Two Ways of Green, Upstairs on Nguyễn Du

by Wei Lin · June 2026

The first thing you notice at SOBO is the poodle. A single-line drawing, round glasses, pink — on the cups, the aprons, the sign. The second thing you notice is the seat: a long window bar on the second floor, facing the tamarind canopy over Nguyễn Du street. I sat there with an iced bạc xỉu and watched the green move in the wind, and I thought about how tea and coffee have been having this conversation for centuries.

SOBO's menu says it outright: "Matcha, two ways: Japanese & Vietnamese." That stopped me. In Hangzhou we talk about tea the way people here talk about coffee — as heritage, as identity, as something you don't mess with lightly. But SOBO is messing with it lightly, and that's the point. The layered iced matcha arrives in a clear cup, vivid green over milk, the pink poodle looking up at you. Beside it, the egg coffee — the Hanoi heritage recipe — served in sage-green and dusty-pink ceramic, dusted with cocoa. "Rewriting the story of Vietnamese egg coffee," they say. I don't know about rewriting. I'd say translating.

The room is all morning light. Pale stone counters, matte ceramic, bamboo on the patio outside — the "green corner," they call it, stone paving and sage chairs and whitewashed walls, cool shade in the middle of District 1. No neon, no dark mode. The brand lives between 9am and 7pm, in sunshine. And the dogs — dogs are allowed inside and outside, genuinely, not as a slogan. The shop poodle was there in a pink outfit when I visited, being photographed by everyone.

What I keep thinking about is the layering. Matcha over milk. Egg over coffee. Japanese over Vietnamese.

The cup is the argument: that these things don't compete, they stack.

You can taste the centuries in it if you pay attention — the tea routes that carried the first green powder across Asia, the coffee that came later by ship, the egg coffee born in wartime Hanoi out of scarcity and ingenuity. All of it, layered, in a clear cup with a poodle on it.

And then there's the human layer. The owner's own TikTok — "the day off of the SOBO shop owner" — small, family-run, women-owned, hands-on. This isn't a brand built in a boardroom; it's built by someone who is there, pouring, every day. The barista who made my matcha wore the poodle-logo apron and poured with the care of someone whose name is on the door. In Hangzhou, the old tea houses work the same way — the owner's hands are in everything. You can taste the difference between a cup made by an owner and a cup made by an employee. It's not technique. It's attention.

I finished my matcha and stayed for the egg coffee. The window bar, the tamarind trees, the afternoon light. Some places you visit. This one you sit with.

On my way out I passed the green corner — the stone-paved patio, whitewashed walls, sage chairs, bamboo — and understood the arrival sequence they'd designed: green hush first, then upstairs to the canopy. Cool shade in the middle of District 1, then the window bar above the trees. It's a small journey, from ground to canopy, from shade to light. The old tea gardens worked the same way — you moved through them, and each turn changed the air. SOBO does it in two floors. The poodle watched me go, pink and round and unbothered. I thought about the bio line: matcha and true happiness. It's a big claim for a small shop. Sitting in that window bar, watching the tamarind leaves move, it didn't feel big at all. It felt exactly right.