HANOI – Drinks at the coffee shop on Van Mieu street have no price, customers can pay as much as they want.
On the ancient and busy Van Mieu street, a black-tone coffee shop with a not-so-prominent appearance regularly welcomes guests in and out. People who come here for the first time will be surprised that the drinks at the bar are not priced. Guests pay themselves into the box with the words “Box according to the mood”. This is the heart of Vu Dinh Tu, born in 1991, a person who has gone from a love of drinking to a love of making coffee.
Tu’s journey to open a cafe was a series of fates and coincidences. At the beginning of 2020, he is still someone who knows nothing about baristas, just loves to drink. The Covid-19 pandemic forced Tu’s habit of drinking coffee and coffee shops to change. Craving for coffee but couldn’t go to the shop, he tried to make it himself at home. “Normally, when I’m drinking well at the bar, I’m bored when I go home to make my own. So, I got excited and decided to go deeper to make a cup of coffee closest to the outside.” Since then, he began to learn what coffee beans, how to make…
The most important thing that Tu shares about how to make a delicious and satisfying cup of coffee is choosing beans. It takes him a long time to buy quality coffee beans because where there are good beans, the performance is not stable, or there are good beans but not to the taste. The coffee beans chosen by Tu to make the main drink at the shop are robusta. Instead of using arabica beans for foreign coffees, he decided to “dig” deeply, exploiting the seeds that are said to be the strength of Vietnamese coffee by approaching advanced brewing techniques. best in the world to apply to Vietnamese coffee beans.
Thanks to his love for coffee, Tu won the third prize in the “Vietnam Open Roastmasters Championship” coffee roasting contest in 2021. After that, Refined was born, which translates into Vietnamese as “refined”. According to Tu, that means that the spirit of making coffee is not difficult, but it needs to be done correctly and elaborated step by step, eliminating small things that are not good.
Tu applies the mood-based payment method. As a business person, Tu is also worried if there is no profit, but he really doesn’t care too much about how much customers pay for him. “Initially, I planned to open a small place for friends to come and experience the coffee that I made myself. Everyone tried it, offered to send money, but I don’t know-how. Before, the shop had a filter, everyone. After drinking, you can put as much money into it as you like. So far, a customer made a larger box, I wrote on it “the box to pay depending on the mood”, Tu shared.
Tu said, customers are only surprised when they first come to the shop, then everyone becomes a habit, telling each other before leaving. The fact that he did not set a specific price for the cups of coffee he made helped him feel comfortable and light-headed. According to him, this helps him reduce the work of detailed billing at the end of the session, controlling invoices. Tu feels that his creativity will be affected if he spends all his time on such meticulous work. At the end of each session, Tu and his partner simply calculate how much the total income is, minus the capital to see if it makes a profit. If there were profits, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Tu said this idea he came up with by himself and did not refer to it from anywhere. To him, business is like gambling. In the past 8 months, the amount of money collected is still enough to maintain the shop. He said, when I work wholeheartedly, customers will appreciate the effort, support, and want the shop to maintain. The shop is small, can accommodate 8 guests, many guests have to say “Oh there is only one bar” and move to another bar. According to Tu, his way of doing business filters out a lot of customers, helping him to have many local people, some of whom come almost every day. The customer base is also very diverse, ranging from 15-year-olds to 80-year-olds.
Initially, the shop did not have a menu, serving only two types of Vietnamese coffee, black and brown (coffee with milk). After that, Tu said that “making the menu because of introducing too much is also a bit tiring”. A few customers who came to the shop liked to drink fresh milk, condensed milk, and cream, so they asked Tu to do it. Tuesday’s coffee consists of coffee and fresh milk, Van Mieu coffee with fat cream and condensed milk was born. Currently, Tu still serves other types of coffee outside the menu if requested by guests. In addition, Tu also often explains to guests the difference between arabica and robusta beans, showing them directly when these two nuts are not roasted.
Duong Vu Khanh Ly, 23 years old, the second time he came to the restaurant, he was surprised when Tu could remember the face of the customer and also the position where the customer used to sit. “In my opinion, selling coffee at a price depending on the mood is not a bet, but a smart business method of the owner. This is a way to help the shop make a difference in the existing coffee shop market. tends to be saturated in form. I usually pay according to the mood, but at least 30,000 VND because I really appreciate the delicious cup of coffee that I can drink.”
The shop is open from 8am to 6pm daily. Tu decided not to open in the evening because drinking coffee at night is easy to lose sleep. In addition, he will be tired after working continuously for 8 hours and chatting with customers, which may affect the quality of coffee if he continues to darken. The most crowded hours of the shop are 10am – 2pm and 4pm – 6pm. The drawback of the restaurant is that there is not much parking. However, the restaurant can only accommodate 8 guests, so Tu is not too worried about this issue. Follow vnexpress