1. Hanoi Street coffee
While young people prefer the noisy and busy atmosphere of modern and luxury or pavement cafes, old ones love cafes which have been around for a long time, located in old streets or inside deep alleys. Office workers like cafes with romantic and quiet styles like those in Phố Cổ (Old Quarter).
Though you won’t find a Starbucks in Hanoi, there is no shortage of a variety in Hà Nội’s cafes. Besides the standard four coffee drinks — hot black coffee, iced-black coffee, hot coffee with milk and iced coffee with milk — available in any cafe, there is hot coffee with a raw egg beaten into it, with or without milk, which tastes a bit like flavored meringue. With sugar, it is practically a meal.
Taking over a legacy from bygone years with the involvement of an irresistible French factor, the Vietnamese have embraced café culture in a great way. There are so many famous coffee shops in Hà Nội, like Năng Café (No. 6 Hàng Bạc Street), Nhân (No. 39D1 Hàng Hành ), Quất (Quán Thánh), Quỳnh (Bát Đàn) and Lâm (Nos. 60 and 91 Nguyễn Hữu Huân) and so on.
For many people, a cup of coffee is simply a crutch for the sleep-deprived but Vietnamese coffee, on the other hand, can teach you the feeling of linger.
Hanoi’s coffee culture calls on coffee addicts from every corner of the globe!
2. Biahơi – Bottoms up!
In Hanoi, you can find the simplest corner bar on Earth with tiny plastic stools on the sidewalk, small tables on the ground, laden with glasses of beer. Come to Vietnam to try Vietnamese beer and see how men drink beer with favorite refrain such as “yo yo yo”, “drain your glass of every drop”…
Bia hoi (draught beer) is one of things you should not be missed when you come to Hanoi. There are plenty of local as well as imported beer brands in Hanoi such as 333, Carlsberg, Hanoi, Tiger, Saigon, LaRue, San Miguel and Heineken. However, bia hoi is the most popular beverage throughout the country and the cheapest beer in the world (5,000 VND for a glass only). Of course, it is an unpasteurized beer with low alcohol content (approx. 3%) that is sold in mugs in simple street restaurants.
Vietnamese tend to drink beer in large quantities. It is not uncommon to see a group of four or five men with 24 empty bottles on their table at lunchtime. Humorously speaking, as well as their drinking capacity increase, their business prospects seem to be bright. Despite all the changes in Vietnam’s beer industry, the most popular drinking establishment remains the traditional bia hoi. These ubiquitous establishments are always on the sidewalk where customers sometimes will raise their voices over the din of motorbike traffic or the clouds of diesel belch over the plastic tables from a passing bus.
The customers have no need for the sleek furniture and fancy entertainment that they might find in a brew pub. Nobody minds if the tables are dirty and the sidewalk is littered with paper napkins. This is simply the place where everyone comes to unwind – from truck drivers returning from a stressful shift to college professors who use bia hoi as a sort of street-side salon.
Now, wandering on a certain street in Ha Noi, you can accidentally hear the sentence “Bottoms up!” and question yourself “what is the only thing that will make these men forget their wives and their homes?” The answer is “beer only”!
