cafe | setiawanphoto

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.

When we were in Hanoi, Vietnam, our plan for spending the afternoon watching the Water Puppet show had to be changed because the tickets for the day’s performances were already sold out. So we found ourselves with several hours of open time, as we were not supposed to leave for the next leg of our trip until that evening.

We went back to our hotel to ask the staff there for suggestions on good places to go to hang out for few hours. We saw many coffee shops in the city as we walked around the Old Quarter area, so we asked the lady at the front desk for her recommendation on a good place to go that was within walking distance from the hotel. She mentioned that there was a good cafe near a particular intersection, though she didn’t remember the name of the place or the exact address. She pointed the area on the map, and off we went walking towards the area to find the cafe.

We reached the area on the map, but we couldn’t find the cafe as she described. So we decided to continue walking around the area, and finally when we saw a cafe, we decided to just go there to rest and hang out for a little bit.

The cafe looked like a typical one found in Hanoi. It’s a little dark inside, with seating areas set up like a lounge. There was food on the menu as well, though it looked like most people went there to have drinks (coffee, cocktails). While resting and waiting for our drinks, Kristi and I looked at our Blackberry phones and saw that we could get some open wi-fi connection there (from a nearby hotel). So we were able to check emails there while enjoying our drinks. We started ordering coffee, but then we decided to also get some mixed fruit drinks.

We would’ve stayed there for a little longer had we not been bothered by one thing.. it’s not a smoke-free environment, and many Vietnamese smoked cigarettes. We kind of got sick from the second-hand smoking after a while, so we decided to finish our drinks, paid up, and continued our walking tour.

The photo below was taken at the cafe. Here is Kristi checking emails on her Blackberry. You can see the drinks we had there.