Abandoning a lucrative career in finance, Vu Dinh Tu opened a coffee shop without telling his parents and joined a wave of young Vietnamese entrepreneurs using espresso to challenge family expectations about work.
Coffee, traditionally taken black, sometimes with condensed milk or even egg, has long been an integral part of Vietnamese culture.
But opening a cafe is not a career many of Vietnam’s growing pool of ambitious middle-class parents would choose for their children.
“At first my family didn’t know much about it,” Tu, 32, told AFP.
“They gradually found out — and they weren’t very supportive.”
Tu’s parents tried repeatedly to convince him to stay in his well-paying job in investment banking.
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But he persevered and opened four branches of Refined over four years in Hanoi.
Everything is packed from morning to night with coffee lovers enjoying Vietnamese robusta beans — in an environment that looks more like a cocktail bar than a coffee shop.
His parents “saw the hard work that went into running a business — handling everything from finances to personnel, and they didn’t want me to struggle,” Tu explained.
Vietnam was desperately poor until the early 2000s, with a boom in manufacturing, but many parents want to see their children climb the social ladder into stable, lucrative professions such as medicine and law.
Coffee, on the other hand, has become a byword for creativity and self-expression.
As an “artist”
In Vietnam, “cafes have become a way to break the rules around family pressure to do well in school, go to college, get a degree … work in something that is familiar and financially stable,” according to Sarah Grant, Associate Professor. at California State University.
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“They’ve also become spaces of possibility where you can bring creative people together in a community, whether it’s graphic artists … musicians, other kinds of self-made 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 — commonly found in instant brew — made the country a coffee producing powerhouse and the world’s second largest exporter.
Passion for the coffee business is often linked to this story, Grant told AFP.
Coffee entrepreneurs are “really proud that Vietnam is this coffee-producing country and has a lot of power in the world market,” he added.
In a tiny alley in the heart of the capital, 29-year-old Nguyen Thi Hue mixes a cold lychee matcha in her new glass-fronted shop — a one-woman “Slow Bar” coffee business.
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“When you make coffee, it’s almost like being an artist,” said Hue, who had her first cup as a toddler thanks to a neighbor who roasted his own.
But coffee is also extremely trendy, and there’s money to be made if a cafe appeals to selfie-loving Gen Z.
“No one dresses badly to go to a cafe,” notes Hue, dressed in stylish glasses with bright blue frames and a matching turtleneck.
Coffee “a serious career”
Relaxing at a rival shop nearby, Dang Le Nhu Quynh, a 21-year-old university student, is typical of the new generation of customers — she says the style of the cafe is what matters more to her than the noodles.
“I don’t like coffee that much,” he admits.
Vietnam’s coffee industry is worth $400 million and growing at up to eight percent a year, according to branding consultancy Mibrand.
There are also thousands of shops that are not officially registered with the authorities, says Vu Thi Kim Oanh, a lecturer at Vietnam’s RMIT University.
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“If we have problems with an office job, then we give up and think: let’s get some money together… pick a place, rent a house and then open a coffee shop,” he said.
“If it goes well, then you keep going. If it doesn’t go well, you change.”
Global brands struggled to gain ground, and Starbucks represented just 2% of the market in 2022, according to Euromonitor International.
Earlier this year it announced it would be closing its only store in Ho Chi Minh City that sells specialty brews.
Unlike most local ventures, the coffee giant uses exclusively “high-quality” arabica beans, which have a distinctly different flavor than Vietnamese robusta.
For Tu, his parents finally came — and he’s planning further shops, wanting to create a workforce that loves coffee as much as he does.
“I want to build the mindset that this is a serious career,” he said.
Source: AFP