The first time you sit down in a Vietnamese café, you may realise the menu is nothing like what you expected. What arrives is something slower, richer, and built on entirely different logic: a phin dripper balanced over a glass, coconut cream folded into crushed ice, salted egg foam layered over black coffee. Vietnamese café culture has its own vocabulary, and learning it is one of the quieter pleasures of stepping into a Vietnamese coffee shop for the first time.
This guide covers five drinks that define the Vietnamese café experience – what they are, how they taste, and what each one says about the culture behind it.
What Makes Vietnamese Café Drinks Different
The foundational difference is the brewing method. Vietnamese coffee is made using a phin, a small four-piece metal filter placed directly on top of the cup. Hot water is added to the grounds, and the coffee drips through by gravity alone, slowly, over five to seven minutes. The result is concentrated and full-bodied, with a texture and depth that no machine replicates.
The beans matter equally. Vietnamese coffee tradition is built on Robusta, grown across the Central Highlands in provinces like Lâm Đồng, where volcanic soil and altitude produce beans that are bold, earthy, and naturally low in acidity. Properly sourced Vietnamese Robusta is heavier on the palate than Arabica, with a clean bitter finish and an intensity that makes it an ideal base for everything else on this list.
Then there is the Vietnamese instinct for combination: condensed milk, coconut cream, salted egg yolk cream. Each addition has a flavour relationship with the coffee beneath it that rewards attention.
The Must-Try Drinks at a Vietnamese Café
Coconut Coffee – Blended Iced Coconut Coffee
This is the drink that introduced Cộng Cà Phê to the world, and the one most worth ordering first.
Phin-brewed Robusta is poured over a thick, cold and deeply creamy coconut smoothie which is blended from coconut cream, condensed milk, and crushed ice. The texture sits somewhere between a smoothie and a frozen dessert, but the coffee is present throughout – its bitterness cut but not eliminated by the richness of the coconut.
The coconut smoothie was inspired by Tràng Tiền ice cream, the iconic Hanoi street treat beloved since the 1970s. Cộng’s founder channelled that memory of sweetness and cold into a café drink, and the result became one of the most recognised Vietnamese beverages beyond Vietnam’s borders.
Coconut Matcha – Matcha with Blended Iced Coconut
For those who want the full Cộng texture experience without the coffee, the coconut matcha is the natural entry point.
Matcha is layered over the same smoothie of coconut cream and condensed milk. The coconut cream softens the earthiness of matcha and adds a natural sweetness that keeps the drink balanced. The result is rich without being cloying, and complex in a way that a standard matcha latte rarely manages.
Black Coffee
This is Vietnamese coffee in its purest form: Robusta is brewed through the phin and nothing is added. The coffee drips slowly into the cup, producing a small concentrated serve with a syrupy body and an earthy, bold, with a bitterness flavour profile that machine extraction can not replicate. At Cộng Cà Phê, the beans are sourced from Lâm Đồng province and prepared using the traditional phin method the brand has used since its founding in Hanoi in 2007.
Every other drink on this list is built on this base. Ordering a black phin coffee first makes the coconut series and the salted egg cream easier to understand because you can hear the Robusta underneath the other ingredients once you know what it tastes like alone.
Black Coffee with Salted Egg Cream
Perhaps the most surprising drink on this list and often the one people remember most.
This drink starts with strong black phin coffee, topped with a thick layer of salted egg cream made from whipped salted egg yolk. The cream feels rich and slightly savoury, softening the boldness of the coffee while adding an unexpected contrast of flavours. The best way to drink it is without stirring. Let each sip move through both layers naturally, so you can taste how the creamy topping gradually blends with the coffee underneath.
Salted egg may sound unusual at first, but it has long been part of Vietnamese cuisine. Known as trứng muối, it appears in traditional pastries, mooncakes, and savoury dishes across generations. In this drink, it takes on a new form — familiar in flavour, but completely unexpected in coffee.
If you want to try something genuinely different at a Vietnamese café, this is an easy place to start.
Where to Try Vietnamese Café Drinks in Paris
All five drinks are available at Cộng Cà Phê France, at 18 Rue Volney in the 1st arrondissement. This is the brand’s first European location and the only address in Paris where the complete Cộng menu is served. The space is built around the subsidy period of the 1970s and 1980s aesthetic that defines every Cộng store: handcrafted furniture, enamel cups, phin drippers as both tools and objects, walls that carry the textures of the old Hanoi.
Explore the full menu at Cộng Cà Phê France, 18 Rue Volney, 75001 Paris.
Leave a Reply