Dubai's JLT Now Serves Coffee Made With a Raw Egg Yolk

Ca Phin opened in Jumeirah Lakes Towers this January, a Vietnamese café built entirely on Robusta, the bean speciality coffee spent a century writing off as cheap and bitter.

It has four co-founders, all of them colleagues at the same advertising agency. Tobbi Vu, Co-Founder and Managing Director, and Teena Mathew, Co-Founder and General Manager, are the two who left design careers to run the café day to day.

"Ca Phin started as a side hustle," Mathew says, "a lunch-break conversation between four colleagues at an advertising agency who wanted to build something of our own beyond 9 to 5."

They started as a B2B business selling green beans online. The home pop-ups changed things, evenings spent, as Mathew describes them, "experimenting with traditional and trending Vietnamese coffee styles to introduce people to the culture and flavours behind the beans."

One pop-up became a series. Somewhere in there, Vu and Mathew decided they were in hospitality, not coffee supply. Half a year later they signed for the JLT space.

Neither had run a hospitality business before. "Everything was a challenge, and in many ways, it still is," Vu tells SceneNowUAE. They still run the place daily between them, one behind the counter while the other keeps the rest of it upright.

Coffee arrived in Vietnam with French missionaries in the 1850s, and the plant that took to its soil best was Robusta, the coarser cousin of Arabica. Vietnam is now the world's second-largest coffee exporter and its leading grower of Robusta.

"Robusta is often overlooked, but we see it as the underdog of the coffee world," Vu says.

It carries more caffeine than Arabica, and when it's grown and roasted with care, produces a body and flavour that has little to do with the flat, bitter stuff that earned it its reputation. It's also more resistant to the climate stress making Arabica harder to grow reliably every year.

Three of the four founders are Asian, and Vu is Vietnamese herself. "We felt there was an opportunity to represent Asian coffee culture in a way that wasn't really being done here," she says.

Her family's roots in Vietnam meant the team could go further than placing an order with a supplier. They travelled there, met the farmers in person, and built relationships with them.

The beans arrive in Dubai green and get roasted locally, to blends the team developed themselves. Traditional Vietnamese coffee runs darker and stronger than most people here are used to, closer to an espresso shot than a flat white.

The menu offers Vietnamese Latte, Cà Phê Sữa, hot or iced, ordinary blend or single origin. There's the Sa Pa Latte, whipped and named for Vietnam's mountain coffee region, and a Coconut Coffee built on espresso and coconut milk rather than the condensed-milk route most people expect.

A whole page is given over to bottled coffee to take away, labelled Cà Phê Việt Đóng Chai, with homemade yogurt on the side.

"We've created something that feels distinctly Vietnamese," Mathew says, "but isn't something you've likely tasted before."

"For a first visit, we'd recommend our Salted Coffee, our best-selling coffee, paired with the Beef Bánh Mì, our food bestseller," Mathew says. "But if you want one drink that truly represents what Ca Phin is about, it has to be our Egg Coffee, one of Vietnam's most iconic and traditional coffee creations."

The Egg Coffee, cà phê trứng, was invented in a Hanoi hotel bar in 1946 by a bartender who ran out of milk mid-shift and whisked a raw egg yolk into hot coffee until it sat on top in a pale, foamed cap. It's still served through the phin, a metal filter that drips coffee slowly into the cup.

"We serve it the traditional way because it's a big part of Vietnamese coffee culture," Vu says. "We want people to experience coffee the way it's meant to be enjoyed in Vietnam."

The room carries the same intent. The door handle is worked from coffee-tree bark, the coasters are cut from spent coffee grounds, and the furniture and some of the brewing tools were shipped over from Vietnam.

In one corner, a framed print shows a Saigon delivery motorbike buried under a leaning tower of cardboard boxes. On another wall, a companion print renders the JLT tower cluster outside in the same folk style.

"There are lots of little details and stories hidden throughout," Mathew says, "and we love when people take the time to notice them." One regular, who's lived in the area for 14 years, has taken to calling the place a third space.

A recent embroidery afternoon came with materials, guidance from a local instructor and a complimentary drink in the ticket price. September alone brings a matcha workshop, a Vietnamese coffee workshop, a game night and a Moon Festival weekend.

Dubai's speciality coffee scene, in the founders' own words, is already crowded and fairly ruthless. Who actually walks through Ca Phin's door has been harder to predict: expats working nearby, locals curious about something unfamiliar, and a loyal contingent from Vietnam's community in the UAE who turn up on weekends for something that tastes like home.

Next is new locations in the next six to 12 months and an expanded food menu.

"We'd love to play a small part in making people more curious about where their coffee comes from and the different cultures behind it," they both explain. "For us, it's about putting Vietnamese coffee and Robusta on the map. Ultimately, we want Ca Phin to be known as a gateway to Vietnamese coffee culture."