I'm surprised that places are opening up in this tourism part of Vietnam when nobody is coming here and it doesn't look like they are going to start any time soon. While we are back where we began with Vietnam having a lot of freedom that other countries don't have in relation to Covid, we still have some pretty hardcore closed borders, so opening a restaurant or pub near the beach doesn't make a great deal of sense to me.
People are still doing it though and this on we went to recently, was the worst grand opening I have ever experienced.
Beer is beer in my mind and I don't really care who is selling it to me as long as it is cold. There are very few lagers out there that straight up don't appeal to me and I can't think of any of the ones that they sell here that I won't drink. So when you make them 2 for 1 it is gonna get me and my friends in the door.
When we walked into the place it was already well past their advertised opening time of 7am, we were there at quarter past 4. We immediately encountered trouble because none of the staff spoke any meaningful level of English, especially not our waiter. Any inquiries, regardless of how simply we worded it, was met with a blank stare.
Now I'm not saying that everyone in the world needs to be fluent in English but when you open a pub / restaurant in the part of town that virtually no Vietnamese people live in and is purely a tourist area, you might want to get some staff that speak a bit of English. It doesn't make sense for them to be employed there at all if they don't.
Image blurred out because while I was upset with my experience here, I'm not trying to get anyone in trouble
So we sat there for a while and eventually decided to just bail on the food and go for some beers since the waiter wasn't capable of answering anything we asked. So we ordered some Tiger draft pints. About 5 minutes later the bartender, who can speak a bit of English informs us that the Tiger draft wont be "ready" for another hour. Ok, we moved on to what they had in the fridge and ordered a Saigon Special, a Larue, and a Huda. It's not important that you know what these things are but of course, there was a problem with all of these as well. None of them were cold and they didn't even have Huda despite the fact that they have a friggin Huda advertisement sign hanging on the front of their shop.
Huda is ubiquitous in Vietnam and it might be the number one seller in the country. Not having this beer is very rare but not having it when you have an unironic sign advertising that you definitely do have it on the front of your shop is just stupid. Not having ANY of your beer be cold on your grand opening is just a level of "we're not ready" that is difficult to understand.
We were a little worried when we turned up to the "Grand Opening" and were the only customers but we like to try everything that opens here at least once. Eventually, after being brought some towels that we didn't ask for and some glasses of water that we also didn't ask for (one of which had some dirt / contamination of some sort floating in it) we had enough.
I stood up and just told the bartender "you are not ready to be open, we'll come back in a few days."
We actually did end up going back and the situation was dramatically improved but as someone that owned a couple restaurants in the past and also worked at many of them for years prior to that, this was just an exceptionally frustrating experience for me. Whoever is in charge of this place needs to get their act together because you can make this mistake with me one time, but i'm not very forgiving beyond that.