These eateries have customers running scared—and it's not because of the food.

Food, service, and decor might get them listed in Zagat's, but a restaurant can achieve a certain level of fame—or infamy—on the power of its name alone. Hooters, for example, has been trading on the campy-but-literal shtick of its brand for years. Puns have been known to work on occasion too: Pluck U, a chicken sandwich outfit, has successfully opened locations throughout Manhattan. But in some unfortunate cases, proprietors stumble into lost-in-translation absurdity, with names like Big Wong or Phuket Thai, both of which actually exist. (One such tragedy occurred just a block away from the Radar offices, when a lunch spot called C-Wrap—the C stood for Chicago—shut its doors for good after a long struggle with the hyphen.) And occasionally, due to ignorance, hubris, or outright stupidity, a restaurant owner goes too far.

Take Sambo's, a popular Santa Barbara restaurant founded in 1957, whose reputation for good, greasy eats allowed it to grow to 1,200 locations. Local municipalities eventually thwarted its expansion efforts, mostly because of strong objections to its name—which, needless to say, offended a good portion of the African-American community. The chain went bankrupt, but when the grandson of the original founders reopened it in 1998, he was able to win over the NAACP by insisting the moniker meant no harm—it was merely an abbreviation of the co-founder's names. But history, in this case, seems doomed to repeat itself. In 2004, Dairy Queen announced its new frozen drink, the MooLatte, which sounded so much like "mulatto" that Slate called into question the "mental competence of Dairy Queen's corporate leadership." And a whole new crop of crudely named-institutions have sprouted up since. Below, a few of our recent favorites.

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Pink Taco
When Hard Rock Cafe heir Harry Morton took his Pink Taco Mexican restaurant to Scottsdale, Arizona, last April, mayor Mary Manross was none too impressed. She would not allow a business to open in her tony jurisdiction that "offended more than half the population." Locals spoke their minds to area newspapers. "I don't think we'd even go to lunch there," decreed one, who described the talk around town as "Can you believe they're going to open something with that name here?"

According to Morton, who recently dated Lindsay Lohan, in the six years since the original Pink Taco opened in the Las Vegas Hard Rock, he never had to contend with a single flap over the name. If the restaurant were truly "vagina-themed," he argued to The Daily Show's Ed Helms, there would be "vaginas all over the walls."

Though the Arizona mayor tried to obstruct his bid for a liquor license, Morton prevailed and later made news attempting to purchase the naming rights to the Arizona Cardinal's football stadium. Fortunately for wide receivers who would have suffered the indignity of "going deep" inside the Pink Taco, he was unsuccessful.