db goes after db

So Daniel Boulud is not too happy with the use of 'db' in db Wine Bar and Kitchen.

From Frank Bruni's blog:

Mr. Montagu gave me a fuller sense than his letter to Danny Brown did of why the Boulud restaurant group objects so strongly to Mr. Brown calling his Forest Hills, Queens, restaurant db Wine Bar & Kitchen and to presenting the db as two lower-case letters with little space between them, a format similar to the one for Mr. Boulud’s db bistro moderne in Manhattan.

...

The letter that Mr. Montagu sent Mr. Brown implies that if Mr. Brown doesn’t abandon the initials db, he’ll be sued. When I asked Mr. Montagu flat out if a suit was imminent, he said that it was certainly an option.

When I asked him if it would be enough for Mr. Brown to make a typographical change, calling his restaurant, say, D.B. Wine Bar & Kitchen, the lawyer said he couldn’t give definitive answers to those sorts of scenarios without having additional, non-hypothetical information, such as exactly what a new logo for the restaurant might look like.

But he suggested that capital letters and punctuation marks wouldn’t go far enough, because the sound of D.B. spelled that way is the same as the sound of db, so the initials, when uttered, could give a person the impression that they were discussing a restaurant affiliated with db bistro moderne and with Daniel Boulud.

The confusion between db Wine Bar & Kitchen and db bistro moderne certainly occurred to me, especially since initially googling for db always brought up db bistro moderne and not db Wine Bar & Kitchen.

Do Boulud and his attorney have a point here or are they picking on a little guy, our very own Danny Brown, the saving grace of the Forest Hills dining scene?

Update: I missed the earlier post over at Bruni's Blog here.