Nha Trang /Food and drink/Living here
Coffee in Nha Trang is a morning habit before it is a drink: a phin filter on a plastic stool, before work, for 15,000 to 25,000 VND at a pavement stall in 2026. The chains and the garden cafes charge more and open later. This is how to order, what each tier costs, and the four cafes in my rotation.
Coffee in Nha Trang is a morning habit before it is a drink. It is taken sitting down, slowly, on a plastic stool at the pavement or under a tree in a garden, usually before work and often before eight. A filter coffee at a pavement stall was 15,000 to 25,000 VND in 2026 and a cà phê sữa đá about 25,000; the garden cafes charge 20,000 to 50,000 and the specialty places up to 89,000 for their most elaborate drinks.
Two years in, I have a rotation of four cafes and one stall, and a way of ordering that gets me what I want most of the time. This is how the morning works here, and where I would sit if I had three of them to spend.
The phin is the small metal drip filter that sits on top of the glass. It takes several minutes to run through and you are meant to wait for it; that wait is most of the point. The vocabulary is six words. Cà phê đen is black, cà phê sữa is with condensed milk, đá means iced and nóng means hot. Cà phê sữa đá, iced with condensed milk, is the default order in the south and the one to say if you say nothing else. My Vietnamese is not good, and nobody has ever misunderstood it.
A glass of iced tea arrives with the coffee without being asked for. It is free and gets refilled. You pay when you leave, not when the drink comes, and nobody will hurry you out for sitting an hour over one glass. That is the other half of the habit: the coffee is the excuse, the sitting is the activity.
The research behind the Nha Trang Guide food pages sorts the city’s coffee into three tiers, and after two years I would not change the sorting.
| Tier | Where | Published price, 2026 | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pavement stall | Any inland corner with plastic stools | Filter coffee 15,000 to 25,000 VND; cà phê sữa đá about 25,000 | From first light |
| Chain | Cộng Cà Phê, 97 Nguyễn Thiện Thuật; Phê La, 24 Trần Phú | Not published; between the other two tiers | 07:30 to 23:00; 07:00 to 22:45 |
| Garden and specialty | An Cafe, 40 Lê Đại Hành; Iced Coffee, 146 Hùng Vương | 20,000 to 50,000 VND; 20,000 to 89,000 VND | 07:00 to 22:00; 06:30 to 22:30 |
For a reference point, Numbeo’s average for a cappuccino in the city in August 2026 was 43,333 VND. The gap between the stall and the cappuccino is the gap between how residents drink coffee and how visitors do, and it is not a quality gap. The stall coffee is usually the stronger one.
Not on Trần Phú. The beach road is the tourist-facing strip, and the food locals queue for is inland and north; the coffee follows the food. The stall I use is on a corner a few streets back from the sea, and I am not going to name it, partly because it has no name and partly because it is somebody’s front room with four stools outside. Every neighbourhood has one. Find yours by walking inland at seven and looking for the stools with older men on them reading their phones.
The timing is fixed by the beach and the markets. The exercise groups swim on the city beach from about 05:30 to 08:00, and Xóm Mới market is busiest from 05:00 to 08:00. Coffee comes after both. By nine the stools are empty and the same people are at work. I have written up that whole hour in Nha Trang at five in the morning, and the markets themselves in the Nha Trang markets I actually use.
Iced Coffee, 146 Hùng Vương. A small local chain rather than a stall, open 06:30 to 22:30, which makes it the earliest proper espresso in the western quarter. It sells traceable single-origin Vietnamese beans and an iced drink it calls the Iccino, with pastries, and drinks run 20,000 to 89,000 VND. There are branches at 144 Nguyễn Thiện Thuật, at 38 Trần Phú on the ground floor of the Havana, and at 19 Đường A1. I use it when I have come straight from the beach and want something quicker than a phin.
An Cafe, 40 Lê Đại Hành. A garden with a wooden house in it, seating about 160 people away from the beach strip, open 07:00 to 22:00 with the last seating at 21:30. Drip coffee and Vietnamese desserts, 20,000 to 50,000 VND. This is where I take a laptop on a weekday morning when working from home has become working from the same four walls.
Cộng Cà Phê, 97 Nguyễn Thiện Thuật. The chain with the subsidy-era interiors, open 07:30 to 23:00, with a second Nha Trang branch at 23 Nguyễn Chánh. The order here is cà phê cốt dừa, the coconut coffee, which is a blended, sweet, cold thing that has very little to do with the phin. I take visitors here once. It is a dessert, and a good one.
Phê La, 24 Trần Phú. The exception to my rule about the beach road, open 07:00 to 22:45, with a terrace facing the sea and a menu built around specialty oolong milk tea as much as coffee. It is where I go the one morning a month I want to look at the water while drinking rather than swimming in it.
Hùng Vương and Nguyễn Thiện Thuật are the streets of what the city calls phố Tây or phố Nga, the western quarter behind the beach, so two of the four are surrounded by Russian and Korean signage. It does not change the coffee.
On a weekday I am up before six, on the sand or not depending on the flag, and on a stool by seven with a cà phê sữa đá and the free tea. Half an hour, sometimes an hour. Work starts at nine because the people I work with are in other time zones, which is the whole reason the morning is mine. On a weekend the stall becomes An Cafe and the half hour becomes two. The rain in October and November changes none of this; the stools move under the awning and the coffee carries on.
The thing a visitor gains from copying this for one morning is the city itself. Between six and eight Nha Trang belongs to the people who live in it, and the coffee is where you sit to watch. It is also, if you are thinking about staying, the cheapest habit you will form here: I go into what the rest of a month costs in the cost of living in Nha Trang, and into the habits that make it a home rather than a stopover in making a life in Nha Trang.
Field note: the older regulars at my stall order by lifting a finger and nodding at their glass. I tried it once, got a cà phê sữa đá, and have not said the words since.
In 2026 a filter coffee at a pavement stall is 15,000 to 25,000 VND and a ca phe sua da about 25,000. Garden cafes such as An Cafe run 20,000 to 50,000 VND and the specialty Iced Coffee chain 20,000 to 89,000. Numbeo's August 2026 cappuccino average was 43,333 VND.
For the drink itself, a phin filter at a pavement stall away from the beach road. For a cafe, Iced Coffee at 146 Hung Vuong for single-origin beans, An Cafe at 40 Le Dai Hanh for the garden, and Cong Ca Phe at 97 Nguyen Thien Thuat for coconut coffee.
Early. Iced Coffee on Hung Vuong opens at 06:30, An Cafe and Phe La at 07:00, Cong Ca Phe at 07:30, and the pavement stalls are pouring before any of them. Most cafes stay open until 22:00 to 23:00.
Ca phe den is black, ca phe sua has condensed milk, da means iced and nong means hot. Ca phe sua da is the standard order. The glass of iced tea that arrives with it is free, and you pay when you leave, not when it comes.
Once, as a dessert rather than a coffee. Cong Ca Phe at 97 Nguyen Thien Thuat is the usual place for it, open 07:30 to 23:00. It is a blended, sweet, cold drink that has very little to do with the phin filter.
Read on 15 September 2026. Prices, hours and rules change; these are the pages the figures came from.
At five in the morning Nha Trang is the town its residents use: exercise groups in the sea by half past five, fishing boats landing under the Xom Bong bridge below the Po Nagar towers, Dam and Xom Moi markets trading from five, and the first coffee on the pavement. By nine it has handed itself back to the hotels. Set one alarm.
A cafe, a beach hour and a gym gave me a week here before I knew anyone, and the people came out of the routine. The foreign communities are large and mostly passing through: South Korea sent 616,000 visitors in the first quarter of 2026 and Russia nearly 620,000 in the first half, but nobody has published a count of the residents.
I swim on the central city beach in front of a rescue tower, early in the morning, from February to August, and only under a green flag. I do not swim at the north end near Hon Chong, at the harbour end by Cau Da, or from November to January, when the winter swell runs and the rip currents form.
October and November are the wettest months of the year: roughly half the annual rain falls in those eight weeks and the typhoon window runs to about 10 December. Come if you want cheap rooms and a working city with the mud baths, the cafes and the citadel; do not come for the beach or the boats.
