Morning Coffee: Tao Dan Park
I knew I would like Ho Chi Minh City the minute I had my first cup of coffee. Any city where it’s normal to take a leisurely mid-morning coffee break is fine by me — especially when those coffee breaks take place with birdcages and newspapers in a public park.
Last year, I wrote about the coffee-on-demand service available in one Saigon park, but the city’s parks are home to more conventional cafés, too. One year ago, on a sunny morning in early February, I found myself sitting with two friends in Tao Dan Park, on the west side of the city’s colonial centre, where a concrete terrace is filled with low plastic chairs. We sat and ordered two iced milk coffees and one hot black coffee from a woman who wandered over from a small outdoor kitchen nearby. Around us, middle-aged and elderly men read newspapers or chatted as they slowly nursed their coffee. Some birdcages sat prominently in the middle of the terrace, reminding me of the old Hong Kong cafés I’d seen in films, where men bring their birds out for milk tea.
There’s something plainly civilized about park cafés — they help make public space comfortable, complete and less banal. So I was happy to hear yesterday that in Montreal, the Plateau Mont-Royal’s new Projet Montréal administration wants to introduce a café to Lafontaine Park. As long as the café is affordable and its revenues used to maintain the park around it, I can’t see many downsides to this idea. Maybe Montreal will end up with a bit of Tao Dan on the Plateau.
Tags: Cafés, Ho Chi Minh City, Montreal, Morning Coffee, Parks, Plateau Mont-Royal, Saigon, Vietnam
Mary Soderstrom says:
How nice to see that one positive aspect of the Vietnameses’s long history with France has lingered–coffee on the terrace. As it happens I just finished reading Marguerite Duras’s Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall.) It was published in 1951 and is full of the ugliness of the colonial experience, but the coffee and terraces are there too.
Definitely worth reading.
Mary
May 15th, 2010 at 12:36 pm