Partial answer
First we must
find a correspondence between the 20 symbols used in the grid and the 20 letters in the words under it, so as to allow us to find those words in the grid. NECTARINE is the obvious way in here, being as long a word as will fit in the grid with some handily repeated letters. After a few minutes' trial and error we get:
ITHASTHRE
NECTARINE
EMARYRREB
HIEPAPAYA
PLPWPBEWR
YEGLALAAS
HMIDATERT
AOFRUITTW
DNASRATSO
and now
we can read around the outside: IT HAS THREE STARS TWO BARS AND A HYPHEN.
[EDITED to add:] ... Huh, I misread (as I found from athin's answer, posted two minutes after mine). In fact it's
THREE BARS TWO STARS, not THREE STARS TWO BARS.
I've amended what follows accordingly (it doesn't much change my state of knowledge and/or ignorance).
My first thought is
that maybe the "stars" and "bars" are on a national flag ("the Stars and Bars" being a colloquial term for the US flag [EDITED to add:] ... no, turns out I was wrong about that, it's a term for the first Confederate flag; thanks to Mark Tilford for pointing this out in comments), but I can't find any national flag with three bars and two stars, and the only country with a hyphen in its name seems to be Guinea-Bissau, whose flag has one star -- though it does have three (not all parallel) bars, at least if you consider any rectangular region to be a bar. The flag of the District of Columbia has three stars and (depending on how you count) two bars, matching my misreading but not the correct reading -- but, in any case, no hyphen.
There must be any number of
hotels that have two stars in someone's rating, three bars for drinking in, and a hyphenated name (though probably fewer than have three stars and two bars, which is what I originally thought I was looking for),
but "any number" is too many.
I'm out of ideas -- or rather I have too many, no obvious way to filter them, and so far no sudden lightning strike of inspiration.
Celebrities? Balls of fusing hydrogen? Stars on a flag or in a logo? Asterisks? Places where alcohol is served? Metal rods? Stripes on a flag? Musical measures? Prohibitions?
CRAB,APPLE
andSTRAW,BERRY
intentional? $\endgroup$ – Omega Krypton Feb 1 '20 at 2:52