Stickyrice

On Coffee and Atmosphere

The Vietnamese feel pity for the lone diner.

I suspect that this sympathy extends to the solo coffee drinker.

The Vietnamese cafe is generally a lively environment where, upon entry, orders are shouted rather than quietly taken. It's an experience to be had in couples, pairs, rowdy groups. There's smoke, more Marlboro than Vinataba these days. There's the dextrous tongue and teeth husking and spitting of watermelon and sunflower seed cases, all over the floor. Banter is generally good-natured but loud. Sticky-beaking, even adding one's 500 đồng worth to a total stranger's conversation is acceptable behaviour. If it's the price of fruit that's being discussed, expect opinions to be shot across the cafe like volcanic projectiles.

A TV could be on, switched to the Korean soap with its concomitant melodramatic piano soundtrack and one voice dub of all characters adding to the din. Naughty children in coffee shops are both encouraged and admonished vociferously. Newspaper sellers, shoeshine boys and beggars are all regular characters in Hanoi coffee houses, their transactions adding another dimension to the atmosphere.

So, the sympathy I mentioned earlier is somewhat misplaced because how could one not feel part of such communal commotion. Noise equals ambience in Hanoi. My Mona Lisa smile in this environment is to assure the gathered caffeine crowd that, despite being on my own, I am indeed thankful for their efforts to include me, to envelop me in their racket.

But the half smile is in fact a ruse. In reality I'm zoned out. Oblivious.

 

My senses are elsewhere. The intricacy and colour of the building facade across from the cafe conveys me to another time. I wonder about the people who have dwelled behind the shutters, how they might have adjusted to changes in the political landscape, if they ran to dodge a bomb.

I may be focused on the pages of a book, where the story is of another place and time; 1941 China, 1962 Cameroon or the Caribbean before it became one big resort. Fiction or non-fiction but definitely not in the cafe in which my physical self sits.

Life's mundane little episodes grab my attention, too. A woman is peeling the tough outer layers of cải làn stems in readiness for dinner. Her two daughters draw up stools, brandish paring knives of their own and it becomes a case of "more hands making light work." They natter and laugh though I do not hear them. The white noise from the coffee shop makes them a silent movie. And there's the pomelo seller, too, wrenching the thick pith from her fruit, standing by her laden bicycle.

I savour the sips of coffee slowly drugging me. Sometimes abruptly, I emerge from this contemplation and am stunned not by the noise but by the silence. I am present in the ebb of the coffee shop's ebb and flow, back where the experience started, again the solitary coffee drinker. Literally.

And it's so quiet I don't know what to do with myself.

Cafe Yến Ngọc
93 Triệu Việt Vương
Hanoi

A Coffee Memoir

I owned a little cafe once. In Smith Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne. With my sister.

Our work there was strenuous. Days were long. Customers could be fickle.

But we survived. We survived our own naivety. We survived the introduction of a vicious new goods and services tax, all the while doing our own books. We survived the stigma of operating a business in a street where junkies came to score and shoot up. We even got through the media's typically distorted depiction of the drug problem, which frightened some patrons away. We survived our one pathetic disagreement; she threw an ashtray in my general direction and I, unable to get my hands on anything, threw...or rather floated...a serviette at her. Foot soreness, cuts and burns, in-grown toe nails, alcoholic habits at day's end...the list goes on...but we are both still here.

Thanks in large part to coffee.

Adrenalin and coffee. It was easier to make time for coffee than food. In fact, it was not uncommon for us to sit down to eat for the first time in the day at 3pm, eight hours after we'd opened and one before we were to close. Prepping, cooking, serving and cleaning up after customers is an endless cycle that really only halts when locking the cafe door at night. At first, we saw stopping to eat ourselves as rather self-indulgent, merely adding to the clean up and extending our working day.

But there always seemed to be enough time to gulp down an espresso or latte, to coordinate an extraction out of the machine between or with those of our customers. Coffee, sugar, sometimes milk to sustain a body on the race to the end of the working day is hardly a balanced diet. Not many carbs there. That is where the adrenalin used to kick in.

Learning the craft of making good coffee and various other aspects of one's own business operation leaves not much time for proper sustenance. The terminology, the machine, the beans, the grind, the blend, the 'seasons' of the milk, the humidity and temperature, the proclivities of the customers...so much to manage in the production of a uniformly perfect cup of coffee, every time. Who would have time to eat? This studious approach also involved lauding it over our employees to ensure the exacting standards never slipped.

So...a decade and more on, I find myself in Italy. And I'm convinced that the DNA of the Italian is different. They have a coffee-making gene or something. Nowhere in sight is the vigilanteism of our approach. With the orders being transferred from cashier or customer to barista at speed, it is not an overly systemized routine but rather an organic one.

Saucers clang and wobble on the counter and then teaspoons tinkle on them. All waving arms and conversation, the barista gracefully swoops the group handles out from the machine, dumping coffee grounds with a flamboyant tap-tap into the waste drawer. Fingers flick doses of fresh ground coffee from what seems like a constantly buzzing grinder. Perfect pressure is applied with a manual tamp, excess powder brushed aside with the palm of the hand. Italian baristas know the machine so well, I'm sure they could insert the group handle and wrench it into position without looking nine times out of ten. In a final flourish, the extraction is measured with the push of a button or the pulling of a lever or arm in older manual machines. A sigh of nonchalance issues from the barista at the same time as the black gold starts its tantalising trickle into the cup. They know they're getting it right every time.

Cup is placed on saucer.

"Prego" is uttered and the barista twirls back around to the machine as customers syphon sugar onto perfect crema, where it sits for a second before its slow release to the bottom of the cup. There is something so dramatic and sensuous about this part of the ritual. It's a moment in a day when one's entire concentration is focused on sugar on crema in coffee...and nothing else.

But there's no time to get lost in this thought in the busy Italian cafe. You better suck that caffe normali down and get the hell out of the way because you're a tourist and the other patrons are on the way to work, double-parked and shaking the sugar sachet in desperate readiness. And is the barista hurried or worried? No. His feet are sliding around on the fallen coffee grounds, his arms are gesticulating around the machine...in a series of rhythmic moves, innate in his make-up.

Twelve years earlier, in inner-suburban Melbourne, we made bloody good coffee but we lacked that natural rhythm. We danced around our coffee machine like the way white people dance.

A Different Coffee Experience

My aunty says she can't even say the word coffee after 11 am. Lots of folk I know have strict limits about when they consume coffee, particularly once the sun goes down. At night, suddenly caffeine becomes the enemy. I've never actually worried about it.

Until the other night when I hit this coffee spot just up from my local market. I think I eventually got to sleep at 5am and the alarm went off 45 minutes later. And I have to say that even though my days of recreational drug use were over long ago, this shop's cafe den da (iced black coffee) gave me one funky trip.

Thrashing about tangled in the sheets, trying to count sheep and getting up towards 1000 several times, thinking that it might be better if I counted animals that are actually prevalent in Vietnam, trying to flush the system out with water then the pacing up and back to the bathroom...all that in addition to the racing thoughts of how I would cope at work the next day and must get to sleep, must get to sleep, must get to sleep...and the looking at the clock, how many times did I do that!

It was verging on a psychotic episode and a very clear reminder that what's in that there glass of black liquid is indeed a drug.  

I've been back since to take another hit. A day-time dose. And to admire the style of the place, which is quirky old world, with fading shuttered doors, bamboo lampshades and birdcages hanging under the outside awning and a nice exhibition of commie propaganda posters nicely framed and stark against the clean white walls inside.

Chinese chess boards also hang on the walls and classical music comes lightly through the air waves. The young proprietor treads lightly, too, going about his operation in a courteous and soft-spoken manner. When I go to pay with a slightly flawed big bill (always problematic in Vietnam), he generously tells me not to worry, that I can pay next time.

He's only encountered me twice.

I like him. I like his cafe. I like his coffee.

Just not at night.

Cafe Viet
76 Nghi Tam
Tay Ho District

Sip Sip, Tweet Tweet

Prowling around not-so-familiar Hanoi neighbourhoods can surprise.

When ostensibly alpha-males in Vietnam are sitting about on the streets of the capital, it's far from a surprise. But when they are sitting about staring up lovingly at caged birds, talking about how sweetly they sing, one might be forgiven for being slightly taken aback. Further observation was warranted.

This pleasantly situated cafe near the Japanese embassy appears to cater for these bird-admirers, having erected a series of bamboo rods from which the cages can be hung for their viewing pleasure. Clearly a pastime for boys who have everything - latest mobile phones (usually x 2), Italian scooters, imported cigarillos in tins, gold bling enough to purchase land - there is still something of an anomaly here. Shouldn't they be older or elderly, more outwardly scholarly in appearance, perhaps wearing berets, looking up between chess manoeuvres? 

The ornately carved cages are worth millions of VND, many of them imported from China. Vietnamesegod was telling me a friend of his owns a moderately priced cage, for which he paid 27 million (USD$1415, AUD$1610). One of the boys at the cafe said he was going to sell his two cages and buy a car.

Now that's more like the Vina-alpha male I know and love.

For a song (not)

One coconut, one iced black coffee - 50,000VND (USD$2.60, AUD$3)

HN Cafe
26 Van Phuc
Ba Dinh, Hanoi

Cong Caphe

"More pigs in the pen means more fertilizer for the fields," proclaims one propaganda poster. The caption of another says, "Cho Dai Dot Dung Den Dat Nuoc Nay (It would be folly to attack this country. Do so at your peril)." A woman warrier is brandishing a rifle in the latter. Black and white war-era photographs are pinned to canvas. Old army kitbags hang on the white washed walls. Soiled white T-shirts are strung starkly against one wall painted army green. The light is coming down framed in tin petrol funnels, ingeniously refashioned as light fittings.

Sturdy wooden antique chairs and tables furnish the shiny concrete floor. On shelves up high, dusty Vietnamese translations of works by Lenin are juxtaposed alongside the flashing green lights of modems and wifi routers bringing in the philosophies of the world. French realist writer Balzac is also represented. Mao Zedong is there too, on the wall, taking his people along on the Great Leap Forward. The Rolling Stones' album Aftermath is softly filtering through the speakers. The fans are whirring and the staff are slumped, slightly aloof, dreaming.

The bitter dark chocolate of the coffee, sourced from Buon Ma Thuot and "made according to specifications by Cong Caphe", is more complex than the standard Hanoi brew and the avocado fruit blend is thick and viscous up the straw. Both are expensive.

And the staff know and I know that ambience in a coffee shop sometimes comes at a handsome price.

Cafe den da (iced black), bo sinh to (avocado fruit blend) - 50,000VND (USD$2.65, AUD$2.90)

Cong Caphe
152b Trieu Viet Vuong
Hai Ba Trung District
Hanoi

Toy Street Coffee

Amongst the coloured clutter of children's play things in the old quarter street known as Toy Street, there is a coffee den. Awkwardly positioned, slightly camouflaged and really tiny, a seat in this establishment comes at a premium. In fact, it's best to carefully plan one's assault on it.

Persistent by nature, I've been known to circle this cafe like a shark, waiting for someone to vacate their stool and extract their motorbike to create space for me and mine. As the place is located in a one way street, this circling involves doing curcuits of the block burning litres of fuel. It's really best to park elsewhere and walk but even then there is no guarantee of a place to park one's body. The sure-fire strategy is to hit the place between 11am and 1pm, when the locals are feeding their rice holes and then sleeping it off. I must say though that I have noticed an increasing number of Vietnamese foregoing their afternoon siesta in favour of the caffeine alternative.

The coffee here is a sweet, rich but subtle blend served in classy glassware, delicately ridged and a good fit in my hand. Even though the girls who make the coffee are mere teens, they have been very well-trained to produce consistent coffee every time, which is one of my imperatives in a cafe. In all of my regular haunts, I know the cup I'm going to get. When I'm nursing it, tinkling with the ice and anticipating the liquid on my palate, I know what it's going to taste like. It's a comforting thought. In fact, venturing to new cafes can be traumatic, risky business.

As I sip my coffee, the traffic whizzes by, a passing parade of sweating and lost tourists, too. Across the street, toy negotiations are undertaken and cheap Chinese-manufactured playthings are clutched tightly by kids on the back of motorbikes, ready to be assembled, broken, discarded and their small parts swallowed all over Hanoi.

Cafe Huong
37 Luong Van Can
Hanoi

Coffee then Tea

The coffee shops I frequent in Hanoi are mostly old-worldish. Stories have been told in these cafes, family skeletons unveiled, relationships rocked and broken, tears shed.

They have history.

And dust. Good dust. Dust which belongs. Dust which cannot be rubbed, even scoured away.

Stained teapots and little handle-less cups are proferred to the old-timers in a quaint custom following their morning coffee. The green tea cleanses the palate and legitimises a further half-hour of memoir and yarn. The Vietnamese love a chat.

And I really love watching them.

Lakeside Coffee

 

Yesterday afternoon's caffeine injection was taken lakeside. The gleaming sun on the water was supposed to infuse a sense of calm, to mentally regenerate the shattered lobes of a brain weakened by a longer than ordinary working week. I was looking for an hour or so of meditative zen-sipping - minus conversation, minus reading matter.

But I became distracted.

Firstly, across the road in the parkland adjoining the lake, a rag-tag group of adolescent shoe-shine boys were partaking in an over-zealous card game, each ace being flung down with more vigour and louder sound effects than the last. The crescendo of noise reached when the winning card was laid down would have flipped even the most concentrated yoga enthusiast out of their lotus position. My own state of coffee lull was shot to pieces. The card dealer's blue hair and exuberant magnetism made it too much to bear.

My people-watching addiction kicked in again.

Just in time for Grandma News to step up into the coffee shop with her cardboard folder of doom, gloom and superstition. Selling all kinds of front page news, she promoted her wares with wrinkles and a betel- stained smile revealing true life stories better than those in her print-stained hands.

She was a walking edition of the history of Vietnam.

And I drank her down.

In the cafe's retro glassware.

The Price of History

One cafe nau da (iced coffee with milk), one cacao da (iced chocolate) - 18,000VND (USD$1.05, AUD$1.55)

Cafe Quat
102 Tran Vu
Truc Bach
Hanoi

Hanoi History 101

I don't need salubrious surroundings and funky music in my cafes. Places to be seen are places to avoid. I don't have the right clothes, haircut or motorbike, anyway. There is a certain aesthetic that rates with me, though.

Clutter appeals. I hate cigarette smoke up my nose but kind of like the way it stains the walls. A street facing stool, a passing parade and a view of a temple scores points. Feeling a sense of days gone by is good in a cafe, too. History is palpable at this place in the old quarter. A permanent collection of black and white photographs depict Hanoians alighting from the old street cars that used to rattle around the city. Others have captured an eerie and unrestrained Hoan Kiem Lake, an old quarter street strangely unencumbered by motorbikes and wartime destruction of buildings that would have been standing right across from this very cafe.

A moment of reflection accompanied by a caffeine injection.

Cafe 61 Bat Su
Old Quarter
Hanoi

Coffee Strip

South of the old quarter in Hanoi, in Trieu Viet Vuong St, there must be coffee sluicing through the plumbing mains. This street is coffee shop central, with hardly another business breaking the pattern on either side of the strip. The footpaths have disappeared under a chaotic throng of motorscooters, plastic furniture, wayward banyan trees and squatting caffeine addicts.

Naming my poison is no problem. Scrounging a patch of pavement to wedge our plastic stools into, however, is a dilemma at Cafe Tho, a 23-year veteran of Trieu Viet Vuong's cafe scene and favourite of the god's 20-something mates, with whom I'm having my daily hit. It's French era atmosphere to the hilt with shuttered windows that haven't been dusted since they left. In fact there seems to be a caffeine and nicotine residue on every exposed surface, inside and out. Rustic is definitely the prevailing adjective for this one.

In between sips, the shoeshine boy takes me for a tourist, wanting the shirt off my back for his toil. Another drama plays out when Cafe Tho's resident fortune teller gives a theatrical wave, only to knock the waitress and half a black caffeine hit all over her clairvoyant self. A catty spat ensued about who was to blame. While the locals have an uncanny knack for ignoring such an episode, I find myself both not knowing where to look and perversely hoping that something solid gets thrown.

It doesn't. Instead it's all smouldering glares.

Then my black drug kicks in.

Score

Three cafe nau da (with condensed milk and ice), one cafe den da (black with sugar and ice) - 28,000VND (USD$1.74, AUD$1.85)

Cafe Tho
117 Trieu Viet Vuong
Hanoi