Càphin Doubles Down on Minneapolis with Downtown Cafe
Three years ago, Savio and Jenny Nguyen were perfecting Vietnamese coffee recipes on their home espresso machine. Now they’re opening their second cafe in downtown Minneapolis, spreading phin-filtered coffee through a city more accustomed to Scandinavian light roasts.
Càphin’s new location in the Warehouse District sits at 430 North 1st Avenue, at the base of the historic Kickernick Building. The soft opening follows two years of rapid growth—from a farmers market trailer in 2022, to a Linden Hills storefront in February 2024, to this downtown expansion.
From Heritage to Business
The Nguyens are second-generation Vietnamese-Americans who grew up watching their parents brew coffee the way they had back home. Before launching Càphin, the couple traveled to northern and central Vietnam, studying regional specialty coffee traditions and the slow-drip culture that defines Vietnamese cafes.
“A way to honor our roots, tell the story of our heritage,” they describe the cafe’s mission. Their tagline—“Brewed with Tradition, Served with Love”—echoes the care their parents brought to the ritual.
What they found in Vietnam was a coffee culture built around patience. The phin filter, a simple stainless steel gravity dripper, takes four to five minutes to produce a single cup. There’s no rushing it. Hot water seeps through dark-roasted grounds, emerging thick, intense, and syrupy—closer to espresso in strength than anything from a drip machine.
The Menu: Beyond Sweetened Condensed Milk
Càphin uses 100% Vietnamese-grown beans—both robusta and arabica—in all their drinks. The robusta, typically from Vietnam’s Central Highlands, brings the high-caffeine punch and bitter backbone that defines the country’s coffee identity.
The signature offerings include:
Cà Phê Sữa Đá – The ubiquitous iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk that appears on every Vietnamese cafe menu. At Càphin, it’s brewed through a phin, not from concentrate.
Cà Phê Muối – Salted coffee elevated with a salted caramel cold foam cap. The salt cuts the sweetness and amplifies the coffee’s bolder notes.
Cà Phê Trứng – Egg coffee, a Hanoi specialty where a beaten egg yolk and condensed milk foam sits atop strong black coffee. It drinks somewhere between a latte and a dessert.
The downtown location will focus primarily on morning service, with pastries rather than a full food program.
Vietnamese Coffee’s Midwest Moment
When French colonists brought coffee cultivation to Vietnam in the mid-1800s, they also introduced the gravity drip method. Vietnamese craftspeople adapted French “biggin” percolators into the compact phin, using accessible materials like aluminum and stainless steel. By the early 20th century, these simple brewers had become standard equipment in homes and street-side cafes across the country.
Vietnamese coffee culture differs from Western specialty coffee in one fundamental way: it celebrates robusta. While American third-wave roasters dismissed robusta as cheap, harsh, and suitable only for instant coffee, Vietnamese coffee makers developed roasting and brewing techniques specifically designed to showcase the bean’s intensity. Dark roasts, slow extraction, and rich additions like condensed milk or egg foam transform robusta’s perceived weaknesses into deliberate strengths.
Càphin isn’t the first Vietnamese coffee shop in the Twin Cities, but the Nguyens’ expansion signals growing appetite for the category. The Warehouse District location puts phin-brewed coffee in front of downtown office workers and visitors who might never venture to Linden Hills.
Why This Matters
American specialty coffee has spent decades defining quality through a narrow lens: light roasts, single origins, delicate flavor notes, washed processing. Vietnamese coffee operates by entirely different rules—dark and bitter, robusta not arabica, sweetened rather than black, slow-dripped rather than pour-over.
For coffee drinkers conditioned to think of “good coffee” as bright and fruity, places like Càphin offer a course correction. There’s more than one way to make coffee well, and the traditions Jenny and Savio Nguyen grew up with deserve a seat at the table.
Càphin’s Warehouse District location is at 430 N 1st Ave #140, Minneapolis. The original Linden Hills cafe remains open at 4503 France Ave S.