It's a HONderful Day

On Sunday I participated in a roundtable discussion with Gordon Ramsay, who was taping an episode of Kitchen Nightmares about Cafe Hon.

On Monday morning, Cafe Hon owner Denise Whiting announced that she is abandoning her trademark claim on the word “Hon.”

Are the two events related? Maybe.

My interest in Hon is through another web site, Welcome To Baltimore, Hon!, a sort of mashup of a city guide and virtual museum that I’ve maintained for several years.

There is that Whiting had essentially taken a common term of endearment that is tantamount to public property and claimed it as her own for exclusive commercial exploitation.

I felt—as do many others—that Whiting’s trademark claims had a chilling effect. There was an implicit fear that somebody with a blog or magazine, a store owner, or somebody who produces a coffee cup or T-shirt, makes a poster, throws a theme party or wants to use a hon character in advertising could receive an unpleasant letter from a lawyer.

Charlene Osborne, of Dundalk, had been portraying the beehive-and-feather boa-ed Hon long before she won the Baltimore’s Best Hon contest at Honfest. She told me about the headaches and legal costs involved in producing a book about her experience, My Year as Baltimore’s Best Hon. Talking about Whiting makes her visibly upset.

“When she said, ‘I created you, I own you,’ she crossed a line,” Osborne said.

Last Saturday, I received an email from a Kitchen Nightmares producer. The show was looking for people who could inform Gordon Ramsay about the Hon issues.

We met in a conference room at a hotel not far from Cafe Hon. I was joined by Osborne and another friend, William Patrick Tandy, who produces an acclaimed literary magazine, Smile Hon, You’re in Baltimore.

The roundtable included several others, including a graphic artist, a few Hampden residents, a cultural anthropologist and an expert on civility from Johns Hopkins.

We talked with Ramsay for about an hour. They asked us not to discuss what happened, so I won’t.

But I will say this: Ramsay was well informed and had clearly done his homework on the Hon issue and the deep feelings surrounding it in Baltimore.

The segment was taped with no frills. There was no stage lighting, just two cameras and a boom microphone. Nothing was staged or coached.

Ramsay thanked us and shook our hands as we were ushered out of the conference room. The “reveal” meal was taped Monday night when Cafe Hon unveiled its new décor and menu.

On Monday morning Whiting abandoned the trademark and asked for forgiveness on MIX-106.5, saying that the trademark “just about killed the business.”

I guess it took a personality as forceful as Ramsay’s to convince Whiting that a three-letter word threatened to unravel a 20-year-old landmark restaurant and all the good works she has done.

If Whiting remains true to her word, Hon will be cemented in the public domain for anybody to use any way they want, for business purposes or otherwise.

And that’s great news, hon.