Punny restaurant names

With the impending demise of higher education in the United States, we are all considering backup career plans. Mine is to become a restauranteur who specializes in food puns. I know nothing about, and have no interest in, either the business side or the culinary side of running a restaurant; I just want the puns. So if you actually have business acumen or know how to cook, let me know and we can be 50/50 partners. My contribution will be the restaurant names. Here are a few of them. Note that the customer base for many of these is limited to people who know the same languages as I do and who have my same bad sense of humour.

• For this first one, I don't have a name for the restaurant, but I have names for some sections of the menu. This will need to be a Hong Kong style dessert restaurant, where the menu has different sections with different themes. Or it could be a bubble tea shop. In either case, the section with grapefruity desserts (or drinks) will be 西柚記. And the section with pear-themed desserts or drinks will be 你有鴨梨，我有鴨梨. Unfortunately, this restaurant cannot open until I figure out puns for all the other sections of the menu.
• Two hot pot restaurants. One will be called 三锅, and the decorations in the restaurant will all be based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. (You can also order a fruit platter called 三果 for dessert.) The other will be called 帅锅, and the servers will all be sexy shirtless guys. (Note: when I did a Google Image Search to look for photos to go with this, I discovered that like a million restaurants have already used this pun. But I thought of it like 15 years ago when I was a grad student, so I still claim credit.)
• Unbelievabowl. This will be a donburi restaurant, or maybe a ripoff of sweetgreen; anyway, something that serves bowls. One of its items will be the Impossibowl, which has Impossible beef in it.
• The Need to Knead, a bakery.
• The Paneer Pannier, an Indian restaurant for bikers.
• Mean 麵, a Cantonese noodle restaurant. The logo will be an angry-face emoji eating noodles.
• 喂你的胃, Chinese fast food.
• So Pho So Good, a pho restaurant, obviously.
• A brewery that makes IPA IPA. The bottle will have the International Phonetic Alphabet table on the label. The main barrier to me starting this brewery (other than the fact that I don't know how to brew beer or run a business) is that I don't actually like IPAs.

Let me also use some of this space to shame a few companies that have tragically missed opportunities for food puns. First of all, Ikea. You guys have famous meatballs, and then you started making vegetable balls (which are quite good), but you didn't call them "vegetaballs", and I can never forgive you for that. Secondly, KFC. In China you call yourself 肯德基, but it would have been funnier if you were 肯德鸡 (or maybe 啃的鸡, but that one is maybe trying too hard). Come on!

by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2025-04-08. CC-BY-4.0.