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.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate