Ditching a lucrative career in finance, Vu Dinh Tu opened a coffee shop without telling his parents, joining a wave of young Vietnamese entrepreneurs using espressos to challenge family expectations around work.
Traditionally taken black, sometimes with condensed milk, or even egg, coffee has long been an integral part of Vietnamese culture.
However, starting a cafe is not a career that many of Vietnam’s growing group of ambitious middle-class parents would choose for their children.
Photo: AFP
“At first my family didn’t know much about it,” 32-year-old Tu said. “Gradually they found out — and they weren’t very supportive.”
Tu’s parents repeatedly tried to convince him to stay in his well-paid investment banking job, but he persevered and opened four branches of Refined over four years in Hanoi.
Each is packed from morning till night with coffee lovers enjoying Vietnamese robusta beans — in surroundings more like a cocktail bar than a cafe.
Photo: AFP
His parents “saw the hard work involved in running a business — handling everything from finances to staffing, and they didn’t want me to struggle,” Tu said.
Vietnam was desperately poor until the early 2000s, pulling itself up with a boom in manufacturing, but many parents want to see their children climb the social ladder by moving into steady, lucrative professions such as medicine and law. Coffee, on the other hand, has become a byword for creativity and self-expression.
In Vietnam, “cafes have become a way to break norms around family pressure to do well in school, go to college, get a degree ... work in something that is familiar and financially stable,” said Sarah Grant, an associate professor at California State University.
“They have also become spaces of possibility where you can bring together creative people in a community, whether that’s graphic designers ... musicians, other kinds of do-it-yourself type people,” said Grant, an anthropologist specializing in Vietnam.
Coffee first arrived in Vietnam in the 1850s during French colonial rule, but a shift in the 1990s and early 2000s to large-scale production of robusta — usually found in instant brews — made the country a coffee production powerhouse and the world’s second-largest exporter.
A passion for the coffee business is often linked to that history, Grant said.
Coffee entrepreneurs are “really proud that Vietnam is this coffee-producing country and has a lot of power in the global market,” she added.
Down a tiny alley in the heart of the capital, 29-year-old Nguyen Thi Hue was mixing a lychee matcha cold brew in her new glass-fronted shop — a one-woman “Slow Bar” coffee business.
“When making coffee, it’s almost like being an artist,” said Hue, who had her first cup as a young child thanks to a neighbor who roasted his own.
Coffee is also hugely trendy, and there is money to be made if a cafe appeals to selfie-loving Generation Z.
“No one dresses poorly to go to a cafe,” said Hue, herself decked out in stylish bright-blue-rimmed glasses and matching necktie.
Relaxing at a rival shop nearby, Dang Le Nhu Quynh, a 21-year-old university student, is typical of the new generation of customer — she says the cafe’s style is what counts for her more than the brews.
“I don’t like coffee that much,” she said.
Vietnam’s US$400 million coffee shop industry is growing up to 8 percent a year, branding consultancy Mibrand said.
Thousands of shops are not officially registered with authorities, said Vu Thi Kim Oanh, a lecturer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Vietnam.
“If we have problems with a job at the office, then we quit and we think: ‘Let’s get some money together ... choose one place, rent a house and then open a coffee shop,’” she said. “If it goes well, then you continue. If it doesn’t, you change.”
Young Chinese, many who fear age discrimination in their workplace after turning 35, are increasingly starting “one-person companies” that have artificial intelligence (AI) do most of the work. Smaller start-ups are already in vogue in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, with rapidly advancing AI tools seen as a welcome teammate even as they threaten layoffs at existing firms. More young people in China are subscribing to the model, as cities pledge millions of dollars in funding and rent subsidies for such ventures, in alignment with Beijing’s political goal of “technological self-reliance.” “The one-person company is a product of the AI era,” said Karen Dai
South Korea’s air force yesterday apologized for a 2021 midair collision involving two fighter jets, a day after auditors said the pilots were taking selfies and filming during the flight and held them responsible for the accident. “We sincerely apologize to the public for the concern caused by the accident that occurred in 2021,” an air force spokesman told a news conference, adding that one of the pilots involved had been suspended from flying duties, received severe disciplinary action and has since left the military. The apology followed a report released on Wednesday by the South Korean Board of Audit and Inspection,
About 240 Indians claiming descent from a Biblical tribe landed at Tel Aviv airport on Thursday as part of a government operation to relocate them to Israel. The newcomers passed under a balloon arch in blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, as dozens of well-wishers welcomed them with a traditional Jewish song. They were the first “bnei Menashe” (“sons of Manasseh”) to arrive in Israel since the government in November last year announced funding for the immigration of about 6,000 members of the community from the states of Manipur and Mizoram in northeast India. The community claims to descend from
‘TROUBLING’: The firing of Phelan, who was an adviser to a nonprofit that supported the defense of Taiwan, was another example of ‘dysfunction’ under Trump, a US senator said US Secretary of the Navy John Phelan has been fired, a US official and a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, in another wartime shakeup at the Pentagon coming just weeks after US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ousted the Army’s top general. The Pentagon announced his departure in a brief statement, saying he was leaving the administration “effective immediately,” but it did not provide a reason or say whether it was his decision to go. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Phelan was dismissed in part because he was moving too slowly to implement reforms to
RSS