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The streets around the Saint Lazare train station churn with a current of hurried office workers, wandering tourists, delivery trucks, and city buses. In the shadow of the austere รglise de la Sainte-Trinitรฉ church, Hanoi Corner is a little haven of calm welcoming passersby for lunch or an afternoon cup of tea.ย
The cafe, specializing in Vietnamese filter coffee, Vietnamese tea, and street food staples like banh mi sandwiches, is Nguyen Nam and Nguyen Linhโs love letter to their Vietnamese-French heritage.
โI wanted to create a Vietnamese coffee shop, but I didnโt want to just serve a good cup of coffee,โ Nam says. โI wanted to take customers on a voyage to discover Vietnamese culture.โ
Nam is Vietnamese, but grew up in France; his wife, Linh, came to France from Vietnam to study. For Nam, a former IT project manager, coffee is an opportunity to stop and enjoy the moment. In Vietnam, he says, coffee is never taken to go.
โCoffee made with a Vietnamese filter takes time,โ Nam says. โItโs coffee that invites you to sit down and share it with someone.โ
Though Vietnam is a major coffee producer, the quality of the beans, mostly Robusta, is generally considered inferior to those produced in other regions. But as interest in coffee grows, so has the demand for locally grown Arabica and lighter roasted beans. Cafe culture is developing in new and exciting ways in Vietnam, particularly in cities in the south, where a number of cafes are taking a specialty coffee approach that includes different extraction methods and a special attention to provenance. Hanoi Corner tries to capture the diversity of this movement for a French audience, sourcing both darker-roasted beans as well as more modern interpretations fromย The Workshop, a specialty roaster in Ho Chi Minh City.
โThereโs this side of Vietnam that many French people arenโt aware of. We wanted to show traditional coffee, specialty coffee, and whatโs happening in between,โ Nam says. In addition to offering straight up Vietnamese filter coffee, the couple also prepares a beverage with iced coconut milk, as well as egg coffee, which is topped with whipped egg yolk and condensed milk. Nam admits that purists might be put off by the idea of coconut and coffee mingling, but also insists that different occasions call for different coffees.
โI love eating at gourmet restaurants, but that doesnโt stop me from enjoying comfort food now and then,โ he says.
For Linh, it was important that teas also appear on their menu. A staple beverage in Vietnam, green tea is consumed in the morning, after meals, during ceremonies, and with family. In addition to two native green tea varieties and three native black teas, the cafe serves a lotus-infused green tea produced within the traditional Vietnamese style, with no artificial flavorsโfor this drink, green tea leaves are infused six times with lotus flowers harvested from the West Lake area in Vietnam. All teas are procured from small producers who work with local communities in Vietnamโs mountainous tea-growing regions.
โOur work here in Paris has to give something back to Vietnam, it canโt just be about making money,โ Linh says.
Namโs decision to exclusively serve coffee brewed with the Vietnamese Phin filter is unique in Paris, and even more so because he has developed a specialty-inspired brewing method specific to the filter.
โI wanted to work with the beans and filter from Vietnam, and the methods I learned in France,โ he explains. When he first began learning about extraction methods, he found the Vietnamese filter often presented as a quaint element of local culture rather than a serious way to make a good cup of coffee. So, initially he concentrated on learningย V60ย techniques.
But there were things about the V60 that bothered him, namely a nagging sense of irregularity, no matter how precise his measurements were. โThe Vietnamese filter is even simpler than the V60, which meant I could concentrate on precision of grind, temperature, and ratio,โ Nam says. He spent a year poring over books and adapting V60 techniques to the filter, eventually refining a brewing process that produces coffee with a flavor and mouthfeel somewhere between an espresso and a filter brew.
Namโs hard work paid off earlier this year when he won theย Rรฉseau Barista de France Brewing Contestย with his method. In the past, heโs been reluctant to enter competitions that donโt include blind tasting, because heโs sensed some condescension within the specialty coffee community toward the Vietnamese filter.
โIn my experience, people have had preconceived ideas about my coffee before they even taste it. Theyโll say, โItโs not bad,โ but they donโt dare say itโs good,โ he says. The blind tasting was an opportunity.ย โTo show people that itโs possible to make a modern, relevant cup of coffee with a Vietnamese filter. Itโs not just a quaint bit of folklore to play on nostalgia about Vietnam.”
The couple takes the same approach to food as they do coffee, using Linhโs family recipes to create banh mi sandwiches, bo bun bowls, and manioc desserts that break with a nostalgic or static approach to Vietnamese cuisine.
โWe want to show thereโs another face of Vietnam than what you find in the restaurants in the 13thย arrondissement. Thereโs nothing wrong with them, but they were opened by people who came after the war with an older vision of Vietnam,โ explains Linh.
โBut we can show something new, with good pastries, tea, cake, a good banh miโa blend of French and Vietnamese culture, based on traditional recipes.โ
The slow evolution of Vietnamese cuisine in Paris may arise in part from the stigma Nam says many Vietnamese families attach to working in the food industry. Growing up, for example, Nam says his parents emphasized the importance of higher education and getting a well-paid job in a company, and his decision to open a cafe left them perplexed.
โThereโs a level of fear in saying you work in the food industry, it implies that youโve failed in your studies, in your life,โ he explains. โBut I went to school, I worked and eventually I realized I had nothing to prove to anyone.โ
After just three months in operation, Hanoi Corner landed aย Time Outย mention as one of the best places to seek out Vietnamese food in Paris. It may be a sign that the city is ready for what the new generation of Vietnamese creators have to offer.
โItโs funny because the French brought coffee to Vietnam and now weโre bringing Vietnamese coffee to France. The circle is complete,โ Nam says.
Kate Robinson (@KateOnTheLoose) is a freelance journalist based in Paris. Read moreย Kate Robinson on Sprudge.ย