The Seattle coffee scene’s hot new trend: Vietnamese cafes

This story is part of this week’s Vietnamese Food Guide, a special edition dedicated to Seattle’s vibrant Vietnamese cuisine. Find more at seattletimes.com/life/food-drink and in Sunday’s print edition of The Mix.

IN A TINY Georgetown storefront, a barista distills the components for cà phê sữa đá — coffee brewed in a traditional Vietnamese metal filter called a phin mixed with sweetened condensed milk — into a silver cocktail shaker. The rich, tawny caramel-colored result, served iced, tastes almost like chocolate. This cafe, called Voi Cà Phê, is to-go only, with a little sidewalk seating on nice days, but out of its equally tiny kitchen comes one of Seattle’s best versions of the treasured Vietnamese sandwich banh mi, made with lemongrass-accented pork sausage. 

A few miles away in Little Saigon, in the Chinatown International District, the espresso machine sings at Hello Em, preparing the caffeinated base for cà phê trứng — egg coffee, topped with a luxuriously fluffy, butterscotchy, custardy egg cream. Vietnamese pop slow jams play in the airy space, shared with nonprofit Little Saigon Creative. Decor includes a coffee plant and a burlap sack of the Vietnamese coffee beans roasted on-site (some to “hella dark,” per the packaging); a bicycle bedecked with fishing baskets hangs from the high ceiling. For food, there’s bánh mì kẹp — pressed panini-style, with options ranging from tofu to Polish dog with Laughing Cow cheese to Seattle-centric marinated salmon.

Two blocks northwest sits small, stylish Phin. Named after the coffee filter, the tranquil, inviting cafe features a faux balcony in one corner, echoing the colonial architecture of Vietnam. One specialty here: creamy-textured cà phê sữa chua, aka yogurt coffee, with robust brew stirred with whole-milk yogurt plus just a little sweetened condensed milk — it turns out tangy but balanced, deliciously bittersweet. For a snack, Phin’s crispy, cushy Vietnamese-style pandan waffles have proved so popular that there’s now a mix available for making them yourself.

In the hometown of Starbucks, these three places are part of a new wave of independently owned cafes honoring, celebrating and expanding upon the longstanding, thriving coffee culture of Vietnam. Enterprises by first- and second-generation immigrants are bringing our city both the classic Vietnamese coffee drinks described above as well as wildly inventive ones — e.g., the phở spice latte at Georgetown’s Voi Cà Phê, which features the aromatic herb blend of the beloved soup (but, per the menu, “No chicken or beef!”).

AS A SEATTLE coffee movement, it seems truly new. Coffeeholic House, the place that claims to be the first among the city’s new wave of Vietnamese cafes, opened just four years ago; it now has three branches, in Columbia City, Greenwood and Bellevue. Elsewhere, there’s the charm of Drip & Sip, tucked away in Tukwila, already a neighborhood favorite with its fish tank; in Fremont, work-from-home laptoppers crowd the tables at sleek, minimalist coffee-and-cream-colored Aroom. In total, more than a dozen Vietnamese cafes have debuted in the last few years across town.

Seattle had Vietnamese cafes before — just of a different stripe.

“I think all of us [new cafes] are standing on the shoulders of giants, those early Vietnamese coffee shops … from the ’90s and 2000s,” says Khôi Phùng, co-owner of Voi Cà Phê. “They helped create the interest for Vietnamese coffee that we are able to build on today.” 

Hello Em owner Yenvy Pham — who, with her sister Quynh-Vy Pham, has built her parents’ esteemed local Phở Bắc chain into a James Beard Award-nominated restaurant group — remembers the “old-school Vietnamese-style” cafes found in Seattle’s Little Saigon in her youth. Many used Café Du Monde coffee, as the closest approximation to what they found back in Vietnam; one had a banh mi cá mòi (that’s with sardines) that she loved; pretty much all of them were filled with cigarette smoke. And: “only Vietnamese people would go,” she notes, “and mainly men.” Over the years, one after another, these places closed down.

The new Vietnamese cafes in the city are inviting everybody in, and for the uninured, these are places not just for new tastes but also for learning. For the barest basics: French colonizers brought coffee and its cultivation to Vietnam in the 19th century, as well as their desire for dairy in a country that didn’t produce it — hence, the concomitant introduction of sweetened condensed milk. The four-part filter that is the phin, functioning like part pour-over and part French press, is also ascribed to the colonialists from France. From there, cafe culture in Vietnam flourished.

Owner Bao Nguyen of Phin urges visitors to “talk to the owners … we love to chat about our work.” And for continuing Vietnamese coffee education, Hello Em makes an excellent starting point. While the baristas behind the counter use an espresso machine, phins are on display with instructions and are available for purchase — along with a variety of the house-roasted Vietnamese beans — to use at home. A wall display details the history of Seattle’s Little Saigon; another presents pertinent coffee facts. 

Though it goes largely unrecognized as a caffeine powerhouse, Vietnam is second only to Brazil worldwide in the production of coffee. Ninety-five percent of the beans grown in Vietnam are of the robusta variety; as its name implies, the plant is hardier, and it grows better in the country’s climate. Arabica beans are typically considered more precious, described as more refined in taste, and priced accordingly. 

Working as a barista at a local non-Vietnamese cafe that showcased the provenance of every bean, Voi Cà Phê co-owner Hiền Đặng thought it strange that with the country’s huge role in coffee production, it went unrepresented. After she and her husband, Phùng, searched high and low for anything labeled “product of Vietnam” at Seattle stores and cafes, she says they “learned the unfortunate reality that Vietnamese coffee is looked down on in the coffee industry.”

To wit: On its website, Starbucks attributes “more complexity” to arabica, while profiling robusta beans as having a “harsher taste compared to burnt rubber.” Alternate tasting notes for robusta might include toasty, nutty, dark chocolate, molasses; much depends on the roast and, of course, how the coffee is actually made. Robusta is also more robust in terms of caffeine — twice as much.

Seattle’s new Vietnamese cafes tend to use both robusta and arabica, depending on the kind of coffee drink, and the respect for the country’s coffee is deep. There’s the import and roasting program at Hello Em, all single-origin beans. Voi Cà Phê showcases and sells coffee sourced from several different Vietnamese roasters, with a dizzyingly nerdy online buying guide.

“Our goal is to show the world how great Vietnamese coffee can be,” Đặng says, by “featuring the culture of Vietnamese coffee in the style of drinks we serve and the origin of our beans, [and by] showcasing the farmers and roasters in Vietnam who work together to make this drink happen.”

The cafe called Phin sources all Vietnamese beans as well, with owner Nguyen working with a family-run cafe that runs a farm-to-cup operation in Đà Nẵng to bring in their coffee soon.

Nguyen calls it all “a continuation of the immigrant story … all these coffee shops are, at the end of the day, economic opportunities that didn’t exist before.” He sees these new places as following in the footsteps of Seattle’s original Vietnamese cafes, delis and pho shops, “when the first wave of immigrants and refugees came, and that was their opportunity to generate wealth and sustain themselves.” With these new enterprises comes job creation, as they expand and hire; then there’s also spreading the prosperity “up and down your supply chain … the farmers, the roasters are all benefiting from this as well.

“It goes all the way back to Vietnam,” Nguyen says. “And that’s really exciting.”  

THE STORIES AND the culture reflected are threaded all around the city, through Little Saigon and back to Vietnam, too. In an evocative story he wrote for Eater Seattle, Nguyen traces his love of coffee back to his early childhood in Saigon, through his family’s coming to Seattle in 1995, to serving his interpretation to his father after opening Phin in 2020. (His dad was critical, then asked for another one.)

Likewise, on Voi Cà Phê’s website, co-owners and spouses Đặng and Phùng reflect on all that’s led them to this moment in heartfelt terms that show this is not just another coffee shop. For Phùng, this encompasses his grandfather’s coffee farm in Vietnam, and remembrances of his family’s former cafe there, too, operated out of their home. For Đặng, there’s the memory of drinking coffee on her grandma’s lap, and that of the cafe her parents opened in early 2000s Seattle called Quán Bên Lề (“shop by the side of the road”). Voi Cà Phê today continues that legacy in more than one way — her mom, Phoenix Đặng, is the chef (and creator of the shop’s magnificent banh mi nem nướng Hà Nội).

“To me,” Phùng writes on their cafe’s website, “coffee is my connection to the people, land, and family. My goal is to find that connection in everything we do at Voi Cà Phê.”

Connection is the goal for Hello Em’s Pham, too. In Vietnam, “coffee culture is so big, you have like 20 coffee shops in one block,” she notes. “And Vietnamese coffee is so distinctive … to bring that to Seattle was really important, but it’s also really fun.” She sees Hello Em as “a driver to gather people together.” 

At Phin, Nguyen seeks out the same communal aim. “The coffee obviously has to be excellent,” he says. But: “My first love, my passion is really just creating and holding space for our community, and specifically the Little Saigon neighborhood.

“People come and stay and chat and hang out and make connections. I’ve seen people have first dates here, make friends here, break up,” Nguyen laughs. “But it’s that human connection, is what I live for — [it’s] why I have this physical space.”

There’s connection among the cafes themselves, too — as they talk about their places, the owners mention and recommend each others’ spots, and more across the city, too.

“My go-to is definitely Voi in Georgetown,” Pham says. “I love how they’re doing what they’re doing.” Voi Cà Phê’s Đặng names Phin as her go-to. “Every shop has a different take, a different taste profile that they’re going for,” says Nguyen, the Phin owner. He recommends the ecumenical approach: “It’s great to go try all of them — see what fits what you like.” 

All the different interpretations, Đặng says, make it “exciting to be part of this new iteration. … It’s fun to experience what our peers have got brewing, and seeing where we all converge, and where we branch off.” 

It’s a movement that already has many convergences and branches, with many stories to tell, and it’s emerging organically and happening fast. “In the end,” Đặng points out, “we’re all bringing diversity to the coffee industry in the city that gave birth to Starbucks.” That started small, too.