Hanoi Coffe Culture
VietNamNet Bridge – “There is nowhere like Hanoi for coffee connoisseurs to enjoy a wide variety of cafés”, a comment of a newspaper about the city where coffee becomes a traditional culture. Every morning, in the summer or winter, you can see people of the city with a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
1. Typical Hanoi café:
Like so much else in Vietnam, coffee has a bittersweet history. French colonist from Indochina brought to Vietnam's first coffee plantations, exploiting the local peasants as cheap labor in the late 19th century. After that, the cafés that lined Hanoi's boulevards were mainly the preserved of the city's wealthy foreign residents.
In many years under the French rule, the cafés served only for the foreigners and the Vietnamese riches because it was a luxury good at that time. It became a figure of French domination and the rich. Coffee, however, gradually popularized to the intelligentsia and artists, who were influenced by Western culture. A cup of coffee became an affordable luxury. Since 1930s, its popularity increased in Hanoi's Old Quarter streets and changed the ways enjoying coffee into more locally.
Unlike the rest of Asia, a tea-drinking continent, Vietnam has a cafe culture like Italy and France, especially in Hanoi. The city takes coffee seriously. Along with the colonial architecture and the fresh baguettes on street corners, coffee is one of most pleasant legacies from its years of French rule. However, unlike Western coffee culture, Hanoians make various ways to enjoy coffee. In Hanoi, there are also have street cafes like the La Terrasse du Metropole (opened in the early of 20th century) which are very expensive European-style pavement cafes, being decorated with flamboyant umbrellas and cushioned chairs onto the sidewalks. The typical Hanoi cafe is a tiny space, typically established by family-run. It is often a storefront with a curtain separating it from the street or in...
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