You would think no business out there could possibly be so dumb as to try something like that again right?
Well, enter the Aloha Poke Company (stylized as "Aloha Poke Co."), a mid-sized Chicago Hawaiian restaurant chain (it has 2 locations according to Yelp), and they've decided that the word "Aloha" is their word, and their word alone. As could be expected, for an iconic word from the native Hawaiian language meaning both "hello" and "goodbye" and an iconic part of the Hawaiian culture as a whole, the people of Hawaii were less than thrilled to hear a white man halfway around the world in Chicago was now claiming to own their word. Worse still, the Aloha Poke company sent out numerous cease and desist letters to Poke restaurants across the country to stop using the word Aloha or face legal action- including to traditional restaurants on the Hawaiian islands themselves.
When several Hawaiian businesses and residents protested the business, the business owner Zach Friedlander and his lawyer doubled down that they owned the word now, and there was nothing the Hawaiian people could do about it, and that they could either pay royalties for use of the word "Aloha" or suffer the consequences in court.
Thus, several large-scale protests have struck the restaurants, and the online protests are still burning brightly, so brightly that the business' Yelp and TripAdvisor pages are effectively offline for new reviews as the sites wait for the vitriol to settle in relation to the restaurant.
Let's put it this way, if I'm hearing about it, it's pretty serious for the Aloha Poke Company.
So, will Gordon Ramsay swoop in to save the day, or will the owner Zach Friedlander cut his losses before things get even more out of hand? Time will tell!
News Articles:
Guardian
Tech Dirt
IPPro
ABC
Honolulu Star Advertiser
Office of Hawaiian Affairs
