Nobody prepares you for egg coffee. You read about it, you see photos, and you still walk in expecting something roughly like a cappuccino. Then it arrives — thick, pale, nearly custardy on top — and you realize you’ve been thinking about it all wrong.
Café Giang has been making cà phê trứng since 1946. Nguyen Van Giang invented it during a milk shortage, whipping egg yolk with sugar and a small amount of condensed milk to approximate the richness that cream would have given. Eighty years later, the family still makes it the same way, in a narrow house off Hang Gai that you could easily walk past twice.
The Experience
The café is on the second floor. You climb a wooden staircase barely wide enough for one person, past walls crowded with old photos, and emerge into a room with maybe eight small tables and a view onto a lane below. The light in the morning is low and warm. It feels like being inside something private.
The coffee comes in a small ceramic cup, served in a bowl of hot water to keep it warm. You stir the foam into the coffee below. The flavour is extraordinary — intensely sweet, eggy in the best possible way, with the bitterness of the robusta coffee cutting through just enough. It is nothing like coffee and completely like coffee at the same time.
I had two. Then I sat there for another hour because I didn’t want to leave.
