There was a short lived restaurant near me that the owner decided to name “Stabby’s.” Logo complete with some menacing kitchen knives.
Maybe in the right neighborhood it would have been a hit, but apparently we are not sufficiently countercultural here to embrace the name as ironic. It closed after about a year of being mostly empty.
Not a restaurant name, but there was a good Thai restaurant in Chicago many years ago that had posters featuring Thai fruit on the walls. The rambutan poster described the fruit as, in large words, “BUSHY, JUICY.”
Great Wolf Lodge is a franchise of themed hotels with indoor water parks included. The hotels include a family restaurant called “The Loose Moose” which doesn’t pair well with all the posted warnings about not using the water park if you’re suffering from diarrhea.
Years back I saw a stand-up comedy routine where the comedian (of vietnamese descent) was talking about how her boyfriend tried to take her to a restaurant with a cutesy name like “Pho Sho.” She ranted about how that was clearly not an authentic Vietnamese restaurant because all the good ones have 3 things in common: a numeral in the name, (I forget the second one) and an elderly vietnamese grandmother sitting on a chair in the corner of the ladies room next to a metal storage shelf full of jugs of floor cleaner and other supplies.
Anyway, quite a few vietnamese restaurants in my area do seem to have numerals in their names. Pho 2000, Pho 22, Pho House 99, Pho So 1, Pho 999, New Pho 999, Pho 99 Plus, Pho 87…
I’m sure those things are a good shortcut for finding a good Vietnamese restaurant but I’ve been to a few stand out ones that had fairly normal names. My favorite is a long time fixture of Reno, NV called the Golden Flower. I haven’t been in Reno for like 20 years so i hope it’s held up but the owner was always around making sure people were enjoying themselves and would jump in at random to crack jokes. I miss that place
I wonder if Vietnam does what Thailand does: they actually have a program to train people to open Thai restaurants in the States, so they teach them marketing, location, hiring, menu, etc. to prepare them to succeed. That would explain the numbering system, certainly.
So much for my theory: Vietnam doesn’t seem to be on this list.
I think that my region has a lot of Vietnamese restaurants in part because many thousands of Vietnamese people resettled here after the fall of Saigon. So those folks probably would not be getting much support from the current government of Vietnam.
Yah I’ve heard other Vietnamese folks say that too- that it’s probably authentic if there’s a number in the name, since that means the owners are fresh off the boat. The numbers in the names is typical in Vietnam proper for various superstitious and cultural reasons.
It’s probably worthy of a whole separate thread, but I’d love to hear what specific quirky indicators predict authenticity for all different kinds of restaurants.
