Mike and Brandon and I had decided to start up a restaurant. We were trying to decide where we were going to open it, so we went to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha to find a nice place to rent. We travelled around the zoo in some sort of open-aired train that was much faster than their little lazy-people cutesy train that goes back and forth across the zoo. This was more futuristic and it took us to all the neighborhoods in the zoo, which looked remarkably like a regular business district from the typical dirty run down bit of any large city.
I decided that we needed to talk to an expert so I decided to phone Lisa Brown, my 6th grade CCD teacher. I knew she had recently opened a restaurant of her own so I figured she'd be a great person to ask. When I phoned, her daughter Loni answered so I asked Loni if I could speak to her mother. When Lisa got on the phone I introduced myself and asked her what we needed to do to get started, as we had been having no luck as of yet.
She explained to me that the first thing we needed to do was decide who our target customer was. That was the most important thing, because once we had that decided, then we could know what type of restaurant we would need, what sort of food to offer, and where we should be located. We knew that we wanted to target mid to upper class business folk who had money but wanted a place to eat that wasn't stuffy and snooty.
That night, Mike and Brandon and I went to eat at a restaurant down on the promenade (still in Omaha...just play along). We were discussing what we should name our restaurant. I wanted to call it "The Curious George." Mike wanted to call it "The Monkey Under the Doctor." I asked him why, and he explained to me that that was a golf term--when someone stands at the tee with the ball below them, the ball is known as "the monkey under the doctor." He thought that by giving a little subtle nod to golfers, it would end up attracting the targeted crowd. I liked the logic, but "The Monkey Under the Doctor" just didn't have the right sound to it--it didn't flow off the tongue like a restaurant name needed to.
We just happened to be looking through the listings of locations for rent while we were waiting for our food, and it was there that we saw there some openings at the dock. Omaha's old dock area was the ultimate in trendiness--young people with money flocked there. Beneath the docks were a row of ultra-trendy restaurants and clubs all along the water. One of those positions had opened up, and that was exactly what we needed.
We would grab that vacancy, move our restaurant in there, and call it "The Monkey Under the Dock" -- getting the golf reference in (Doctor shortened to Doc), as well as having a nice pun, since it was actually under the dock.