Egg Coffee

Cafe Giang

In 1946, a bartender at the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi, Mr. Nguyen Giang opened a small cafe. At the time, Vietnam was suffering a shortage of milk. Improvising, Mr. Giang whipped up some egg yolks and mixed them into his coffee as a dairy substitute. The result became a Hanoi legend. Cafe Giang is where egg coffee was born! It may sound strange, but egg coffee is actually delicious - hot or cold!

Cafe Giang can be a little hard to find if you don't know where to look. It's tucked away in a tiny alley between two tall tube houses. Just enter the alley and keep walking. You'll walk right into the first floor of the cafe!

We ordered two different drinks to try: egg with coffee and egg with chocolate. The egg drinks were served in layers with a few cubes of ice. You have to stir and mix it up until the ice  has melted and chilled your drink, and then enjoy your smooth delicious egg coffee or egg chocolate. The creamy and buttery taste of this egg coffee, reminds me of a milkshake or melting ice cream. There is no egg smell or taste at all, just rich, creamy, vanilla-ey coffee.

Cafe Giang has a wide variety of menu items that you can choose to order. There are other drinks that I am really interested in trying next time, like egg with cinnamon, egg with matcha, and egg with beer or rum (???). It's a nice cafe that conserves the old-fashioned feel of a local Vietnamese coffee shop with tiny stools and plain decor. The cafe doesn't need to be fancy when it is so famous for its drinks! It's a Hanoi icon, and popular with students, businessmen, and tourists alike, who cram onto tiny wooden stools on the top floor of a narrow building to enjoy their iced egg coffee and escape the summer heat of Hanoi.

The Note Cafe

The first egg coffee we tried, however, was at The Note Cafe. It was an early morning, and on a walk around Hoan Kiem Lake, we were approached by a red-aproned cafe employee who gave us a 10% discount coupon for an egg coffee. Everyone at the cafe was super friendly and made us feel very welcomed on our first full day in Hanoi.

We ordered a few hot egg coffees. Even though it would be hot outside that day, it was early enough in the morning that the weather was still quite pleasant. We sat by an open window to read, work, and enjoy an egg coffee.

Every surface in the cafe is covered in post-it notes, and everyone is welcome to add their own. When our coffee arrived, it came with a note as well. It read, "in life, it doesn't matter where you go, but who you are with."