Vietnamese Coffee Culture: Pavement Stalls, Chains and Pour-Over Bars

Four kinds of café

There are at least four distinct kinds, and they do not have much in common beyond the coffee.

Cà phê cóc, the pavement stall. A few stools, a plastic crate of glasses, sometimes a shopfront and sometimes just a stretch of footpath. It is the cheapest kind and the most common.

The old-apartment café. Particularly in Hanoi and Saigon, these are tucked into the upper floors of decaying French-era or 1960s apartment blocks, up a staircase you would not find unless you knew it was there. Quieter, slower, popular with students.

The chain. Highlands Coffee, Trung Nguyên, The Coffee House and others: air conditioning, wifi, laptop-friendly. This is where a great deal of the money in Vietnamese coffee retail is.

The specialty roaster café. Newer and usually independent, with pour-over bars, single-origin Vietnamese beans and scales on the counter. Concentrated in Saigon, Hanoi and Đà Lạt.

Sitting down

Whichever kind it is, a Vietnamese coffee usually means sitting down. A phin takes four to six minutes and cannot be hurried, and the low stools, the seats facing the street and the free trà đá all grew up around that wait. The full argument is in why Vietnam drinks coffee slowly.

Who uses which

A great deal of Vietnamese social and business life happens in cafés rather than in offices or homes. Deals get discussed, relationships get maintained, and job interviews happen over a glass of cà phê sữa đá.

Which kind of café depends partly on what the visit is for. The quiet apartment cafés are popular with students. The chains, with wifi and air conditioning, are the ones set up for a laptop and an afternoon. The pavement stall is the cheapest place to sit, and the specialty bars are where the coffee itself is the reason to go.

The weather decides the rest. The south drinks iced all year; Hanoi switches to hot coffee for several months of winter, and its cafés lean toward indoor rooms. The differences between the two cities, including what they call the same drink, are in Hanoi vs Saigon coffee.

The drink is sweet

Visitors sometimes treat the sweetness of Vietnamese coffee as a compromise, something to be politely tolerated or ordered around with không đường (no sugar).

The condensed milk was never there to hide the coffee. It is a pairing with a very bitter, very strong, low-acid brew, and the two make sense together. How it got into the glass is covered on the condensed milk page.

You can and should try it black. Cà phê đen đá is a real drink and the best way to judge a bag of beans. The milk version is not the lesser one.

What is changing

Vietnamese domestic coffee consumption is growing, at roughly 5 million bags a year and rising, and the shape of it is changing faster than the volume.

A generation that grew up on phin coffee now also drinks flat whites, cold brew and single-origin pour-overs, frequently in the same week. Vietnamese specialty roasters are buying Vietnamese beans rather than imported ones, which was not the norm until recently.

The pavement stalls have not gone anywhere. The new cafés opened in the same cities, often on the same streets.