You’ll wait at least an hour in line on Valencia Street to try San Francisco’s buzziest drinks. Nâu Coffee, inside Bernal Cutlery, is serving Saigon-style coffee you can’t get anywhere else in the city — Instagram-friendly concoctions that are tiger-orange and topped with enough salted cream to guide spirits back to the grave.
Owners Hân Tran and Kiên Nguyen met while studying at Cal Poly, but they both grew up in the same district in Saigon. For the last three years they’d drive hours around the Bay to get a taste of the cafe experience back home. At Nâu, they tap into that energy with Vietnamese music, introducing Vietnamese expats to each other, and showcasing Vietnamese products and flavors to San Franciscans. They debuted their pop-up to a small group in Alameda in July, and in early September, it appeared at Valencia Street’s super buzzy Studio Aurora. At the end of that month, they took over Bernal Cutlery.
If they stick around, their project will be San Francisco’s first specialty Vietnamese cafe. And it’s already a hit.
“We have sold out at each pop-up,” Tran says. “We feel there’s a real demand in the city.”
The menu is simple and tight. Pandan, salted egg, Saigon, and still-popular egg coffees. They serve their own blend, almost unheard of for coffee pop-ups starting out, with beans they buy from roasters in the Vietnamese city of Buôn Ma Thuột. At the pop-up, the tireless baristas open and close huge jars of their medley. The team won’t reveal which roasters they buy from to create their blend. About a day before each pop-up, they alchemize the blends at home. Nguyen says the central coastal city is wildly popular for coffee farm tourism. Tran points out all the beans they use are robusta, the most common species in Vietnam that’s known as a resilient, higher caffeine plant. To pair, Aurora’s owner Dario Barbone made a pho focaccia sandwich — a pho-caccia.
Vietnamese cafes are nothing new in San Francisco. Haight Street has relative newcomer Angiday and the Tenderloin’s longtime Mộng Thu Cafe both serve dizzyingly sweet Vietnamese iced coffees. But specialty Vietnamese cafes is its own recent phenomenon, and one that’s skipped San Francisco.
There’s been an explosion of specialty shops in Portland thanks to Kimberly Dam (Portland Cà Phê, now breakfast heavy-hitter Mémoire Cà Phê), Seattle’s booming scene (Aroom and Phê, among others). New York is home to darling cafe and roaster Sey, a staple offering at multiroasters the country over, and the East Village’s second wave-coded Le Phin.
In San Jose both the restaurant Hết Sẩy with its paired Vietnamese chocolates and Kasama Cà Phê, among a handful of other pop-ups and boba-esque shops including Lacàphê, have capitalized on the trend. But in San Francisco, only short-lived Open Book Project has offered anything like Nâu. And it’s really just been a matter of time: Imbibe called out the trend way back in 2021.
Tran and Nguyen do plan to open a brick-and-mortar in the city down the road. For now, both work in consulting; neither. has worked at cafes before. They say they became “cafe addicts” when they moved here, driving two hours to San Jose to get a taste of the Vietnamese coffee they left at home.
Even outside of specialty coffee, Vietnamese cafe culture is skyrocketing across the world. The country’s most successful cafe company Trung Nguyên Legend Cafe opened its third-ever location in the United States in Portland to huge success after Southern California and Texas. Nothing of that new school on that scale is in San Francisco. Compared to the old-school Vietnamese coffee shops in San Francisco, “we try to focus more on coffee and community-building,” Tran says. “La Ca Phe in San Jose [is like what we do]. But we shouldn’t have to drive hours.”
Nâu Coffee will pop up again at On Waverly (162 Waverly Place) from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, November 22.