Why Bankok 54, etc?

October 28, 2005 6:39 AM

Why do many Asian restaurants and markets have a number in their names, for example, Pho 24 or Bankok 54?

It doesn't seem to be related to the addresses of the establishments, at least not in the cases around my neighborhood.

posted by Morrigan to Society & Culture (36 answers total)

Around here, it's often the highway number they're on.

But in general, I bet it's for good luck, like 90% of other weird Asian stuff.
posted by smackfu at 6:44 AM on October 28, 2005

I've never seen this as an Asian thing. It's fairly common marketing in restauranting and that. I mean, what happened to Studios 52 and 53?
posted by kcm at 6:48 AM on October 28, 2005

I remember long ago when I sold real estate that Chinese people only wanted homes with the numbers 2 and 4 in the address because I think it meant good luck. They would never buy a house with a 2 and a 5 because that meant easy death or so it was explained to me by a Chinese co-worker.
posted by any major dude at 6:56 AM on October 28, 2005

There's a popular asian grocery store around here called "Super 88".. I never noticed this as a trend before, but I'll toss it on the evidence pile.
posted by jozxyqk at 6:57 AM on October 28, 2005

Judging from the takeout menu of the restaurant near my office (65 chinese restaurant) it's either a chain of random events or entirely made up.

"Our family's last name is 'Hong' which when spoken or written in Toi Sahnese ( a Chinese dialect) means 'soup.' At that time (post WW2), a large bowl of soup was a dollar and a small bowl of soup 65 cents. Since my father was much shorter in height than my uncle Kim, all of his relatives and Chinese friends called him "Small Soup."

One day, my father came back to his apartment where many other Chinese men lived. They shared the apartment to save money. He knocked on the door and one of them asked, "Who is it?" My father answered "Small Soup," in Chinese. Another said, "Small soup, that's 65 cents," again in Chinese. My father then tried to who off his English and said, "Look Moe Five." 'Look Moe' means 'sixty' in Cantonese (anther Chinese dialect). Five was what little he could pull out of his limited English vocabulary. All of them, being amused, then gave him the nickname "Look Moe Five." These days, his friends from way back then have almost forgotten his real name since they've called him "Look Moe Five" for all these years.

I opened a tofu factory some years back. This was just after my mother had passed away, so I named it after her, as "Mei Shun Tofu Products, Co." I then established these restaurants and wanted to name them after my father's real Chinese name, but he said he'd rather have his nickname used. This was how the name "Sixty-Five Restaurant" came about.

Louis Hong
Owner of Look Moe Five"

-- found on the web @ LTHForum, but I just read it yesterday in the restaurant.
posted by true at 7:00 AM on October 28, 2005

88 is considered to be a lucky number in several asian cultures.
posted by Mitheral at 7:00 AM on October 28, 2005

Many are named for the year they were opened. Around here you see a lot of Pho 73's and Pho 68's and so forth from the Vietnam war era.
posted by Pollomacho at 7:04 AM on October 28, 2005

2 and 4 would mean Get Dead, more or less, in various Chinese dialects.. 4 (si4, 四) and dead (si3, 死) sound very similar. 8 is indeed lucky, though, and 28 (二八) sounds similar to 'get rich'. you won't find many 14th floors.
posted by kcm at 7:12 AM on October 28, 2005

The telephone exchange 718-888-xxxx was recently added for the chinese residents of flushing queens. I'm told that 88 is a homonym for "exploding wealth."
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:25 AM on October 28, 2005

I mean, what happened to Studios 52 and 53?

Studio 54 was located at 254 W. 54th Street.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:32 AM on October 28, 2005

well, you proved my implicit point, a lot of non-Asian businesses are named as such for reasons like that (addresses, years as mentioned above, etc.).

Sichuan Airlines paid $300k USD for the phone number 8888-8888 about two years ago.
posted by kcm at 7:36 AM on October 28, 2005

There was a restaurant across the street from where I used to work called What the Pho'. [Apparently the correct pronunciation of Pho' is FUH.]
posted by matildaben at 7:45 AM on October 28, 2005

2 and 4 would mean Get Dead,

either I remembered it wrong or was wrong when I sold real estate all those many years ago. Probably the latter I didn't sell too many houses to them.
posted by any major dude at 7:55 AM on October 28, 2005

i think it has to do with the number of resturants. around here, there is great wall I II and III or something like panda palace IV
posted by chuckforthought.com at 7:56 AM on October 28, 2005

The telephone exchange 718-888-xxxx was recently added for the chinese residents of flushing queens. I'm told that 88 is a homonym for "exploding wealth."

I think it's just magnitudes of 8 in general. Note, as an example, the excellent "Triple Eight Palace" restaurant.
posted by mkultra at 8:09 AM on October 28, 2005

double-repetition of words (baba/88[/dad dad], hoho, diendien, xiaoxiao, etc.) is common and imples anything from cuteness to magnality. and I meant '24 would homonate "get dead"' above.
posted by kcm at 8:13 AM on October 28, 2005

Very interesting question. Data point: we have a Pho So 1 and a Pho 74 here in town. I'd always wondered about those numbers.
posted by junkbox at 8:21 AM on October 28, 2005

The asian community in the San Gabriel valley was upset when that section of the 818 area code changed to 626.
posted by brujita at 8:23 AM on October 28, 2005

Around here we have an explosion of Happiness, there's Happiness, Double Happiness, and Triple Happiness. But the names are spelled out and they don't seem to be related.
posted by KirTakat at 8:24 AM on October 28, 2005

I'm told that 88 is a homonym for "exploding wealth."

Yes, I've heard this as well. The word for 8 is "Baht" (not sure which dialect, I think cantonese?), and 88 is "Baht Baht," which sounds remarkably like "faht faht," meaning exploding wealth or lots of money. I was told this from my former co-worker, a Hong Kong immigrant, who speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese.

Here in California there are many large Asian grocery stores and shopping centers called "Rancho 99" or things with 99 in the name. Don't know the reference there though.
posted by sarahnade at 8:58 AM on October 28, 2005

八 is 'ba1' in Mandarin and 'baht' in Cantonese, yeah. derail, sorry. :)
posted by kcm at 9:08 AM on October 28, 2005

An answer of sorts may be at the very end of this article. Check it out:

http://www.bizforward.com/wdc/issues/2001-01/account/
posted by Stoatfarm at 9:10 AM on October 28, 2005

In Manderan chinese '88' is pronounced 'bai bai'. I've noticed chinese people use "88~" to end IM conversation
posted by delmoi at 9:38 AM on October 28, 2005

In downtown LA, there is a Chinese supermarket called "99 Ranch Market". Inside is a sign that reads "99 Ranch Market: for 100, we try harder". Not something you would normally say in English, but I can't say it doesn't make sense.
posted by 4easypayments at 10:05 AM on October 28, 2005

I always figured the 99 Ranch Market was a 99 cent store. I am an idiot.
posted by clh at 10:17 AM on October 28, 2005

Data point: Minneapolis has a Pho 79. I've wondered about the name for years...
posted by hamster at 10:56 AM on October 28, 2005

Wiki for Ranch 99 notes that 99 is a lucky number in Taiwan. The chain's slogan is "For 100 We Try Harder", which an indie band adopted for a CD title.

Asian number treatment also shows up in some Internet slang: 39 for "thank you", 54 for "ignore", etc.

Re "Pho": There's reportedly a Pho King restaurant in Rosemead, CA. I haven't found the more direct "Pho Q".

But I did intern for a machining company called "Alpha Q", which the receptionist took pains to pronounce carefully when answering calls.
posted by kurumi at 11:04 AM on October 28, 2005

There's tons of combinations of these in Chinese -- the 24 combo is pronounced "yi sei" in Cantonese", the "yi" sounds like easy ("yung yi" is easy) and "sei" is death as noted before. This doesn't apply in Mandarin, since two is pronounced "er" and easy is "rong yi".

Just having a 4 doesn't necessarily mean bad if it's combined correctly with another number -- 48 is "sei baht", i.e. getting rich to death or fantastically wealthy.

28 is another popular combo, because it's interpreted as "easy to get rich". There was a restaurant in Mississauga, Ontario that was called this.
posted by Big Fat Tycoon at 11:33 AM on October 28, 2005

And, as noted above, most of these only have real meaning in Cantonese -- the Mandarin pronunciations don't sounds like the other meanings.
posted by Big Fat Tycoon at 11:34 AM on October 28, 2005

For some reason their stores are commonly refered to as Ranch 99 but it's really 99 Ranch. The chain has spread as far as Vegas, at least.

Many are named for the year they were opened. Around here you see a lot of Pho 73's and Pho 68's and so forth from the Vietnam war era.

I find this conclusion difficult to believe. I thought their immigrant community's population was negligible until the 'boat people' influx of the mid 1970s. My first Vietnamese restaurant experience was in the late 1980s, in LA.
posted by Rash at 11:39 AM on October 28, 2005

Rash, I will confirm that many pho restaurants (sample size: three in the DC area) are named after the year they opened.
posted by emyd at 12:20 PM on October 28, 2005

Around here we've got Pho 75 which I've been told is named for the year Saigon fell and the Americans left. They sure have not been open since '75.
posted by fixedgear at 1:51 PM on October 28, 2005

I've heard that it's the year the family first arrived in the US. Some other important year (like Saigon's fall) would make sense too.
posted by footnote at 2:02 PM on October 28, 2005

this is interesting ... i've never seen anything like this in sw michigan, although we do have chinese and japanese restaurants and groceries ... but i don't know of any vietnamese places
posted by pyramid termite at 3:58 PM on October 28, 2005

So now the big question: What's with all the numbers? Why are all these restaurants named Pho 75, Pho 95, Pho 79? Unfortunately, there's no clear answer, but speculation has fueled enough urban myths to choke an alligator in the sewer. Asking the management yields only hazy answers. Pho 75 was named by the original owner, a journalist commemorating the fall of Saigon in 1975; the 95, according to staff at Pho 95, is "just a number we threw on the restaurant." For whatever reason, naming pho restaurants by number has become fashionable in the world of Vietnamese restaurants.
— The Best Quick Vietnamese Business Lunch Is at Pho 75 or Pho 95

That author's favorite is Pho 75 in Arlington, which is where I first had Pho. In Richmond, I tried to get my wife to go to a Pho 79, to no avail.

And if you're really into Pho, there's the PhoFever website, which has both a National Pho Directory and What the Pho? t-shirts. Here's an interesting morsel: In fact, it is believed that "phở" is derived from "pot au feu" a French soup.
posted by Alt F4 at 6:19 PM on October 28, 2005

Don't know if it's true and my google skills haven't found confirmation, but I remember from a few (many?) years ago while trying to track down a great Pho place in Oakland (Pho 84 on 17th St) that I read that the number related to a street number in Saigon. A major thoroughfare (sp?) had lots of small Pho joints prior to '75 and the number on that street related to many American Pho restaurants. Can't find any such reference tonight. I visited that restaurant first in about 1986 or 87 so the "when it opened" could be correct.
Can't beat Pho (and that same site also said the name came from feux, french for fire, as in fire pot). Can't beat Pho. I vote for a little dive in Van Nuys, corner of Sherman Way and Coldwater. Can't beat Pho. Love it.
posted by johngumbo at 10:58 PM on October 28, 2005