Observation: There seems to be a dominant naming paradigm for Chinese restaurants. The pattern is as follows:
[Peking | China | Hunan | Szechuan] + [House | Star | Buffet | Village]
Sixteen Google searches provide the following number of results.
| Peking | China | Hunan | Szechuan | Totals: | |
| House | 379,000 | 36,300,000 | 199,000 | 838,000 | 37,716,000 |
| Star | 5,700,000 | 22,100,000 | 850,000 | 365,000 | 29,015,000 |
| Village | 2,080,000 | 5,980,000 | 118,000 | 410,000 | 8,588,000 |
| Buffet | 804,000 | 864,000 | 681,000 | 554,000 | 2,903,000 |
| Totals: | 8,963,000 | 65,244,000 | 1,848,000 | 2,167,000 | 78,222,000 |
Note: current searches may return different results. I ran these ~ 6 weeks ago.
Conclusion: There are many 'China' restaurants, there are many 'House' restaurants and, appropriately, China House is the most popular name. Arguably, 'Beijing' and 'Shanghai' could be added as columns. But I was concerned that the number of results referring to the Shanghai Star newspaper was skewing the results. Similarly, Beijing Village seemed to refer predominantly to Olympics related locations.
Anecdotally, I can report that there is a China Star in downtown Iowa City and a Szechuan Village in Coralville. The first Chinese restaurant I can remember visiting was the Shangri-La in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. My favorite Chinese restaurant is the legendary House of Nanking in San Francisco.
In Cedar Rapids, we tend to patronize the non-compliant, prosaic & pedestrian sounding Egg Roll House. And the closest Chinese restaurant to our house is the also non-compliant Ting's Red Lantern. This name, at least, is evocative and I appreciate the opportunity to make the periodic...
You can get any Ting you want....joke. And that reminds me. I want to hear similar jokes in other languages making fun of native English speaking pronounciation and/or close sounding words. But how to approach that?
Me: (speaking to native Mandarin speaker): You know how we make fun of foriegners speaking English?
Mandarin speaker: Ah...
Me: Yes, we exaggerate common mis-pronounciations like "Any ting you wah".
Mandarin speaker: Ah...
Me: Can you make fun of me?
Mandarin speaker: Ah...
I think this is a variation of the "lost in translation" trap where the joke would have to be explained at such depth so as to ruin the effect.
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