Vietnam’s coffee entrepreneurs open stylish cafes to serve Generation Z

Ditching a lucrative career in finance, Vu Dinh Tu opened a coffee shop without telling his parents and joined a wave of young Vietnamese entrepreneurs using espressos to challenge family expectations around work.

Traditionally taken black, sometimes with condensed milk, or even egg, coffee has long been an integral part of Vietnamese culture. But starting a cafe is not a career that many of Vietnam’s growing group of ambitious middle-class parents would choose for their children.

“At first my family didn’t know much about it,” 32-year-old Tu says. “Gradually they found out – and they weren’t very supportive.”

Tu’s parents repeatedly tried to convince him to stay in his well-paid investment banking job. But he persevered and opened four branches of Refined over four years in Hanoi. Each is packed from morning till night with coffee lovers enjoying coffee made with Vietnamese robusta beans – in surroundings more like a cocktail bar than a cafe.

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His parents “saw the hard work involved in running a business – handling everything from finances to staffing, and they didn’t want me to struggle”, explains Tu.