FIFA World Cup 2026 Fan Festival attendees walk past construction on Hutchins street as they make their way to watch Mexico take on South Africa in Houston, Thursday, June 11, 2026.
Jacob Lujan/Houston Chronicle
Owners Vanarin Kuch and Andreas Hager at Koffeteria
Annie Mulligan/Contributor
Koffeteria’s menu features the kind of wild, discordant-sounding combinations that reflect our all mixed-up city. At the East Downtown bakery, you can get mango sticky rice danishes, potato samosa croissants, beef pho kolaches, and Cambodian iced coffee.
But when Houston’s FIFA Fan Festival opened June 11 near Shell Energy Stadium, Koffeteria became a different kind of Houston story.
In a video posted to Instagram that day, Koffeteria showed an empty sidewalk outside the shop and asked where the promised FIFA rush was. Regulars had trouble accessing the bakery, employees had no assigned parking, and food trucks had been placed in front of brick-and-mortar businesses, siphoning away customers. That post drew nearly 12,000 likes.
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Andreas Hager and Chef Vanarin Kuch, the married co-owners of Koffeteria, sat down with the Houston Chronicle opinion section’s summer intern Lajward Zahra to discuss everything going on.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lajward: What happened when the FIFA Fan Fest setup began around Koffeteria?
Andreas: The preparations have been going on for months. Starting Jan. 1, it’s been really difficult. Each week has been more difficult to get into the neighborhood. They started the actual FIFA setup the first week of May.
Vanarin: They didn’t even tell us they were doing it. We literally drove up on a Saturday, and Saturdays and Sundays are our busiest days. Four streets were completely shut off.
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People need to realize we are also going to be enduring a month of breakdown as well. What everyone perceives as a month of FIFA, for us, has already been about four months. And it’ll end up being six to seven months total.
Lajward: What did that do to business?
Vanarin: It made operating two to three times harder. It’s not just about foot traffic. Parking is already an issue in East Downtown, and we had been asking for three months: Where are we going to park?
They told us we weren’t allowed to park in front of our shop because that was for emergency egress. Then they turned around and put food trucks there.
I literally had a person quit because of the parking situation. It was so hectic. We almost didn’t get a dairy delivery because they couldn’t pull up to deliver.
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If we didn’t make a stink with the post on the first day of FIFA, we would have never gotten parking. We’re the only company involved that has designated parking. We got two little spots that FIFA is personally paying for, but I had to ridicule them on social media and get on six to eight different news networks to have something happen.
Andreas: For the past few months, we had to work hard to prepare for the demand that was projected. I hired about five to six seasonal employees, and I’ve had to fire them all. We scaled up and then had to scale right back down.
We ordered extra food. We changed some suppliers. We bought ice cream from a local vendor, decorated cookies from another local vendor, and croissants from a friend who owns another bakery. We thought the workload was going to be overbearing. It turned out to be the biggest letdown ever.
Lajward: How did that make you feel?
Vanarin: Disheartened. A little brokenhearted. I’m not going to lie, last Thursday I cried for hours just feeling like Houston was trying to make me quit. Like Houston was trying to tell me that I don’t belong here.
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As a brown gay man, I moved to New York City because, at the time, gay marriage was not protected federally. I felt then like the only way I could feel whole was to live in New York City.
I’m getting those feelings again. I’m not sure Houston really appreciates us.
Lajward: What was the response from the city after the Instagram posts?
Andreas: One of the councilmen reached out to me directly, and I believe that is the reason we ended up with two parking spots. The city itself has been very quiet.
Vanarin: What I was asking for was responsibility from the city. If you’re going to displace our business so that the street that is our storefront is completely inaccessible to the public, you need to buy us out to cover the money we lose while we’re inaccessible. That is what’s reasonable.
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When Southern Smoke did an event in East Downtown, they used our area, but they paid us a buyout because they knew we were going to lose business. The city spent $50 million doing Fan Fest. You’re telling me you couldn’t pay us a daily payout or a monthly payout?
Lajward: You used the word “gentrification” on Instagram. How do these Fan Fest problems connect to the larger changes you’re seeing in EaDo?
Vanarin: I barely call it EaDo or East Downtown, to be quite honest. I still call it Old Chinatown because for me, in my mind, it will always be Old Chinatown.
My parents were married in my uncle’s restaurant, The Silver House, on Chartres Street. We had a seafood and donut spot, Navigation Seafood and Donut, right on Canal and Franklin. My grandmother was in the same refugee camp as the woman who owns Kim Hung, the grocery store across the street from us.
I have a lot of ties to this area. I grew up here. I played Street Fighter in the little Chinese barbecue spot that was in the middle of the grocery store. I used to eat dim sum down here all the time.
So it’s sad for me to watch what has happened to the neighborhood. It was sad to see Midtown, the old Vietnamtown, turn into Midtown. Once you started losing street signs written in Vietnamese, you knew things were changing. And now, with Old Chinatown, I feel like we’re seeing that same kind of loss again.
Lajward: Final question, and I’m sorry I have to ask: Are you considering leaving Old Chinatown?
Vanarin: Girl, I’ve got five years left on this lease. So I will be dealing with a bunch of stuff, and I’m not looking forward to it. We will be chatting again, I promise.