New branch in Fremont brings accessibility to traditional Vietnamese Coffee
On a busy weekend, in between running errands, we found ourselves in Union City and craving coffee. To be honest, we hadn’t had our daily coffee fix yet. First shop that came to mind was Hippies Brew over at The Union Flats. Even though that sounded great, we wanted to try something new. So we scouted around for a coffee spot we haven’t visited yet. After a couple minutes of searching, Phin Cafe popped up on our radar. When we saw Phin Cafe, we hadn’t made the association that this is the San Jose’s Phin Cafe new branch! But we thought, hey let’s give it a go! Not only we get our coffee fix, but what excited us the most was Vietnamese coffee.
Vietnamese Coffee Quick
Phin Cafe serves Vietnamese coffee in 2 ways: the quick option, what they call “House Special”, and the more traditional option, “The Phin Coffee”. While both offers similar offerings in toppings, the actual phin coffee can only be ordered for in cafe. There’s no takeout option for phin coffee. We find it a bit odd that the phin coffee (served hot) can only be ordered in store while the “House Special” (served cold) is take out only. The only 2 reasons we can think of is that they only have a limited amount of phins; so allowing in-cafe only limits the usage of the phins. The second reason being that phin drips take a bit of time to complete – in-cafe strategy limits customer complaints in reducing overall wait time.
Since the “House Special” offers takeout and there was quite a bit of a crowd there, we decided to go with that option. We ordered an egg house special and an pandan house special coffee. Since tradition phin coffee uses an egg as its form of creamer, we definitely want to give that a try. It took longer to get our orders than we thought. Arriving with maybe 5 orders in front of us. It took about 15 minutes to get our coffee. Since all “House Special”s’ shots are pulled from an espresso machine, we were pretty confused on the wait time. We were also not sure if “House Specials” are pulled with Vietnamese coffee from their espresso machines.
More of a Coffee Desserts than a Coffee
The actual coffee tasted great. They are essentially desserts in a cup. The egg coffee has a velvety smooth texture. The pandan one has a good balance of pandan and coffee flavor. A “love letter” cookie roll came with the pandan coffee half inserted into the coffee as garnish which is a bit strange. But overall we liked the coffee.
If it wasn’t for their takeouts only being cold, we’d go back more often. But for now, we’d probably go back sometime to try out their actual phin coffee in the cafe. Ranch 99 is in the same plaza, so after coffee, you can pick up some Asian groceries! Phin Cafe also have a San Jose location; that’s an option if you’re in that area too.
Phin Cafe
https://www.phincafe.us/
34460 Fremont Blvd Suite D, Fremont, CA 94555