The Most Common Restaurant Names in the US

How do restaurants get their names? All kinds of ways.

Choosing what to call an eating place can be a little like deciding what to christen a baby: Parents might look for something unique and memorable or might pick a name that honors a family member, ancestor or special friend. They also might take a hint from the newborn’s personality (“He looks like a Max to me.” “Look at that smile — let’s call her Sunny.”)

Opening a restaurant, especially the first time, is apt to give the proprietor a sense of almost parental pride. So choosing just the right thing to call it takes on great importance.

There are branding specialists who make a formal study of the subject, considering factors like Google search terms and focus group opinions, but that’s mostly for chain operations.

What about everybody else? One of the simplest devices is simply to name a restaurant after yourself or somebody close to you, like Joe’s Place, Casa Juanita or Mom’s Café. Speaking of “casa,” restaurant owners may give their business a name that suggests a homey atmosphere. Someone’s casa is their house; so is someone’s maison. And all those French restaurants called “Chez Herni” (or whomever) have a name that might be translated as “At Henri’s House” or just “Henri’s Place.” (The author and humorist Calvin Trillin once proposed that the quintessential name for a Continental restaurant, to be avoided, was “La Maison de la Casa House.”)

Then there are the puns — a Southeast Asian restaurant called Old School Thai, an Indian place dubbed NaanSense or a pizzeria christened Pizza My Heart. Other names are meant to evoke the cuisine served, such as Dubrovnik, Portofino, Tokyo and La Côte Basque. Still others suggest elegance, as in Champagne and Pearls, The Epicurean, The Golden Pheasant, and The King’s Table.

That’s just the beginning of the ways restaurants gain their monikers.

Various sources estimate that there are somewhere between 140,000 and 155,000 independent restaurants in the United States. However original their owners might try to be, it’s hardly surprising that there is considerable duplication among the names of places that are otherwise unrelated.

To determine the most common restaurant names in America, 24/7 Tempo reviewed a study of the subject conducted by Tinting Chicago, an auto and residential tinting and graphics company. The study considered Google review data for over 300,000 independent U.S. restaurants in the country’s 500 largest cities, ranking names on the total number of occurrences of the name across all non-chain restaurants nationwide. Only cities with at least 100 restaurants and 65,000 residents were considered.

The overwhelming majority of restaurants on the list are Asian, with more than three-fifths of the total — including the top nine — being Chinese. Perhaps refreshingly, only one of those has a punning name. (Whatever the name, or the cuisine, here’s a list of the one restaurant you should visit in each state.)

Scroll down to see the 50 most common restaurant names in America: