Yesterday we reported that a new eatery called Rusty Bucket Restaurant & Tavern will be coming to the Lower Highland neighborhood on the ground floor of a new apartment complex being built there. There are already plenty of Rusty Buckets around — nineteen and counting throughout Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Florida, with at least two planned for the Denver metro area. But what we didn't mention is that the name is already taken in Colorado: The Rusty Bucket Bar & Grill has called South Wadsworth Boulevard in Lakewood home for the past seven or eight years.
Of course, this isn't the first case of restaurants with identical names popping up in the same town; sometimes it spells trouble, but sometimes the identical twins find a way to get along. The Rusty Bucket chain, owned by Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, is older than the Lakewood bar and grill — a favorite of Pittsburgh Steelers fans — by a few years, having launched in Dublin, Ohio, in 2002. But until now, the group has been content to spread in the Midwest and points south and east. With the chain's cross-hairs set on Colorado, could the homegrown version become a trademark casualty, or will the two Rusty Buckets find a way to co-exist?