We joke about this a lot here in the expat community. It wasn't that long ago that there was a single solitary Indian restaurant in our part of Da Nang, which is considered to be one of the major tourism areas. This was about 4 years ago when Veda's Kitchen was the only Indian restaurant game in the system. Their food was consistently good and they enjoyed a great number of customers. If you said you were going to have Indian tonight, people didn't need to ask where you were going, it was understood.
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There was nothing particularly special about the interior or exterior but one thing you did notice when you went in was that most of the staff were not Vietnamese, they were Indian. I don't know how they get away with this from a legal point of view but whatever, it's none of my business.
They were never so busy that I ever thought to myself that we would need 22 more Indian restaurants though and while I made that number up it probably isn't too far off the mark regarding how many more of them have opened up in the past 4 years.
This is the google map of the beach area that is called My An and where my condo is. There are Indian restaurants every damn where. I recall a time not long ago, a couple of years or so, where I encountered an Indian family in my neighborhood that was looking for the Indian restaurant that was meant to be nearby and I had to give them very specific instructions on how to get there because if I told them a little bit incorrectly, they would not find it.
These days the only thing you have to do is walk a couple of blocks in really any direction and you are going to find an Indian restaurant.
When I was out walking the other day I noticed another enormous Indian restaurant was in the process of being built.
here's the thing, in the years that I have been here I have noticed that most of these establishments don't make it. They go out of business in a year or whatever amount of time that I can only presume is the tenure of their lease. Then they disappear entirely only to be replaced next door or somewhere nearby by yet another Indian restaurant.
They all have basically identical menus and out of interest I have tried one vs the other over my past 10 orders or so and I gotta say, there is virtually zero difference between the various orders (at least as far as my tastes are concerned) between all of them.
When I ask someone that eats a lot more Indian food than I do which is their favorite, they normally don't have an answer for me because they too agree that all of the food at the various places are so similar that it kind of feels like there is actually just one kitchen that is making all of them and distributing them to the various establishments that all have different buildings.
It's not like Indian is a super-popular food here either because we don't have a tremendous amount of Indian tourists, there are very few Indian residents, and the big block of our tourists are Chinese and Korean, who don't really care for Indian food.
So I guess you could say that I really don't understand how this area is financially capable of supporting this many Indian restaurants. I mean look at the one part of the map that has "Pattaka" at the end of it.
That is just a 4 block area and you could easily walk all of it in 5-10 minutes. It's very small. Yet in this small area we have 11 Indian restaurants.
This is something that kind of ticks me off about this area and perhaps it is the same at other beach places in the world. Everything is the same no matter which way you go. When I search my mind trying to think of something unique that we have in this part of town I can only think of one or two places. Everything else is just a carbon copy of something else that we already have half a dozen of. Don't even get me started on the number of minimarts... good grief.
I suppose this must make money because otherwise we wouldn't have so many of them but I just don't get it. If I had some money to invest somewhere the last thing I would do is open up a place that they already have so many of in the same area.