vietnameseiced.coffee

Specialty · Ho Chi Minh City

XLIII Coffee, Pasteur

Central, specialty, and deliberately austere. A useful counterpoint to Saigon's pavement coffee a block away.

A coffee cupping table with a curved row of white bowls and cupping spoons resting beside them.

Why it matters

Pasteur is about as central as Saigon gets, and within a few minutes’ walk you can drink a 150,000 đồng single-origin filter here and a 20,000 đồng cà phê sữa đá on a plastic stool outside. Doing both in one morning is the fastest way to understand what the specialty shift actually is — and is not.

What to expect

Minimal, monochrome, quiet by Saigon standards. Built for drinking coffee rather than for watching the street, which makes it the opposite of the cà phê cóc tradition.

Where these details came from

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. XLIII Coffee — Locations43 Factory Coffee Roaster (official site) · accessed 2026-09-12Address at 178A Pasteur, Bến Nghé, District 1, and daily hours of 06:30–22:30.

Related reading

A narrow old Hanoi café with mismatched low wooden stools, yellowed walls and phin filters dripping on the tables.

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.

A professional coffee cupping table with a curved row of white bowls, each with a crust of wet grounds, and cupping spoons beside them.

Research

Specialty Coffee in Vietnam: From Commodity to Cup

Vietnam built a coffee industry on volume. Producers and roasters are now trying to sell by the cup instead — fine robusta, traceable lots and domestic demand.