TOKIDOKI (NOMAD)

Cà phê cam. Orange coffee. A newer addition to Saigon’s coffee scene, trendy in the last few years, though it’s still less common than salt coffee or coconut coffee.

The drink is straightforward: strong Vietnamese drip coffee (cà phê phin) combined with fresh orange juice and usually a splash of sweetened condensed milk or simple syrup, served over ice.

The flavor is divisive, to say the least. The bright acidity of fresh orange cuts through the bitter dark roast and the condensed milk rounds it all out. At its best it tastes like a coffee cocktail without the alcohol. At its worst it tastes like someone ruined a perfectly good coffee with juice. That’s kind of my take on it. Orange juice with a splash of coffee. Refreshing, but I’m not interested in having another one. Not when red stools still exist on the streets.
It originated in the trendier third-wave cafes in Saigon and Hanoi over the past few years. You won’t find it at the old-school sidewalk stalls run by grandmothers. Which I will be returning to pronto.

This week began with sunrise.
There’s a certain kind of light in Saigon in the early morning — soft, warm, and already alive with movement. The streets are never empty, just quieter, as if the city is stretching before fully waking. I found myself sitting at a street coffee stand, watching a small group of men gather in what felt like ritual. They invited me to sit with them, but I declined because they were smoking.

At first, the smoke bothered me.
Cigarettes lit one after another, wafting towards me, mixing with the sweet sensation of my coffee. For a moment, I felt like I had to get my coffee to go. But then came the realization: this wasn’t just habit.

It was ritual.
Coffee and cigarettes.
A daily rhythm. Their culture.
A kind of quiet companionship. I’m a guest.

I returned to a small hem in my neighborhood, where I had invited myself to join two men for a beer earlier in the week, because I always see them sitting in front of this restaurant — I had been walking longer than expected, searching for a cà phê sữa đá, when I came across them sitting there casually yet again, drinking cà phê đen đá.
I asked, in my still-developing Vietnamese, if they had what I was looking for.
“Yes.”
A simple answer. A gesture to sit.
So I did.
And then… I waited.
Longer than you would ever expect to wait for an iced coffee. Long enough to begin questioning whether I had misunderstood. Long enough to realize something important: this wasn’t really a coffee shop.

Eventually, one of the men walked off.
Then he returned, carrying a box of condensed milk.
What followed was something improvised, almost playful — a makeshift coffee, assembled not from a menu, but from intention.
He handed it to me, and I drank it slowly.
Not because I had to wait so long, but because it felt like the right thing to do.
When I finished, I paid him. He gave me my change, nodded, and without ceremony, got on his motorbike and rode off — as if the entire exchange had simply been a small, natural part of his day. That’s one of the things about the Vietnamese. I invited myself to have a beer with them previously, and now we have an unspoken bond that will last the tenure of my stay.

That’s what this week in coffee taught me.
That coffee here isn’t always about the drink. It’s about the space it creates. The pauses it allows. The small, human exchanges that happen around it.
Sometimes it’s ritual — shared between people who have been sitting in the same spot for years.
Sometimes it’s improvisation — a coffee made just because you asked for one.

This coffee lady was very impressed with my Vietnamese, and even after I paid, she kept filling up my glass with tea, until I finally had to say, “I really must be going now…”
Sometimes it’s the slow realization that you are no longer just observing these moments, but quietly becoming part of them.
In Saigon, coffee doesn’t always come from a menu.
Sometimes, it comes from a gesture.
A nod.
A willingness to sit and wait.
And that, more than anything, is what makes it worth drinking.

Accompanied by a teapot on this morning.

The always attentive Ca Phe Lady. Bringing my Ca Phe Sua Da to join my tea, my notebook where I record these moments, and my iPad which carries my books that I read whilst I linger…

Another Coconut Coffee. This one is from Cong Ca Phe. It’s good, yes, but the best one is still from Baka Coffee, which I had on my birthday.

Coconut Coffee at Cong Ca Phe on Ton That Tung Street.

I was sitting at Cộng Cà Phê, nursing a coconut coffee through the morning heat, when a woman came by selling lottery tickets. She was working the Vietnamese customers, and I said hi when she passed, because she sat with me on my very first Day 1 of coffee at the church on Ton That Tung. Nothing. Not a glance, not a pause. My existence didn’t register at all.

And I just sat there with it. The coffee was still good—creamy, sweet, that slight coconut edge that makes Vietnamese coffee feel like a treat rather than a caffeine delivery system. And chilled. But I was elsewhere, turning this thing over in my head. The asymmetry of it. How I had remembered that moment, this woman, that particular morning in March, and she didn’t. I was just another foreigner in a city full of them, another non-sale, another face that didn’t make the cut for memory.

It got me thinking about detachment. Real detachment, not the Instagram kind. The understanding that most of what you feel is yours alone. The encounters you treasure, the connections you think you made—often they’re just you, performing significance for an audience that isn’t watching. She had a living to make. I had a coffee and too much time to think.

That’s the thing about traveling alone. You become hyper-aware of your own narrative, the story you’re telling yourself about yourself, while everyone around you is just… living. Working. Getting through the day. You’re the protagonist of a movie no one else is watching.
I finished the coffee. Walked out into the noise of the street. The lesson, if there was one, was already absorbed: let people be free of the weight of your memory. Carry what you need to carry. Don’t demand reciprocity from strangers.