Humorous business name combinations

The thread title may require some explanation, so here’s the example that inspired it: In South Lake Tahoe, CA, there’s a restaurant called Bert’s Cafe. And then just down the street is Ernie’s Coffee Shop. Neither name is funny on it’s own, but the fact that the two restaurants are in close proximity makes them funny (for non-USAans, Bert and Ernie are characters from along running children’s show). And it makes me wonder which one came first, and if the owner of the other one picked the name specifically for the reference.

Have you ever seen similar business names, that are funny primarily because of their proximity to another business?

In Redding, California, there used to be a Five Guys (burger chain). A Thai restaurant opened up in the same strip mall and called themselves… Five Thais.


In Bend, Oregon, there’s a tourist store called Clementine. The same owner opened a clothing boutique next to it called Oh My Darling.

Here in Connecticut, I once saw a Dick’s right next door to a BJ’s.

https://www.dickssportinggoods.com/

https://www.bjs.com/

I snickered. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

P.S. Dick’s is a sporting goods store. BJ’s is a membership-only warehouse store similar to Costco or Sam’s Club.

Oh, interesting. Out west, BJ’s is a brewpub chain with a lot of, well, sloppy desserts…

The owners of the Midtown Manhattan pub Mustang Sally’s have a second location up the road called Mustang Harry’s.

In Noank, Connecticut there is a lobster pound on the coast called Abbott’s Lobster in the Rough. They serve lobster, shrimp, crab, clams, and mussels, all steamed. (I’ve been going there since 1992, so I’ve been a regular customer for over 30 years now.)

Anyway, some time later the owners decided to open a fried seafood place next door, so they called it Costello’s Clam Shack.

So you have Abbott’s and Costello’s right next door to each other. :wink:

Not far away—also in southeastern Connecticut—is a lovely breakfast place in Mystic called the Somewhere in Time Cafe. The place was (and is) very popular and one of a kind, and the owners jokingly said they would open a second restaurant “when pigs fly.”

So a few years later they opened the When Pigs Fly Cafe in nearby Waterford, Connecticut. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: All of the artwork in the restaurant consists of various depictions of flying pigs.

By coincidence, I’m on a train from Boston to NYC and read this at the exact moment we were going through Noank. Looking at google maps on my phone, I’m about a hundred yards from Abbott’s and Costello’s.

Neat! If you ever take a regional Amtrak train, you should get off sometime at the station in Mystic, Connecticut. It’s a really nice area that’s fun to walk around. Lots of pretty views, shops, and restaurants. Also Mystic Seaport and its museum is nearby.

And speaking of Noank, I remember seeing small round stickers on residents’ vehicles with a nautical anchor with a diagonal slash through the anchor. It took me a while to figure out the pun: “no anchor” = “Noanker” = “resident of Noank.” :wink:

My partner grew up in Boston and was an undergrad at Yale so this is her old stomping ground and I’m getting tastes, bit by bit, over the years. I’ll make Mystic a priority! :dotted_line_face:

It’s closed now, the name was intentional, and you kind of need to know the local accent to get the joke, but not all that far from me in Scotland there was an Italian restaurant called Bacchialdis.

It was behind the local Aldi supermarket.

I don’t think you do! :grin:

For many years, there was a Flatt Tire Service in Des Moines. It was owned by the Flatt family; I went to high school with one branch of that family tree.

There was also a John Holmes Meat Market there for a while. I only knew about it because a classmate of mine took a picture of the storefront and sent it to a porno mag, which printed it, and the owners weren’t very happy about it. IIRC, all they really wanted was an apology, because he hadn’t asked for permission, I guess.

Just as an aside, I think that explanation really wasn’t necessary, Sesame Street and especially Ernie and Bert are known all around the world. I was born in 1968 in Germany, and Ernie and Bert were staples of my childhood.

In the 2000s, there even used to be a very racy, even vulgar parody on them on a German comedy show called “Bernie and Ert”. They were a gay couple into S&M.

Maybe the owners were just fans of the cop and the taxi driver from It’s a Wonderful Life.

There is a ‘commercial’ floating around the intertubez - a woman comes out of Staples & exclaims, “OMG, Staples has staples!” It then cuts to a woman in a parking lot sprinting into Dick’s, & then a guy in a parking lot of a BJ’s

https://youtube com/shorts/DXfoHZD6byg (<-- broken link to one variant thereof)

I don’t think they’re both still open, but in Cambridge there used to be two restaurants nexct to each other. It wasn’t the names that were funny, but their mottoes:

Asian fusion restaurant: “Eat Here and Live Forever!”

BBQ place next door: “Eat here and Die Happy!”

That’s amazing :laughing:

That also reminds me of this yoga studio that was above a brewpub in a two-story building. They co-advertised with a sign out front:

Good boys & girls go up :up_arrow: :baby_angel:
Bad boys & girls go down :down_arrow: :smiling_face_with_horns:
Or do both and find balance :person_in_lotus_position:

That same brewpub was also the location for the Sunday afternoon service of a local church. Interesting town, that…

There was a hamburger restaurant in the Rice Village in Houston years ago whose motto prominently displayed out front was:

Over two dozen sold!

:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

That reminds me of something mathematician John Allen Paulos wrote in his book Innumeracy to the effect that McDonald’s could put up a sign reading “over 120 sold”, which would undoubtedly be true, but fails to show the proper magnitude in the same way many people have trouble with estimates and statistics.