In the northern Vietnamese port city of Hai Phong, a market eatery run by an owner whose face looks just like French national-team forward Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 shot to fame off the back of a social media video. The buzz began in early June 2026 with a video of a customer jokingly ordering, \u201cMbapp\u00e9, one offal porridge to go.\u201d According to reports from VnExpress and others, views topped 1.3 million, and people even came from Hanoi, Nam Dinh, and Bac Giang just to check out his face. Hai Phong isn\u2019t as known to Japanese as Da Nang or Hoi An, but it\u2019s a city about two hours by car from Hanoi and a gateway to Cat Ba Island and Ha Long Bay. Knowing about this bowl as a candidate for a \u201clittle detour\u201d on your next trip could make for an interesting evening.<\/p>\n
The person behind the buzz is Nguyen Van Thanh, 31. At Mep Market (ch\u1ee3 M\u00e9p) in Tu Ky commune, Hai Phong, he runs an eatery that opens only in the evening with his partner Nguyen Cong Tuan (33). Hours are from 5 p.m. to around 10:30 p.m. By day he caters for local banquets, and at night he serves regional dishes centered on offal congee (ch\u00e1o l\u00f2ng) in a corner of the market\u2014a downtown double-cropping style. It opened in early 2025. Originally it was a perfectly ordinary eatery frequented by locals who came to the market.<\/p>\n
The turning point was Thanh cutting his hair short in the summer of 2025. On top of already sharp features and a tanned complexion, the short hair was added, and customers started saying he \"looks like Mbapp\u00e9.\" A video someone shot of an ordering scene spread on social media, and he became known overnight as \"Vietnam's Mbapp\u00e9.\" Now a situation has emerged where people gather aiming first at the owner's face, ahead of the taste itself.<\/p>\n
Thanh is not a footballer, nor is he related to Mbapp\u00e9 by blood. The resemblance is in his features, hairstyle, and skin tone, and the gap of \u201cnot a high-end restaurant but a market offal-porridge stall\u201d makes it land. Ladling out a humble Vietnamese bowl with the face of a global star \u2014 that gap was the core of the video\u2019s appeal. VnExpress reports that, timed to the 2026 World Cup season, there\u2019s even talk of shooting videos on the theme \u201cwhat if Mbapp\u00e9 lived in Vietnam.\u201d Coinciding with a period of rising football fever also helped it spread.<\/p>\n
In Vietnam, there's fertile ground for market eateries and GrabFood shops to draw a rush of attention from some small trigger. There are cases where an unknown shop advances to the finals of an online voting contest, and the speed at which a humble bowl around town goes viral is beyond anything in Japan.A GrabFood promotion where one order equals one vote sends a neighborhood eatery to the finals<\/a>Even looking at that, you can see how seamlessly Vietnam's dining-out culture connects with social media.<\/p>\n Thanh\u2019s mainstay, offal porridge (ch\u00e1o l\u00f2ng), is rice porridge cooked in a broth of simmered pork offal, a homey dish found all over Vietnam. But Hai Phong is known especially as a \u201cporridge town,\u201d and locally there are several signature styles.<\/p>\nKnowing Hai Phong's \"porridge culture\" makes this shop more interesting<\/h2>\n