Nha Bep in Da Nang: The Best Pineapple Fried Rice
We only have two days of vacation left: today and tomorrow. I wanted to move as little as possible, but my friend sprinted out to grab breakfast with even more energy. He's seriously amazing.
I finally woke up late, grabbed a quick drink, and excitedly headed out to the beach to go surfing. But overnight, the ocean had gotten incredibly angry. I asked the surfboard rental guys what was going on, and after saying a bunch of things in Vietnamese, they showed me a YouTube news clip about a typhoon.
Yep. A typhoon was coming.
The furious ocean in front of us was just the precursor to the actual storm. I knew we had bad luck, but I didn't expect it to be typhoon-level bad. Even a little rain can put a damper on a trip, but here we were, facing a typhoon head-on. We even rented surfboards to try and ride in it. If yesterday was about playing with the waves, today felt like going three rounds in a boxing ring with them.
After such an exhausting morning, I wasn't just hungry—my stomach was completely empty. My body felt like I'd been in a water war, not just playing in the water, and I desperately wanted to eat anything. Right on cue, my friend—who turns into a Vietnamese tour guide at meal times—insisted we absolutely had to go to this place and dragged me to our fifth restaurant of the trip, "Nha Bep."
I think I've adapted enough to figure out the standard for a good restaurant in this town. If you call a Grab (local ride-hailing app) and the driver heads straight there without asking where it is, it's guaranteed to be amazing. For "Nha Bep," the driver recognized it immediately and took off right away.
The prices are on the higher side for a local restaurant. Still, it was cheaper than a basic diner in Korea, so we lost our minds and ordered everything. We got the dishes recommended on blogs, fried rice because we craved rice, and the pho that ended up being our most satisfying meal in Da Nang. There were only two of us, but I think we ordered four or five dishes. Once the order was in, my senses returned a bit. Looking around, I realized it was a high-end restaurant with a lot of attention paid to the interior. For the first time, I was actually grateful for Korea's high cost of living and the favorable exchange rate that let us eat at a place like this without breaking a sweat.
Overall, it's a very clean, upscale restaurant where the staff explains everything well. However, the fried dishes are generally disappointing. So, it's best to stick to the fried rice and pho. The pineapple fried rice, in particular, is no joke—it tastes like they dumped in sugar and every sweet thing imaginable, and it's incredibly delicious. Ignore anyone complaining that it's too sweet; it's an absolute must-eat. If you each grab a bowl of this pineapple fried rice and the spicy pho, you'll instantly understand what the Vietnamese style of sweet, salty, and spicy is all about.