Make Way for Trung Nguyen

Lately, as I consider my career direction and the options I currently have, I can’t help thinking how satisfying it would be to open and operate my own café. In fact, I got pretty close to doing this back in 2005 when I flew from Saigon to Osaka, Japan, and convinced the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) to support my plan to open a “writer’s café” in Kyoto. I had a 50-page business plan and was looking forward to running the café out of a traditional wooden townhouse called a machiya.

Wouldn't it be nice to have your morning coffee in a place like this?

Ah, but it wasn’t meant to be. At least not in 2005. Maybe it was good that I didn’t go forward with it, seeing how the global economic situation has migrated south and will probably remain there for at least a couple more years. In Hawaii it doesn’t make sense to consider opening a writer’s café since commercial rents are through the roof and hardly anyone here seems to have a serious enough interest in writing to support this particular concept. (Or maybe they do have the interest but must work so much to afford living here that they’d never patronize it.)

All this leads me toward the subject of coffee.

I’m not a huge coffee drinker, though that’s less a matter of choice than it is of constitution. I love the stuff, but can’t handle more than two cups of it a day, and usually make do with a single, steaming mug of it in the morning. Like many people I know, my coffee habit began in college. Back then I always drank it with milk and sugar, but when I moved to Vietnam I immediately got hooked on it with plenty of white sugary sludge mixed in – sweetened condensed milk, in other words.

In the last few years, however, I’ve learned to drink it black. Now that I have it this way, I'm convinced that this is how coffee is meant to be enjoyed -- with nothing to interfere with the full-bodied flavor of roasted ground beans. I don’t drink any of the specialty items that Starbucks has come up with, as they’re so dressed up that they resemble desserts in paper cups more than anything else. And for the $5 I have to pony up for one of them I could just as easily buy an entire three-week supply of what I consider to be the best coffee available to me in Hawaii: Trung Nguyen (pronounced choong win).

(What about Kona coffee? For me, it’s too acidic and short on flavor, and I can’t justify paying so much for it. Unless I want a 10% Kona blend, which I don't -- ever -- the real thing costs between five and seven times what I pay for Vietnamese coffee.)

If you haven’t tried Trung Nguyen coffee, you really should make a point to if it's available where you live. In Honolulu, the only place I've found it is in Chinatown, but since there are so many Vietnamese groceries and foodstuffs there it's easily found. Trung Nguyen is strong stuff, somewhere between regular black coffee and straight espresso, which is why it goes so beautifully with sweetened condensed milk (and yes, I do make exceptions and drink this sometimes!). Rather than having to settle for the unsatisfying combination of sugary milk and weak coffee, you get complementary flavors that you just can’t get with anything else.

In Vietnam, Trung Nguyen's drinks menu is extensive; their list of coffees not only has translations of the kinds of beans that are used but also a thorough description of how they're expressed on the palate. Trung Nguyen is also famous for ca phe chon, or “civet coffee.” It's said that some coffee plantations actually feed civets coffee beans and then collect the partially digested remains from the animals' excrement and use them for this specialized blend, though Trung Nguyen's website explains that this is a former practice, not a current one. In any case, ca phe chon is robust, deeply bitter, and, yes, also quite clean. It goes best with sweetened condensed milk, becoming almost chocolaty when the two are combined, and is the most expensive item in the Trung Nguyen coffee line. Although I just finished my last ca phe chon from a recent trip to Vietnam, I’m not at all unhappy to return to the more quotidian “Gourmet Blend.”

$5 will buy you 500 g (1.1 lbs) of Vietnamese coffee

It’s worth noting that Trung Nguyen has cleared room for itself in the crowded café landscapes of Japan, Singapore, Cambodia, and Thailand, and I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time before we see it in LA and NYC…and doing extremely well in those places. In Vietnam, Trung Nguyen is seemingly everywhere, running the gamut from provincial holes-in-the-wall to seriously upscale and hip coffeehouses. Other competitors like Highlands Café, though consistently upscale themselves, just don’t compare (although Highlands does serve beer, which earns it an upward tick on my review scale).

Trung Nguyen Cafe on Tran Hung Dao Street in District One, Saigon

Highlands Cafe in District Seven, Saigon

For directions on how to make Vietnamese coffee with a Vietnamese slow-drip filter, visit this comprehensive blog entry at Wandering Chopsticks:

http://wanderingchopsticks.blogspot.com/2007/03/ca-phe-sua-da-ca-phe-sua-nong.html

A regular coffee maker should work just as well as a one-cup filter, though you'll want to experiment at first with how much coffee you use. My only word of advice is to forego Café Du Monde’s “French Roast with Chicory” blend, which the above link recommends, and which virtually every Vietnamese restaurant in the U.S. uses, and opt instead for Trung Nguyen. I think you'll find that there’s a world of difference between the two.

Ca phe sua da at a Trung Nguyen Cafe in Saigon