Hippo Café: Egg Coffee with a View over Prague's Sapa
Rooftop terraces in Prague usually look out on the Castle or the river. One of my favorites looks out over the tin roofs of wholesale warehouses instead: you sit above the bustle of Sapa, the Vietnamese market, pallets and loaded trolleys down below, and on the table a glass with a layer of thick egg-yolk foam floating on black coffee.
Hippo Café is a rooftop café with its own roastery, right inside the Sapa grounds in Prague's Libuš, and the egg coffee here is whipped the Hanoi way. It's named after the hippopotamus; why that particular animal, I never found out. It may well be the only non-Vietnamese thing about the place.
Cà phê trứng: The Coffee a Bartender Invented Out of Necessity
Cà phê trứng literally means egg coffee, and the recipe sounds like a joke until the glass is in front of you: raw yolks are whisked with condensed milk for several minutes until they turn into a thick, sweet cream, and that cream is spooned over a small, strong coffee brewed in a metal phin filter. The whites are discarded; only the yolks go in. It was the invention of Nguyễn Văn Giảng, a bartender at Hanoi's Metropole hotel: fresh milk was scarce in post-war Hanoi, eggs were not, so he used them in place of milk foam. In 1946 he opened his own café, Giảng, and his family still runs it today.
The foam is a course in its own right. You eat egg coffee with a spoon from the top down - the sweet cream first, then the bitter coffee underneath - and you're not meant to stir the whole glass: that cools the drink and the foam starts to taste of what it's actually made of. In Hanoi the hot version comes in a cup sitting in a bowl of hot water to keep the cream warm; for summer there's an iced one too. A recipe born of shortage has since become an export - Vietnamese cafés in Tokyo and San Francisco whip up that yolk foam today. And so do cafés in Czechia.
A Café with Its Own Roastery above the Market
Hippo Café is a family business and it roasts the coffee under that foam in-house, right there in the market grounds. The staff speak fluent Czech and will happily show you how the egg coffee is made - whipping the cream alone takes several minutes. And if you'd rather have your coffee without eggs, you can get the classic phin filter brew here as well - which I cover separately.
Nobody comes to Sapa just for the coffee, so save Hippo Café for last: soup downstairs at one of the local restaurants, then groceries you won't find anywhere else, and only then up to the terrace, loaded down with bags. Egg coffee is dessert rather than fuel - save it for the end of the visit.
The Terrace above Sapa
This is exactly where I drank my egg coffee - on the Hippo Café terrace, glass on a metal tray, the whole of Sapa spread out in front of me. The foam is a thick, sweet cream, closer to yolk custard than to milk froth, and the strong, bitter coffee underneath keeps it in check; the first spoonfuls, dusted with cocoa, taste like a pastry shop, and the coffee only speaks up further down. I paid 120 CZK (4.80 EUR). There's no rushing this drink - and the terrace above Sapa is exactly the place where that doesn't matter.
Hippo Café
