These Restaurants Are Pho Real About Punning

(Photos: Adam Fagen (AW Shucks); Elizabeth Bryson (Crepes of Wrath); Simone Rapa (Moon Wok); Eric Cade (Turnip the Beet); Freddy Fuentes (MoPho); Jeff Barca-Hall (Claire’s Corner Copia); Samer Nashed (The Great Impasta); E. McDanel (Thai One On)).

See our ultimate crowdsourced map of punny businesses in America.

More than any other types of business owner, restaurateurs seem drawn to punny names. Of all the business name puns that Atlas Obscura collected, more were for restaurants than for any other category.

For the most part, these are not upscale restaurants: they’re pizza joints, Chinese restaurants and Mexican spots—the sort of places that serve comfortable, comforting, and somewhat interchangeable food.

What causes customers to choose one Thai restaurant over another? Maybe the pad thai really is that much more delicious at a particular place. Or maybe a clever name can make the difference and help a restaurant stand out from the crowd.

Here’s what our data says about the state of restaurant puns:

—45 percent of all restaurant-related pun names submitted to Atlas Obscura were for Asian restaurants.

—Vietnamese was by far the most common type of restaurant to have a pun name. The word “Pho” appears in 87 punny restaurant names out of 451 submitted—almost 20 percent of all restaurant names submitted contain a pun on “pho”.

—Pho King is the most common Pho pun.

—After Vietnamese restaurants, Thai restaurants were most represented among the names submitted: Thaiphoon, Thai’d Up, Thai One On were popular puns on Thai.

—15 restaurants in our data set were named some variation of Wok ‘N Roll. One went the extra mile by adding a second bit of wordplay: Lettuce Wok n Roll.

—Pizza and crepe joint names were also commonly punned upon.

—With 8 restaurant names each, New Orleans (pop. 384,320), Portland (pop. 619,360), and Austin (pop. 912,791) all punch above their weight; Chicago (pop. 2.7 million) has 10.* 

Editor’s picks:

Lord of the Wingz (Burbank, CA)

Burgatory (Pittsburgh, PA)

Miso Harney (Oceanside, CA)

Dew Drop Inn (Honolulu, HI)

Moon Wok (Dallas, TX, and New Orleans, LA)

Naan Stop (Isla Vista, CA)

Viet Nom Nom (Chicago, IL)

C’est Cheese (Morristown, NJ)

Lox Stock & Bagel (Berkeley, CA)

Thai, How Are You (Austin, TX)

Notorious P.I.G. BBQ (Missoula, MT)

Souper Girl (Washington, DC)

Thai-Namite (Milwaukee, WI)

The Wurst Shop in Dickinson (Dickinson, ND)

Given the number of names playing on pho, these deserve their own hall of fame. Here, in no particular order, are our top five:

• 9021PHO (Beverly Hills, CA—of course)
• Good Pho You (Lynnwood, WA)
• Pho Nomenon (Hoboken, NJ)
• Pho Shizzle (Renton, WA)
• Un Pho Gettable (Un Pho Gettable)

Here are the other categories:

Coffee shops

Bar/Pubs 

Other (including retail stores, vape shops and lots of yarn stores)

Doctors and Dentists

Food Trucks

Pet Care

Cleaning Businesses/Flower Shops/Portable Bathrooms

Hair/Nail Salons

The full list:

*This sentence has been updated to use 2014 Census population estimates; it originally included Atlanta but cited the metro area population.