I came home with three new habits

I came home with three habits I did not have before. A cup of coffee made slowly every morning, by hand, before anyone else is up. A bowl of phở in January and again in July, because it turns out the soup does not care about the season. And a playlist I did not expect to want, which still makes me get up and move in the kitchen.

None of them is a souvenir. A souvenir sits on a shelf. These changed what I do with the first hour of the day, which is the closest thing I know to proof that a place got under my skin.

The coffee is strong because the bean is

Start with the fact that explains the taste. Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee producer after Brazil — 31.7 million sixty-kilo bags in the 2025–26 season against Brazil’s 63 million, by the US Department of Agriculture’s count. Almost all of it, about 96 per cent, is robusta: the hardier, more bitter species with roughly twice the caffeine of arabica, and Vietnam grows around a third of the world’s supply of it. Nine-tenths of the national crop comes from the Central Highlands.

Coffee arrived under French colonial rule in the second half of the nineteenth century. You will read that a French missionary planted the first tree in 1857. Nobody has shown the document; the claim travels from blog to blog without a source, so we are leaving the date out.

What Vietnam did with that bitter, heavy bean is the interesting part. Sweetened condensed milk, because fresh milk was scarce and does not keep in the heat. Ice, in the south. Egg, in Hanoi — the subject of another piece on this site. And coconut: cà phê cốt dừa, coffee poured over coconut milk blended with ice until it is somewhere between a drink and a dessert. It became widely known in the early 2010s, and the chain most associated with it is Cộng Cà Phê, founded in Hanoi in 2007 — although Cộng itself, to its credit, does not claim to have invented it, and nor will we.

Robusta is what the country grows. Everything else — the milk, the ice, the coconut, the egg — is what people did to make it theirs.

The café as a place, not a product

The US Department of Agriculture puts the number of coffee shops in Vietnam at over half a million. It does not say how it counted, so treat it as a sense of scale rather than a statistic — but anyone who has walked a Vietnamese street will not argue with the scale.

The number matters less than what the cafés are for. A cup is the price of a seat, and the seat is yours for as long as you want it — for a conversation, for work, for nothing at all. The low plastic stools that line the pavements are younger than they look — they only became common in the early 1990s — but what happens on them is older: the street as a living room, shared.

That is the part worth bringing home. Not the décor. The permission to stop.

The phin, and what I actually do at home

The traditional brewer is the phin: a small metal filter in four parts — a saucer, a perforated chamber, a press that sits on the grounds, and a lid. You put it on the cup, pour a little hot water to bloom the coffee, then fill it and wait. Gravity does the rest, one slow drip at a time, for four to six minutes.

I want to be honest about what I brought home, because it is not that. My morning ritual is a pour-over: paper filter, slow spiral pour, attention on the water. It is not a Vietnamese method and it would be wrong to call it one. What came from Vietnam is the thing underneath it — the idea that coffee is worth five unhurried minutes, that the waiting is part of the cup, and that the first quiet moment of the day is something you make rather than something you find.

The other thing that came home is that I now pay attention to where the beans come from. Which leads somewhere less comfortable.

What the highlands pay for the cup

About forty per cent of Vietnam’s coffee area carries a sustainability certification — Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade, 4C — according to the USDA’s 2026 report. That is a real share and a real effort. It also means sixty per cent does not.

The pressure is mostly about water. The same USDA report describes fertiliser applied beyond recommended levels and irrigation that runs down the groundwater. Reporting from the region in 2023 found farmers applying two to three thousand litres per plant per year, where the highlands’ own agricultural research institute says about half would do. From the end of December 2026, the European Union’s deforestation regulation applies to coffee sold into Europe; Vietnam has been classed as low-risk.

There is also a quieter, better story. A specialty robusta movement is growing in the highlands, with growers competing on quality rather than volume — the national Amazing Cup competition in 2025 drew 149 samples from 70 entrants across nine provinces. Robusta grown and processed carefully tastes nothing like the bitter commodity it is known for.

So my habit at home now has a second half. I buy coffee where I can see who grew it and what it is certified for. If a bag says organic, I look for the certificate, because we searched and could not verify a single named organic Vietnamese producer — which does not mean none exists, only that the word on a bag is not enough on its own.

Phở, in January and in July

Phở is younger than most people assume. It does not appear in the Vietnamese dictionaries of the 1890s or in a French survey of northern food from 1907. The first known picture of it is in Henri Oger’s drawings of Hanoi street trades from 1908–09. Where it came from — Nam Định rice noodles in bone broth, a buffalo stew, a French pot-au-feu, a Cantonese beef noodle — is argued about by historians and will probably stay argued about. What is agreed is that it was born in the north at the turn of the twentieth century and travelled south.

In August 2024 Vietnam’s culture ministry added it to the national list of intangible cultural heritage — specifically, the folk knowledge of Hanoi phở, and in the same series Nam Định phở. That is a national listing. Phở is not on UNESCO’s list, whatever the headlines say.

I found it healing. I want to be careful with that word, because it is mine and not a medical claim. A bowl of bone broth gives you around eight to ten grams of protein per cup and some minerals, and it can also carry a lot of salt; the claims about collagen for skin and joints, or broth as a detox, are not supported by the evidence. What I can say honestly is what it did: a hot, clear bowl with fresh herbs felt healing, and the food in Vietnam was the best part of every day. I make phở at home now, in winter and in summer.

The music

I did not expect to fall for the music, and I did, in three directions at once.

The oldest is southern. Đờn ca tài tử grew up in the Mekong Delta at the end of the nineteenth century: a handful of musicians on moon lute, two-string fiddle, zither and bamboo flute, improvising and ornamenting around a bare skeleton of a melody, at death anniversaries, festivals and family gatherings. UNESCO inscribed it in 2013. It is one of a long run of Vietnamese forms on the list — court music, quan họ folk singing, ca trù, ví and giặm, xoan singing, bài chòi and then — which tells you something about how seriously this country takes the sound of itself.

The second is bolero — nhạc vàng, “yellow music” — slow, sentimental songs of love and separation that flourished in the south from the late 1950s. After 1975 it was banned; records were confiscated and listeners punished. Controls loosened after 1986, and in the last decade television singing contests have brought it back to prime time. You will hear it from a radio in a market, and it will make an old person in the room go quiet.

And the third is the one that made me dance. Hoàng Thùy Linh’s See Tình came out in February 2022; at the end of that year a sped-up cut went around the world on TikTok as “Ting Ting Tang Tang”. In March 2025 Hòa Minzy released Bắc Bling with the comic actor Xuân Hinh and producer Tuấn Cry — a song that wraps a quan họ folk melody from her home province in a modern production — and within four days it was second on YouTube’s global music video chart; it passed two hundred million views in eighty-one days. Years earlier, Sơn Tùng M-TP brought in Snoop Dogg for Hãy Trao Cho Anh, which set Vietnamese records for how fast it reached its first million views.

A UNESCO-listed folk melody, rebuilt as a club track, at number two in the world. That is a culture that knows exactly what it has.

About the people

This is the hardest part to write without saying something foolish, so I will keep it to what I saw.

In the places I went, over a few weeks, the people I met were beautiful, strong, confident and kind, in a way that did not ask for anything back. On Phú Quốc, a woman was splitting a pile of green coconuts with a cleaver in a shaded courtyard, fast and unbothered. A confidence that did not need to be loud.

I will not turn that into a sentence about a nation. I can tell you it is why I want to go back, and why the habits stuck: they came attached to people.