vietnameseiced.coffee

Traditional café · Ho Chi Minh City

Cà Phê Vợt Cheo Leo

Coffee strained through a cloth filter into clay pots, in an alley in District 3, by a family that says it has done this since 1938.

A long cloth coffee filter, stained dark brown, held over a brown glazed clay pot with a spout, with a large steel pot lid and kettles behind.
The cloth filter and clay pots at Cheo Leo, District 3, October 2025.Photo: Trương Minh Khải · CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Why it matters

Most Vietnamese coffee is made in a phin. Cà phê vợt is the older way: ground coffee in a long cloth bag, hot water poured through, the coffee kept warm in clay pots. Thanh Niên described Cheo Leo in 2025 as the oldest café of its kind still trading in Saigon.

The family says Vĩnh Ngô opened it in 1938, and his daughters run it now. Every press account repeats that date; all of them rest on the family.

Finding it

Down alley 109 off Nguyễn Thiện Thuật, at 109/36, in District 3. We have not been.

What to order

Press reports name its bạc xỉu, mostly milk with a little coffee, and cà phê sữa đá, both made with sock-filtered coffee. Those reports are from 2016, so the menu may have changed.

More in Ho Chi Minh City

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Related reading

A tall glass of iced bạc xỉu on a wooden café table: white milk and ice fill the lower half, a band of dark coffee sits above it, and a light-brown foam caps the glass around a bamboo straw.Photo: Klientos · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Recipe

Bạc xỉu

Vietnam's sweet, milk-forward coffee, with roots in Saigon

A narrow café front in Hà Nội's Old Quarter with low wooden stools and small tables set out on the pavement beneath a yellow signboard.Photo: Alexkom000 · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Culture

Hanoi vs Saigon Coffee Culture

Two cities, two climates, two vocabularies for the same drink. What nâu means in Hanoi, why Saigon drinks everything iced, and where egg coffee and bạc xỉu came from.

Where these details came from

Show the 4 sourcesHide the sources

Figures on this page come from the following. Where a claim is an estimate or a common description rather than a measurement, the text says so.

  1. 3 quán cà phê vợt lừng danh, lâu đời nhất TP.HCM: Bạn đã ghé chưa?Thanh Niên (Cao An Biên) · 2025-06-23 · accessed 2026-11-04The café in alley 109 Nguyễn Thiện Thuật still operating in 2025; the 1938 opening by Vĩnh Ngô, by the family's account; his daughters running it now.
  2. Veteran Saigon coffee shops offer a slow, easy startVnExpress International (Minh Quan) · 2018-11-05 · accessed 2026-11-041938; the cloth mesh strainer; the alley off Nguyễn Thiện Thuật in District 3.
  3. Hẻm Gems: A Cuppa in Saigon's Oldest CafeSaigoneer (Dana Filek-Gibson) · 2016-09-30 · accessed 2026-11-04The 109/36 address; cloth filter, charcoal stove and clay pots; cà phê sữa đá on the menu.
  4. Three 50-year-old coffee shops in SaigonVietNamNet (English) · 2016-06-11 · accessed 2026-11-04Bạc xỉu as the café's best-known drink; the clay pot and cloth strainer.