choosing the correct name. Creativity, something that sounds catchy and is easy to remember all factor into a good restaurant name. Burger King is a good name but is already taken, while King Burger is a name you would pick only if you were incredibly ballsy. Picking a good name can get you quite a ways, while a foolish or difficult to remember name will sink a business fast as anything.

A restaurant that violated this rule was the woefully named Sushi Factory. Combining warehouse imagery with a dish that often utilizes raw fish is a poor idea. After closing it's doors for a brief time the restaurant re-opened under a new name: Wasabi! Yes, it's Wasabi!, the exclamation mark is part of the name. Even worse, the restaurant has a cartoon wasabi [or wasabi!] root for a mascot. I did not have high hopes for the restaurant when I went in.

Wasabi! managed to redeem it's poor name choice in my eyes by picking very good background music. For awhile the music alternated between tribal themed music -featuring a lot of distant sounding drums and adept didgeridoo playing- and what sounded like Motown tracks. After that they put on an old album by the Clash. To say the music was eclectic would be an understatement. At first I thought that Wasabi! was piping in music from the local college radio station, since that station is notorious for playing a wide variety of musical genres [and, as a consequence, is one of the few stations in town worth listening to.] I finally decided I wasn't listening to the radio since not only was there no interruption in the music to announce tracks, play public service announcements, or what have you, the tracks were of an unassuming nature and didn't feature the intentionally grating tracks -such as the Wesley Willis songs they never seem to tire of- that the college station will occasionally throw into the mix. Odd as it was, someone at Wasabi! had intentionally picked the music that was playing.

None of the music fit the theme of the restaurant which is why all of it worked so well. Instead of being a glaring difference the music created an interesting juxtaposition to the hospital-sanitary-white color scheme and the sparse, tastefully Japanese decorations. While the dinner I had -curry rice and tuna sushi- was fine and something I'd recommend, what really hurts the place in my eyes is that Wasabi! doesn't have a name that lives up to it's soundtrack.

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