Vietnam’s young coffee entrepreneurs brew up a revolution with flavour

Many open trendy coffee shops in Vietnam, challenging traditional career paths.

Ditching 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 espressos to challenge family expectations around work.

Traditionally taken black, sometimes with condensed milk, or even egg, coffee has long been an integral part of Vietnamese culture.

But starting a cafe is not a career that many of Vietnam’s growing group of ambitious middle-class parents would choose for their children. “At first my family did not know much about it,” Mr. Tu, 32, said.

“Gradually they found out — and they were not very supportive.”

Mr. Tu’s parents repeatedly tried to convince him to stay in his well-paid investment banking job. But he persevered and opened four branches of his shop, Refined, over four years in Hanoi. Each is packed from morning till night with coffee lovers enjoying Vietnamese robusta beans — in surroundings more like a cocktail bar than a cafe. His parents “saw the hard work involved in running a business — handling everything from finances to staffing, and they did not want me to struggle”, explained Mr. Tu.

Vietnam was desperately poor until the early 2000s, pulling itself up with a boom in manufacturing, but many parents want to see their children climb the social ladder by moving into steady, lucrative professions such as medicine and law.

Coffee, on the other hand, has become a byword for creativity and self-expression. In Vietnam, “cafes have become a way to break norms 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, an associate professor at California State University.