I suppose a big part of the reason why I am rather "meh" about the restaurants in the area that I live in is because there is so much of the same thing here. In this small area of Da Nang that I live in there are at least 12 Indian restaurants that all serve the same dishes, 25 burger places that are all equally crap, basically everywhere has pizza which is all mostly terrible, and now even the Mexican and Korean restaurant field has been flooded to the point where it isn't possible for any of them to have a realistic customer base.
The worst is the coffee shops: You can't walk more than 100 meters or so without passing at least 2 coffee shops and the way these places function is quite predictable: They open to a bunch of fanfare and promotional events, they hire IG influencers and have pretty girls sitting out front taking pictures to promote the place and they end up busy because of this. Then as time goes by they stop doing promotional events, people realize that they sell exactly the same thing as all the other coffeeshops, and their customer base dwindles until eventually they shut down. The most humorous thing about the cyclical nature of coffeeshops is that after they go out of business someone inevitably will purchase the establishment and 9 times out of 10 they will have the novel idea of opening..... you guessed it! Another coffee shop!
This is one of the more elaborate coffee shops in my hood. It's chic because the outdoor seating is actually submerged lower than the surrounding Koi pond and this is the main attraction. The cool building may draw some people in and this tactic worked on me initially, once. The allure quickly wore off because the coffee in there was exactly the same as it is anywhere else but it was 3 times the cost. Coffee is very popular in Vietnam because it is generally extremely cheap. At a roadside stall with little chairs you can get a Vietnamese coffee for less than 50 cents. In the crazy glass buildings with koi pond seating, you will pay Starbucks prices for the same thing.
I like Indian food as much as the next guy but I have eaten at almost all of the restaurants that we have available in this area and have chosen a kind of wide array of dishes. I have noticed almost zero difference in terms of portion or quality from one shop to the next and therefore I now just order from the cheapest one that is closest to my house. I fail to understand how it is that so many of these places can manage to stay in business when they all are selling exactly the same thing. Normally when you walk past one of these places they will be almost completely devoid of customers unless some sort of bus tour pulls up. Perhaps that is how they manage to stick around.
Restaurants that really kill it here are the ones that go out of their way to try to be something different than just everything else that exists in the area. For example, there is a Turkish restaurant very near my condo and if it weren't for this place I probably wouldn't even know what Turkish food was because it wasn't really a thing in any other place that I have lived and it's not something I would go out of my way to ever have.
This photo doesn't do their success justice but normally this place is pretty packed for lunch and dinner because it is, I believe, the only Turkish restaurant in town. It certainly is the only one in the area. Therefore, if I feel like having Turkish food I already know where it is that I am going to go.
We are spoiled for choice when it comes to the major types of food in the world such as Indian and Italian to the point where when I feel like having these things I am at a loss as to where we would possibly go. If my friends suggest going for an Indian feed I just let them choose because nobody can come up with any particularly good reason why we should go to one rather than another.
I fail to be able to put myself into the mind of the small business owner who thinks that opening something that the area already has a dozen or more of would be a good idea. Location is key of course, but a lot of the business that they get comes from online orders from companies that are similar to Uber Eats. When I open our version of that app called Grab here with the intention of ordering I am always at a loss as to who I should order from because everyone is offering the same damn products. I don't understand how people who think it is a good idea to open the same thing that exists next door as well as all around the area. In the just over 4 years that I have lived here I have seen so many businesses come and go because nobody gets inventive or tries something new.
If they did a bit of research they would find out that there actually IS a market for something new and fresh and when this kind of thing happens those "different" businesses almost always do very well.
Perhaps it is the low barriers to entry that encourage people to open the same ol' thing that the area already has so many of. I owned place in Thailand that happened to have a restaurant in it when I took over and one of the first things I did was completely overhaul the menu. Prior to my taking over of the business, this place simply served the same thing that every other place offered and once I changed it to something unique and unusual the people came. Once I got them to enjoy what we offered we didn't really have any competition because nobody else was making what we had. I don't think this is a difficult concept to wrap your head around but apparently for the business owners here in Da Nang, it is!