Egg coffee on an Old Quarter balconyEgg coffee on an Old Quarter balcony

Up to the third floorUp to the third floor

Dang Thu Ngan’s café is on the third floor of a tube house on Hang Bac street. The way up is a twisting wooden staircase with tall steps and a handrail worn shiny. The ground floor is another family’s silver shop; the first floor is where they live. The café has twelve seats, half of them out on a balcony over the tiled roofs and power lines of the Old Quarter.

Ms Ngan is fifty-seven and opened the café in 2009, after retiring from teaching chemistry at a high school. She says the habit of weighing things never left her: each egg coffee uses exactly one yolk, twelve grams of sugar and a spoonful of condensed milk, and gets four minutes of whisking.

Four minutes and a whiskFour minutes and a whisk

She doesn’t use an electric mixer. She uses a stainless balloon whisk and a small porcelain bowl tilted on her knee. After about two minutes the mixture goes from deep yellow to pale; after four it is thick enough to stand the whisk in. Only then does she pour the drip coffee into the glass and spoon the egg cream over it.

The glass sits in a bowl of hot water so the cream doesn’t cool before you finish. You eat it rather than drink it: regulars spoon off the cream first, then stir the coffee underneath¹. A cup costs 40,000 dong. The iced version, set in a bowl of ice, is also 40,000.

Afternoons on the balconyAfternoons on the balcony

The balcony is busiest from three to five, while the sun is still on the roofs opposite. Most customers are Hanoians who have been coming for years, a few students with textbooks, and foreigners who found the address in an old article Ms Ngan has never read.

I stayed until she started washing the glasses. The street below lit up and the motorbikes got louder. She brought out a cup of hot tea, no charge, and said anyone still sitting there at that hour gets tea. It is the only rule of the house not written on the chalkboard by the counter.