Where I live there’s Yeung Ho, Hung Far, and Foo King Jon. Can anyone translate? Can they be both real chinese names but also chosen because of their english phonetic double entendre?
there was a chinese place in the mall where i grew up called “Pot and Bowl.”
i shit you not.
northbrook court mall, northbrook IL
There’s a place (apparently part of a chain) near my apartment called Wok & Go. Not particularly funny, until you read the sign closely:
“I know, it’s only Wok & Go but I like it.”
AWFUL.
On a recent trip, I ate at the A-Won buffet in New Martinsville, WV.
It’s not obscene or anything, but it did make me scratch my head and wonder.
This is not Chinese food, but there’s a Thai restaurant near where I work called Thai Stick.
There’s also a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley called King Dong.
In Portland, OR we have the Hung Far Low cocktail bar. Apparently most of these names, including Hung Far Low, do actually translate into common Cantonese restaurant names. But one wonders whether the decision to name the bar “Hung Far Low,” wasn’t made with some thought given to the double meaning.
(I know this because I asked a Cantonese speaker, but if you want a cite, here you go: cite )
There’s a Vietnamese restaurant somewhere 'round here called What the Pho. I’m sure they knew exactly what they were doing.
If that’s the one down on Shattuck by Le Note, there used to be a massage parlor in the same building and the theatre on the opposite corner showed XXX movies a few decades ago, IIRC. It wasn’t a “dirty neighborhood” or anything but I sure noticed it as a teenager.
In Edmonton’s Chinatown there’s a Vietnamese place called the Wang-Lo. I went there fairly often when I worked downtown; apparently it used to be called the Lo-Wang, but got switched around.
I’m pretty sure it’s a direct phonetic translation of something, but I don’t know what.
Well, I don’t know Chinese so I can’t answer the OP. I can tell you that “What the” doesn’t mean anything in Vietnamese, so yes, I agree, it’s an intentional play on the word pho.
That does it-some day I’m opening up a sushi place and naming it “Eat Me Raw”.
Wang also isn’t a Vietnamese word. The Vietnamese alphabet, though based on the Latin alphabet, doesn’t have a W.
Well, there’s one in South Lake Tahoe called “Naked Fish”. I like yours better, though. 
There is a Thai place near where I used to live called Poo Ping Palace.
Needless to say I never ate there.
There’s a Chinese place around the corner from my apartment called Wok and Roll. It’s not very good.
My favorite Chinese place is Ollie’s. How many Chinese dudes do you know named Ollie?
Yes, but many of the immigrants who come to North America from Vietnam are ethnically Chinese. They might be very good at cooking Vietnamese food, but still name their restuarant in Chinese. They often will serve Chinese food in their Vietnamese restaurant.
I don’t think these places are joking. Things like names for a business (and the whole idea of bringing luck upon it to be sucessful) are very superstitious for the Chinese. They would joke around with that.
…woundn’t joke around like that…
There’s a Vietnamese resteraunt in Rosemead, CA called My Dung. It’s a woman’s name, pronounced like “May Yuong.” I can’t find a pic, but I did find this:
I’m not sure how this Cantonese romanization came about, but half of those words aren’t pronounced the way you might think. Yeung sounds more like “Yerng” and Hung is pronounced more like “Houong.” It seems pretty standardized, too, so I don’t imagine they picked it for the double entendre. Like, it’s ALWAYS spelled Yeung and Hung.
Ah Lee?
Let me be the first, in this thread at least, to mention Fu King.
And of course there’s Fook Yue, which has been circulating on the web for a while. Don’t know if it’s authentic, though.