What Happens When a Local Restaurant Gets Famous?

Nick and KV Bui didn’t even know what Buzzfeed was when the internet news organization and viral-video factory first contacted them about featuring their little Vietnamese noodle shop on the site. Two weeks later, the “world’s biggest bowl of pho” made its way around the internet, making mouths water for the giant combination of broth, meat, and noodles served at the tiny, ten-table shop in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood. Within 15 minutes of the story going live, the shop was mobbed.

Dong Thap isn’t your average pho shop with a gimmick: it’s actually one of the only places in the city—and even the country—making fresh rice noodles in-house for their pho. The time-consuming, labor-intensive task is standard issue in the Vietnamese province of Dong Thap, where Nick’s family lives. When he decided to open a restaurant in Seattle, the noodles seemed like a good option—and a way to set his place apart from the hundreds of pho shops that abound in the city. The giant bowl was a marketing promotion that he dreamed up early on, never imagining the type of fame it would bring—and how hard it would be to manage the resulting business.