Signal & Sidewalk

Dispatches from the road, the work, and the long way round

The Coffee Beat

The best coffee in the highlands is served in a plastic chair

Three years of drinking cà phê sữa đá at roadside stalls has taught me more about Vietnamese hospitality than any tasting flight ever did — and considerably more about robusta.

By Mai Trần | Pleiku | 7 min read

Photograph — drop your image here

Morning trade. A stall on the Pleiku road sells roughly 200 glasses before noon and closes when the ice runs out.

The stall has no name. It has four plastic chairs, one of them broken, a phin filter collection that would embarrass a specialty roaster, and a woman named Hồng who has been making the same drink since 1998. There is no menu because there is no choice. You get robusta, condensed milk, and more ice than seems structurally advisable.

I have spent a fair amount of money in third-wave cafés in three countries. I have watched baristas weigh beans to the tenth of a gram. None of it prepared me for the specific, tar-black, sledgehammer sweetness of what Hồng hands over in a glass still warm from the rinse bucket.

The received wisdom is that Vietnamese robusta is the cheap stuff — the filler in your supermarket blend, the bean you grow when you cannot grow arabica. That wisdom is roughly a decade out of date, and the people who are proving it wrong are not, for the most part, opening cafés.

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On the Road

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The route from Kon Tum to Măng Đen is technically a road. Technically.

Mai Trần | 4 Aug | 9 min

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The Foundation

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Every line item, including the two we got wrong and had to pay for twice.

Mai Trần | 28 Jul | 6 min

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Kit

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Rain here does not fall so much as arrive. It comes sideways for ninety minutes at four in the afternoon, and then the sun returns and everything you own begins to steam. The gear that survives is rarely the gear that was marketed to survive.

People

The grandmother who feeds every driver on the Pleiku road

Bà Sáu has run the same bún stall for thirty-one years and has never once raised the price for a stranger.

Mai Trần | 12 Jul | 8 min

Long-haul drivers have a mental map of the country built entirely out of places like this one. Ask any of them where to stop between Pleiku and Quy Nhơn and you will get the same answer, given with the confidence of a man reciting his own address.

How We Work

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It cost us about a third of our revenue. It was still the right call.

Mai Trần | 30 Jun | 4 min

A group of twenty does not visit a village. It occupies one. There is a threshold somewhere around fourteen or fifteen people where you stop being guests and start being an event, and everything honest about the day disappears behind the logistics of feeding you.

The Coffee Beat

A farmer explained robusta to me for three hours and I understood maybe half

Anh Dũng farms 1.8 hectares outside Buôn Ma Thuột and has strong opinions about everyone in the supply chain above him.

Mai Trần | 18 Jun | 11 min

He talks about cherries the way a vintner talks about grapes, which would be unremarkable except that almost nobody buying his crop is willing to pay a price that reflects it. The gap between what he knows and what the market rewards is the whole story of Vietnamese coffee.

The Foundation

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Mai Trần | 9 Jun | 7 min

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Food

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Mai Trần | 2 Jun | 5 min

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