Le grande cuisine in a thrift shop
Le Fleur de Lis in Chicago
La Salon of beauty in New Jersey
Le belle couture seems to be based in Singapore
Le belle façon facon in Second Life (I think) (by the way, do you know that several real nations have embassies there? Maybe the Académie française needs to get to work preserving French in Second Life as well)
La bistro. You could give them the excuse that it's an Italian restaurant. However, bistro is masculine in Italian, too. A better excuse is that it's in Hurst, Texas.
Le belle dame is a hair salon in Kansas City.
And my favorite.... which you see all the time in Louisiana:
Ouch! That's a lot of mis-gendered articles! And not-agreeing adjectives!
Posted by: materfamilias | 20 September 2011 at 15:43
Funny! :) This bugs my husband. There is a nice, fancy, French restaurant in Vegas and they have everything misspelled on the windows and menus. :) He notices it and points it out every time we are there!
Posted by: Karen | 21 September 2011 at 02:04
When the Paris Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas first opened, we excitedly visited it only to find that so many of the signs in French were grammatically incorrect or just misspelled. With all the millions they spent to build and decorate this place, you would have thought they could have spent a few hundred more and hired a competent translator. The next time I went, I noticed the signs were fixed.
Posted by: Jennifer | 22 September 2011 at 02:00
Probably the person who commissioned the signs asked a high school French student or something....
Posted by: Sedulia | 22 September 2011 at 08:34
Chiming in, could you please verify that last one? I thought it was, "let the good times roll" and being Cajun is a colloquial phrase is used during Mardi Gras. It may be too direct of a translation, but it is Cajun after all.
Posted by: Sagely | 21 June 2014 at 12:59
Hi Sagely! I'm Cajun myself & can assure you it's not correct to write it with -z, nor is the phrase actually Cajun French in origin. In fact its popularity is recent, since 1980 (see ngram viewer below), by which time very few Cajuns still spoke French as their main language and Louisiana suddenly realized (thanks to Codofil) that French had its good points.
"Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a back-translation from English, probably from the song(s) "Let the good times roll" (1946); "let the good times roll" became popular since 1960.
The phrase is not good French, nor is it real Cajun, but it IS wonderful "Louisiana"!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=let+the+good+times+roll&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Clet%20the%20good%20times%20roll%3B%2Cc0
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=laissez+les+bons+temps+rouler&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Claissez%20les%20bons%20temps%20rouler%3B%2Cc0
Posted by: Sedulia | 21 June 2014 at 13:49