I've had coffee in cities known for it — Melbourne's laneway cafes, Thailand's beloved cafe scene. Both are incredible, and I still think about them. But nothing has stuck with me quite like Vietnamese coffee culture, and it's why I opened Yanna's in San Enrique, Iloilo.
Melbourne's coffee culture is precise — third-wave, single-origin, competition-grade baristas. Thailand's is warm and social, cafes built for lingering. Vietnam's is different. It's slower, more deliberate. You order a phin, and you wait. The coffee drips one drop at a time, and that patience is the point — it's part of the ritual, not something to rush past.
What really won me over, though, is how creative Vietnamese coffee culture is. Take coconut coffee — someone decided robusta and coconut cream belonged together, and they were right. Or Hue-style salt coffee, where a pinch of salt cuts through the bitterness and makes the whole cup rounder. These aren't gimmicks. They're generations of people treating coffee as something worth experimenting with, not just caffeine to get through the morning.
That's the spirit I wanted to bring to San Enrique — real phin-brewed coffee, made the traditional way, with the same inventive drinks that make Vietnamese coffee culture so special. Not a copy of Melbourne, not a copy of Thailand — just an honest cup of Vietnamese coffee, brewed slow, in a small town in Iloilo.
Come sit with a phin and see what I mean.
Ready to taste it yourself? We're open daily, 8AM–8PM, in San Enrique, Iloilo.
Visit UsWhat I got wrong at first
When I started brewing at home I treated the phin like a toy. I'd pack the coffee in tight, screw the press down hard, pour boiling water straight from the kettle, and wonder why the result tasted like a burnt ashtray. I blamed the beans. I bought different beans. Same ashtray.
The problem was me. Boiling water is 100°C and it scorches robusta on contact. Packing the bed tight strangles the drip. I was trying to make the phin go faster because I'd been trained by espresso to think speed was competence. It isn't. The phin is slow on purpose, and every shortcut I took was me arguing with a device that had already been figured out decades before I picked it up.
Once I stopped fighting it — lower water, looser press, let it drip and walk away — it started tasting like what I'd had in Vietnam. That took me embarrassingly long.
Why we don't have an espresso machine
People ask, and it's a fair question. A machine would let us serve faster and put a cappuccino on the board for the customers who want one.
We decided against it, and I'll be straight that it costs us sales. Someone walks in wanting a latte, we don't have one, they leave. That happens.
But the moment there's a machine on the counter, the phin becomes the slow option — the thing you do when you have time. And then one busy morning someone pulls a shot instead because there's a queue, and adds condensed milk, and calls it Vietnamese coffee. I've seen that happen at other places. It's not a conspiracy, it's just what pressure does. I'd rather not build the pressure in.
The drink I was most nervous about
Egg coffee. I was sure nobody in San Enrique would order it. Egg, in coffee, in a province where coffee mostly means 3-in-1 sachets.
I nearly left it off the menu. What changed my mind was thinking about how I'd first reacted to it — I didn't want it either, and then I had one, and it was the best thing I drank that trip. So we put it on, priced it at ₱185, and braced for it to sit there.
It sells. Not the most, but steadily, and almost always to someone who's just watched the person next to them order it. It's a drink that spreads sideways through a room. I'm glad I didn't cut it.
What I'd tell someone who's never had it
Don't start with the egg coffee. Start with the salted cream — it's the friendliest cup on the board and it'll tell you whether you like robusta. If you do, come back for the egg.
And don't drink it standing up. The whole point of a phin is that it takes twelve minutes, which is the phin's way of telling you to sit down.