Yes that’s a clickbait headline, but I wouldn’t go vintage Buzzfeed on you if I wasn’t being earnest. So let me tell you about this coffee I had the other night.
I’m eating out at a fancy Vietnamese joint in downtown DC. Since I don’t drink alcohol, I have to scan the back of the menu to find the spiritual kiddie table that is the zero-proof section. The restaurant has only three options, one of which is “salted Vietnamese coffee.” Because this drink is still in the early stages of the cultural appropriation process, I have never heard of it before. The menu offers no details past the name of the drink, and I’m trying to avoid a visit to Dr. Rick by being the dad who asks the server 50 questions before ordering anything. So I don’t know if this coffee will be iced or hot. Because it’s listed under “soft drinks,” I don’t know if it’ll be carbonated or not. I don’t know how salty it will be.
But I’ve never had it before, and this dinner was on Defector’s expense account. So I said fuck it and ordered me a salted Vietnamese coffee.
It will not be the last one I order.
The coffee arrives on the rocks in a tall glass. The coffee is pitch black save for a creamy, Guinness-style head on top. The topper is made from a blend of frothed cream, condensed milk, and a generous pinch of salt. I take one sip and immediately say, “Holy shit, this is one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.” The sweet cream provides a flawless counterbalance to the strong coffee lying underneath, and the added salt opens up the flavors rather than overpowers them. I finish my coffee in a hurry, and nearly order another before remembering that it’s too late in the evening for my system to handle this much caffeine. I’ll have to wait another day to try this coffee, also known as “salted cream coffee,” again.
I don’t want to wait much longer, and I may not have to. Because salted cream coffee isn’t exclusive to just one American restaurant. There wasn’t some goateed barista mixologist in the kitchen of Moon Rabbit who devised this recipe in a stoner epiphany. This is a drink that has far deeper, more interesting origins that that. Those origins don’t go back far, but they do go back to the proper source: According to Maggie Wong at CNN, it was invented by two cafe owners in the city of Hue back in 2010. The drink caught on in Vietnam after the pandemic, so much so that Starbucks locations in that country have begun to sell their own version of it.
I doubt it’ll be much longer before Starbucks locations here follow suit. Because once you’ve tasted this drink, you want more of it. I ate a lot of incredible food over the course of my fancy dinner the other night, but it was the coffee that stayed with me. I already lament how the bastardization industrial complex in America will fuck up the salted Vietnamese coffee recipe. At the same time, I’d fucking kill to walk into a Peet’s one day and see this on the menu. It’s that good. Everyone in Hue knows it, and soon you will too.
