Hanoi vs Saigon Coffee Culture

The climate does most of it

Saigon has two seasons, wet and dry, and both are hot. Hanoi has four, and January is cold: single-digit Celsius, damp, with no central heating in most buildings.

The vocabulary

Drink	Hanoi	Saigon
Iced coffee with condensed milk	nâu đá	cà phê sữa đá
Hot coffee with condensed milk	nâu nóng	cà phê sữa nóng
Black iced coffee	đen đá	cà phê đen đá
Black hot coffee	đen nóng	cà phê đen nóng

Nâu means brown. Hanoi names the drink by its colour; Saigon names it by its ingredients.

Both are understood everywhere. Using nâu in Saigon will get you the right drink and a slight double-take.

Hanoi

Cafés in Hanoi tend to be interior spaces: narrow shophouses in the Old Quarter, upper floors of crumbling apartment blocks, rooms with mismatched furniture and a ceiling fan. That is partly aesthetics and partly because for several months of the year sitting outdoors is unpleasant.

The coffee runs less sweet than in the south. Hot versions are common from roughly November to March.

Egg coffee is Hanoi’s contribution. The story (a milk shortage in the mid-1940s, a bartender at the Metropole, whipped egg yolk as a substitute) is well established in the family and press accounts, if not in contemporary documentation. Café Giảng in the Old Quarter is still run by the family and still the reference version.

Trà đá, the free iced tea that arrives with the coffee, is not a Hanoi speciality. It comes with coffee across most of the country, Saigon included, and why it is there is explained in why Vietnam drinks coffee slowly.

Saigon

Ho Chi Minh City drinks iced, all year, mostly outdoors, mostly faster.

Pavement stalls (cà phê cóc) dominate, and a great deal of Saigon coffee is drunk in fifteen minutes on a plastic stool before work rather than over an hour. The cà phê mang đi (coffee to go) trade, sold from carts and kiosks to people on motorbikes, is a Saigon phenomenon that has only partly reached Hanoi.

It is also sweeter. Southern Vietnamese cooking in general uses more sugar than northern, and coffee is no exception.

Bạc xỉu is Saigon’s contribution, from the Chinese-Vietnamese community of Chợ Lớn: mostly milk, a little coffee, and a name that comes from Cantonese rather than Vietnamese.

And Huế, in between

Huế does not fit either column. Cà phê muối, salt coffee, comes from Huế in central Vietnam, and it reached the rest of the country a good deal later than either of the drinks above.

Central Vietnam is not simply a midpoint between the two big cities, and treating Vietnamese coffee as a north–south story leaves out a third of the country.

Which is better

That depends on what you want a coffee to be. If you want an occasion (slow, indoors, at a table, with a spoon), Hanoi is set up for it. If you want coffee as part of the street, fast and cold and all day long, Saigon is.