As we walked around on the main street of Sapa, Vietnam, we saw many businesses established in the downtown area that were clearly targeted to capitalize on the increased interets for tourism in the area. There were many restaurants, hotels, and souvenir or backpacking supplies stores around.

Kristi and I started doing a new routine to begin our days in Vietnam during this trip, getting Vietnamese coffee as part of breakfast to jump start the day. Our hotel, Sapa Rooms Hotel, had a restaurant with a really good menu of both authentic Vietnamese and western dishes to choose from, and breakfast there was included in our stay. However, on the second morning of our stay, the coffee machine at the hotel broke, so we couldn’t get our coffee fix. Since our morning now opened up because our scheduled trek was canceled, we decided to explore the town and find a place to get the coffee. We thought surely we could find places that serve Vietnamese coffee.

As we reached the end of the commercial area on the main street of Sapa, we found a small restaurant/cafe aptly named the French Bakery that seemed to serve French-inspired pastries and drinks. The place looked nice and they had a nice display of some of the items they had on the menu, but it was empty when we got there. Nevertheless we thought we could still chek it out and hang out for some time in the morning there.

The Vietnamese lady who ran the restaurant seated us at one of the booths in the small dining area. We ordered the standard hot Vietnamese coffee served with condensed milk, and also an order of tiramisu to share. Later on some more customers came to the restaurant and it became more lively. Both the tiramisu and the coffee were good and definitely hit the spot especially on a cold and wet day outside.

The photo below was taken in the dining room of the restaurant, before more customers came. You could see it being pretty small but cozy.