Vietnamese Drip Coffee

I went out for lunch with my mom today at Pho88 on Spadina. Before we ordered real food, I asked for two drip coffees, one hot and one cold, because i know they take forever to drip. The hot one comes in a small cappuccino coffee cup with a bit of condensed/evaporated milk at the bottom and the cold one is the same but with a lot more milk and comes in a glass. What happens with the cold is that they give you a bucket of ice to make the coffee cold.

This isn't my first time drinking Viet coffee but every time I order it, I'm always a little dumbfounded. No one has ever told me whether the ice goes into the coffee after it's done dripping or before. The problem with the drip coffee is that by the time the coffee is done dripping, it gets cold (which is what happened with the hot one I ordered).

Last time I ordered the cold, I added the ice in after, but it took FOREVER for the ice to actually melt so this time i added the ice in while it was dripping. The problem now is that even though the ice was melting right away, the condensed milk was having trouble dissolving.

So the iced coffee ended up being half dissolved and the hot coffee ended up cold and so i added ice to the luke warm coffee to make it slightly better. The only reason why I still order it every time is because it tastes so damn good.

I seriously think Pho88 should consider doing what they do in Taiwan. In coffee shops in taiwan that offer this type of drip coffee, they have these HUGE dripping machines that like sits in the centre of the store, and you can watch it drip while you sit there. The mechanism actually traps heat though, so when you ordered the coffee, they give it to you pre-dripped and the waiting time is completely eliminated. If you want it iced, they have ways to ice it for you.

There are a lot of things North Americans can learn from Asians...