Before and Now

Where Old Town Slows Down Enough to Drink Properly

Nguyễn Thái Học is one of the quieter arteries threading through Hoi An's UNESCO-listed Old Town, and the atmospheric conditions it creates matter to how Before and Now functions as a bar. The street runs parallel to the Thu Bon river, far enough back to escape the loudest foot traffic but close enough to the old merchant houses that the architecture sets the tone before you step inside. In a town where heritage is often packaged for tourist consumption, a bar that positions itself between the historical and the contemporary on a street like this is making a deliberate argument about what kind of experience it intends to offer.

Hoi An's bar scene has developed along two reasonably distinct tracks in recent years. One segment runs toward the riverside, where venues like the Hoi An Brewing Company Tap Room and Riverside Beer Garden and MANGO MANGO offer volume, views, and crowd energy suited to the backpacker and package-tour corridor. The other track moves inward, toward smaller, quieter rooms where the drink itself carries more of the weight. Before and Now belongs to the second category, which means the quality of the programme becomes the primary reason to visit.

The Cocktail Programme as Cultural Position

In Vietnamese bartending over the past decade, the most interesting creative movement has been toward local botanical sourcing: lemongrass, calamansi, pandan, Vietnamese whisky, rice wine distillates, and herb profiles drawn from central Vietnamese cooking traditions. This is not a Saigon-only development. While venues like Drinking and Healing in Ho Chi Minh City have drawn international attention to the southern interpretation of this approach, Hoi An's geography and culinary identity give bars here access to different raw material. The central region's herb-forward cooking, its proximity to farming communities in the Tra Que vegetable village, and its historical position as a spice-trade hub all feed into what a thoughtful cocktail programme in this town can reach for.

Before and Now sits on Nguyễn Thái Học at number 94, and the name itself signals the bar's operative tension: the historical weight of the Old Town pressed against a contemporary drinking sensibility. That tension, when handled well, is exactly what distinguishes a bar with genuine editorial interest from one that simply uses heritage as décor. In Hoi An's compact Old Town, the difference between those two things is often a single block.

For comparison, The Haflington in Hanoi has built its reputation on a similar premise: drinks that use Vietnamese ingredients as structural components rather than garnishes, served in a space where the colonial-era architecture informs rather than overwhelms. Before and Now operates in a different city and a different competitive tier, but the underlying logic of place-informed bartending connects both venues to the same broader movement in Vietnamese cocktail culture.

Old Town Positioning and Peer Context

Among the bars most frequently cited alongside Before and Now in Old Town conversation, Mr Bean Bar and Mai Fish Restaurant represent the food-led end of the drinking spectrum, where cocktails are secondary to what arrives on the plate. Before and Now flips that hierarchy. The bar is the point, and food, where present, serves the drink rather than the reverse. That is a meaningful distinction in a town where the eating options are so strong that many visitors structure their entire itinerary around meals and treat drinking as an afterthought.

The Old Town itself creates natural constraints that shape every bar operating within it. The UNESCO designation limits signage, construction, and exterior modification, which means venues here compete on interior atmosphere and programme quality rather than visual spectacle. For a bar like Before and Now, that constraint is an advantage: the attention moves inward, toward the glass and the room, which is where it belongs anyway.

Planning a Visit

Getting to Before and Now requires no particular navigation: 94 Nguyễn Thái Học sits within easy walking distance of the Old Town's central landmarks, including the Japanese Covered Bridge, which anchors the western end of the pedestrianised core. The street is accessible on foot during the evening hours when Old Town traffic restrictions apply to motorbikes and vehicles. Given that booking information is not publicly listed at the time of writing, arriving without a reservation is the practical approach; early evening tends to offer more room than the post-dinner window when Old Town foot traffic peaks around 8 to 9pm.

Travellers already planning time across central Vietnam will find Before and Now sits naturally within a wider itinerary that might include Le Rendez Vous in Da Nang's Son Tra district, a 30-minute drive north, or a longer reach to Bamboo 2 Bar in Thanh Khe. For travellers extending further, Le Pont Club in Hai Phong and Genji Bar in Cam Pha represent the northern end of Vietnam's emerging cocktail geography. An even wider comparison point for technique-driven bartending in the Asia-Pacific region is Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu, which operates in a similar register of ingredient precision and intimate format.

For a broader orientation to what Hoi An offers across food and drink, our full Hoi An guide maps the town's options by neighbourhood and category.