Hillcrest Farmer’s Market Favorite Saigon Coffee Opens North Park Cafe | Eater San Diego

"Opening Saturday, July 8 on the corner of 30th Street and Lincoln Avenue in North Park, this new cafe will spotlight Vietnamese coffee brewed according to traditional methods. Founder Tu Duong, who moved to San Diego in 2010 and started replicating the old-fashioned Vietnamese iced coffee her mother made, launched Saigon Coffee as a stall at the Hillcrest Farmers Market in 2012 and has become a popular vendor at several local markets; she’ll continue at Hillcrest on Sundays and Poway on Saturdays while focusing on the North Park storefront. Operated with her brother Vinh, the cafe brews through a classic phin filter — described as a cross between a French press and a pour-over that produces bold, concentrated coffee — and will scale the technique in a glassed-in brewing room housing up to 20 phin filters about 50 times bigger than the standard size, with slow-brew batches taking about four hours. For now the menu is all about coffee: a condensed milk–sweetened signature Original Saigon Coffee, a coconut-milk blend, and a Hanoi-style egg coffee made with whisked pasteurized egg yolks, with possible future additions of Vietnamese street food like coconut and pandan waffles." - Candice Woo