CEIBA

 What's in the name of this Hot Latin Restaurant?

It took months of debate, but a name was finally chosen for Passion Food Hospitality’s contemporary Latin restaurant, which opened in September 2003. It is called Ceiba, pronounced "say-ba," after the umbrella-shaped tree found throughout the new-world tropics. Closely related to the peculiar baobab trees of Africa, the crown of the Ceiba tree is laden with plants and provides a home for countless species of animals.

The ancient Maya of Central America believed that a great Ceiba tree stood at the center of the earth, connecting the terrestrial world to the heavens above. Long, thick vines hung down from its spreading limbs, providing a connection between the real world and the world above. Even today, these trees are regularly spared when forests are cut, in deference to their mythological status.

In the 1940s, the fruit of the Ceiba tree was harvested commercially for stuffing life preservers. The fluff that surrounds the seeds of the fruit, called kapok, is buoyant and resists saturation by water, making it the perfect flotation aid. As a result of the many synthetic fibers invented later in the twentieth century, the Ceiba's fruits are no longer harvested.

Ceiba trees are also prized by indigenous peoples who construct enormous dugout canoes out of the trunks. Some of these canoes can hold as many as forty passengers! For villages nestled in the forests of the tropical lowlands, these giant canoes provide the only connection to neighbors and to the rest of the world, as they are plied on the winding waterways of the rainforest.

In choosing the perfect name for their new restaurant, the owners of DC Coast and TenPenh settled on Ceiba because of the beauty and majesty of the tree, which features strongly in the restaurant's graphics.