Opinion by Wally Tuan
Imitation does not equal quality in Vietnam’s hospitality industry
Cafes in town that have elevated emotional distress into an art form. Its playlist is the poor soul’s calendar: every song insists the seasons are changing — always spring-to-summer, autumn-to-winter, the whole metaphorical bingo. You cannot sit here in peace. The city’s noise palette has a new worst instrument: a steady stream of syrupy lines about falling leaves, thawing hearts, and smiling like summer, looped until your eardrums beg for asylum.
But what’s even more excruciating is the timing. Just as you settle into your coffee, getting comfortable and ready to relax, the cafe decides to play that one song – you know, “Marry Me” – that one that highlights a man’s tragic loss of both testicles. The repetition is intolerable, and you can’t help but wonder if the cafe’s staff are secretly sadists, taking pleasure in the misery they inflict on their customers.
When cruelty becomes too intimate, when the cafe’s emotional weather report reaches catastrophic levels, you can always flee to your favorite craft-beer sanctuary for refuge. Ha. There is a predictable second-line attack: the craft beer place obligingly switches its own soundtrack to blaring V-Pop at a decibel that makes your neighbor’s barking dog — ten kilometers away, probably retired now — perk up in sympathetic pain. The craft-beer crowd, once a bastion of low-key clinking glasses and subdued talk, transforms into an amphitheater of manufactured joy. Volume increases; melodic simplicity decreases your ability to taste hops. It is globalization’s triumph: every refuge converts into an auditorium for sound-based punishment.
Originality is not a core value here. No, the city prefers the comforting lie that imitation equals quality. Good things are not copied; instead, another “French Taco” opens on the next corner. It arrives wrapped in an embarrassing amount of sauce, stuffed with cold fries that were vintage last Tuesday, and then lovingly reheated in a cancerous fake butter so saturated it could have its own health warning. This is offered to you as a cosmopolitan experience — something Parisians have never dreamt of, and for very good reasons.
So the cycle completes itself. Seasons change in every song; seasons change in your cup as the milk goes from warm to scalded to sour. You move from cafe to beer bar to taco shop and back again, each venue promising a different brand of cultural constipation: melodramatic ballads, deafening pop, and the culinary equivalent of a midlife crisis. The city is loud, inventive, and committed to making sure you never, ever get comfortable.
At some point you will stop looking for peace and instead start timing your exits: ahead of the 7 a.m. construction symphony, away before the first chorus of “Marry Me,” and never, ever ordering the reheated fries. You will learn to wear earplugs as a fashion statement and to nod with the polite expression of someone who knows the seasons will change, the love will ache, and the V-Pop will play until even the moon moves to another district to get away from it all.