The new restaurant at Lincoln Center, which was reviewed in today’s New York Times, has a Central Florida connection: it’s owned by the Patina Restaurant Group, which also owns and operates the restaurants at Epcot’s Italy pavilion. Like its sister restaurants (or maybe it’s brother; I always find it difficult to tell the gender of restaurants), Lincoln Ristorante is Italian, and it received a very respectable debut rating of two stars in critic Sam Sifton’s review. The Epcot venues include Tutto Italia, which replaced Alfredo’s a few years ago, and the recently opened Via Napoli, with its special brick ovens imported from Naples and special water, imported from Pennsylvania. Even with those expenses, the two restaurants here probably didn’t cost as much as the new venue at the renovated Lincoln Center reportedly cost, which is a cool $20 million. With all that money, they couldn’t come up with a better name for it? Does anyone else find the name Lincoln Ristorante a bit odd? How about Lincolno? Or maybe L’Incolne. Lincoln Ristorante doesn’t speak to me. Or, to use a phrase more apt to the location, it just doesn’t sing.

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