IMHO, If I were Restaurant owner, I'd prefer .dine or .dining over .rest
First thing I think of with .rest is the actual word, and if people have to be convinced that it makes sense to use .rest for restaurants, then it's not the sensible choice. Afterall, even you guys reserved Bed.rest, Vacation.rest, Relax.rest, Pillow.rest, etc. You've secured the obvious winners and best names on the extension. LOL
.bar on the other hand is great and I'm sure it will be useful.
Good luck
It's actually very interesting to read about the different opinions that people have regarding the use of these domain names, and that is why we also created this post.
Our priority was to create a domain name that was universal (i.e. that could have a meaning in many different languages, or as much as possible, given the huge amount of different spellings and symbols in many languages), but also short, easy to pronounce, to spell and to remember.
REST has all these values added into it
Yes... It's more difficult to understand for english speaking people, but we are using what exists in the real life, and many other terms are just not suitable to accomplish this...
.dine or .dining is exclusive for english speaking countries (so not at all universal)
.restaurant is both long hard to spell and not universal
.resto is not widely used as the term "restaurant"
.food is not quite the category for restaurants
And many people actually spell restaurant as "rest" when they type it on a whatsapp message or while searching online, so it makes sense to use this abbreviation (yes, it's more an abbreviation than an acronym), even if it's a bit more difficult to attract english-speaking people.
.bar .club .pub .cafe are great
.rest sounds like restroom to me... and I am British, we don't use that term!
tom beats me to it... .dine would be much better!
.restaurant would be too long and a tricky word to spell for a lot of people and easier to typo. Granted.
I also think (putting myself on the line here lol...) rest is an abbreviation for different languages, not an acronym.
If you have a Restaurant called The Neptunes Restaurant in the US... you would likely have neptunes.com .. why would you register neptunes.rest? It isn't even the full title. search engines allow head (i.e. title), body, and link text content to be associated with a domain name/website. Other traffic is from online adverts or shared links, which are direct the user has to do nothing other than click and wait... and the rest is from type in traffic being quoted from a menu, receipt, sign, radio advert etc.
If you cannot get the name you wanted (yes, Neptunes was a very generic example) you diversify with adding a location name or suffix... i.e. neptunesnewyork.com or neptunesonline.com etc.
As for a universal domain name regardless of language... you would have country codes such as .ca, .de, .uk, .it etc.
Personally I think .rest is a new extension too far!
Yes... It's a challenge!
We have to wait and see how real restaurants start to use the new domain extensions into their image and branding... maybe there will be a restaurant called ocean blue, and they may not even buy a .rest name, but "ocean.blue"
Our goal is to help the domain namespace be better organized... because neptunesonline.com or neptuneslondon.com still doesn't say that neptunes is a restaurant and not a toy store!
neptuneslondon.rest will say it, and neptunes.rest will say it too!
And It's also a question of branding...
what is easier to remember?
Easier to design, to fit into a poster, a menu, a napkin, a matchbox?
neptunes.rest
neptuneslondon.rest
neptunesrestaurantlondon.com
There are more than 20 million restaurants worldwide, so there has to be room for some that prefer a .dine and a .food and a .eat and a .rest
This is what the whole new gTLD program is all about... choice!
