Owner stands by restaurant name: Yellow Fever
KELLY Kim and her husband wanted the name of their new pan-Asian restaurant to stand out, eschewing bland or stereotypical phrases, like bamboo, dragon and lotus.
Then it hit them. Yellow Fever.
“That’s memorable,” Kim recalls saying to her husband Michael before they opened their first location in late 2013, in a Saturday interview with the Washington Post.
After Wednesday’s opening of a third location in aWhole Foods 365 store in Long Beach, California, it may be memorable in a different away.
The announcement triggered a national outcry on social media, with many criticising the name’s racist undertones.
Yellow fever is a mosquitoborne infection that kills thousands every year, mostly in Africa, and named for the jaundice hemorrhage that the virus produces. But the phrase is also a common reference to a term associated with a white man’s sexual fascination with Asian women.
Kim, who said that before this week the name wasn’t an issue, did not take the term to have an overtly sexual or even negative meaning, adding that it is more nuanced than what critics have said.
The term implies “an attraction or affinity of Asian people or Asian things”, such as Korean pop music or karaoke, she said. “I never took it to a have deeper meaning . . . It’s a little tongue in cheek, but I never saw it as offensive or racist or anti-feminist,” she said.
Kim, who is also the executive chef, said that she discussed the charged nature of her restaurant’s name with Whole Foods, but could not recall if her partners or the company raised the issue.
Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods did not return a request for comment. The company lists Yellow Fever and another store, Groundwork Coffee, as “friends of 365”, a Whole Foods program in which local businesses are provided a space inside the store to draw more customers. (Whole Foods is owned by Amazon.com; Jeffrey P Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns the Washington Post.)
The restaurant, which serves bowls of rice, noodles, or salad with various toppings and sauces, has long embraced its name and interpretations.
“Yellow Fever . . . yeah, we really said that. Yes, the name definitely gets your attention. But rather than narrowly associating it with a deadly disease or with perpetuating racial stereotypes, we choose to embrace the term and reinterpret it positively for ourselves,” Yellow Fever company material provided to the Post said.
In previous media interviews, Kim has acknowledged the potential for negative reactions to the name.
“Once, I had a friend who was grabbing our food for lunch and her white friend wasn’t sure if he was allowed to eat here,” she told Asian culture site Next Shark last year, adding that she wanted to “re-appropriate” the term to define it her way.
The discussion playing out on social media has been more heated.
Much of the discussion is aimed at Whole Foods and the perception of the store catering to an affluently white demographic.
Kim is sticking by the name, she told the Post.