Đan Nguyen took over an unassuming Plateau corner, the same spot on Rue Roy Est where a long-abandoned restaurant stood for years next to a barbershop and a laundromat. She transformed it into Phin Café, brightening the space with wood and green accents, and a menu offering directly sourced Vietnamese coffee.

Customers flocked to get a taste of her egg coffee: an egg white beaten into condensed milk poured over Vietnamese coffee, dripped the traditional way using a phin filter.

On another street corner between Old Montreal and Griffintown, Sara Sabry of Café 2^nd Gen says “this was supposed to be our quiet, soft launch but it hasn’t been quiet at all.”

Café 2^nd Gen on William Street, offering international specialty flavours over a base of Vietnamese coffee, is a love letter to fusion: Their menu has influences from all around the world, showcases a second-generation identity that fuses with the cultural influences around it, yet still stays true to itself.

“One of our goals is to go back to basics. If we look at a lot of cultures, coffee and tea are really at the base of it.” Sara says. “It’s something that brings people together.”

Bê, a first-generation Montrealer with Vietnamese heritage, opened her café, Bêden Càphê, to preserve her culture and community, and transmit it to her kids. The café is in the same spot where her parents owned the restaurant in which she grew up, and is an ode to that heritage, as well as to her own blend of identity. She now offers uniquely first-generation fusion flavours, nostalgic Vietnamese dishes reinvented through a Montreal lens, like bahn-mi sandwiches inside Saint-Viateur bagels.

Their cafés are part of a new crop of cafés from this past summer that have been redefining what ‘specialty’ means, blending tradition and fusion, identity and community. As the scene in Montreal reaches maturity—sleek, minimalist spaces that celebrate single origins and manual brewing methods—Montrealers seem to crave something different, and cafés are responding with a fusion of cultures like ube matchas, Vietnamese coffee, and egg lattes.

The traditions of generation zero

“I think this was what we needed in the neighbourhood,” Đan explains. “Most of my clients are regulars, they come twice a day sometimes.”

Montrealers were ready when Đan Nguyen took over a long-abandoned corner in Plateau with Phin Café. Some order their regular lattes and espressos, but some want to try something new, a different taste, maybe a little egg in their coffee.

Đan immigrated to Canada from Vietnam nine years ago, and has been dreaming up Phin Café step by step since she arrived. When she came to Montreal, she brought her culture and love for coffee with her. Her recipes come from her family, her neighbours, where she’s from, and where she gets her beans. She brews them using traditional Vietnamese methods.

At Phin Café, she is unapologetic about wanting to preserve traditions and adapt to the palette of a new public. She wants to keep it traditional, but with slick, thoughtful twists, staying authentic to her roots while making herself at home in the Plateau.

“People will ask for the traditional Vietnamese coffees hot to go. I tell them it’s not possible,” she says. “The coffee drips from the filter, it will be cold by the time you take it to go. It’s not what we do in Vietnam.”

A first-gen preservation of history

Bê never planned to own a restaurant. Her parents, who arrived in Canada as refugees in the 1970s, had opened a restaurant called Chez Mai Lan. She remembers doing homework and even napping in its booths when it was her parents’ restaurant.

As a first-generation immigrant, she wanted a different path. Feeling the pressure to excel, she went on to study business management, but she found herself back in that same restaurant where she had grown up years later.

When she took over the location and was doing renovations, just before the booths were set to be dismantled for a stage, she decided to keep them. They represented the closeness of families who once gathered there.

That instinct to preserve the past runs through the café: Traditional Vietnamese elements and remnants of her parents’ restaurant sit alongside touches that are distinctly her own, from her late sister’s piano and a thrifted couch to a wall built from books she found on Marketplace. And while it’s rooted in nostalgia and the preservation of memory, Bêden Càphê is also shaped by her experience as a Montreal-born Vietnamese woman.

“I don’t want to forget my history, and I want to transmit it to my kids,” she says. “The coffee shop is just a way of doing that.”

She recreates flavours from her childhood—like the peppered pork báhn patê sô puff pastry, a beloved breakfast she had as a kid when classmates around her ate PB&J sandwiches instead. Many customers who once came when it was her parents’ restaurant now return to a space that feels both familiar and renewed. Others have come seeking the same comforts of Bê’s childhood: “Kim Thúy actually came here (for the báhn patê sô) several times,” she adds with pride.

Other dishes are inspired by the city her parents adopted. “What is more Montreal than a Saint-Viateur bagel?” she says. “I take the bagel and put bánh mì ingredients inside.” Like those bánh mì bagels, the café’s concept is distinctly first-generation: a dedication to preserving heritage while giving it a Montreal twist.

“With my parents no longer here, what will remain are our origins and the recipes they taught me. I want to preserve my culture, so it doesn’t disappear—for Montrealers, but also for myself.”

Photograph: @cafe2ndgen / @with.muses / @wtvr.wonder / Instagram

The second generation: Fusion becomes the story

The second generation is where the identities brew longer and become something different entirely. Sara Sabry, her husband Marwan Aboughris, and their friend Benjamin (Benji) Mao, wanted to open an ice cream shop with specialty flavours like knafeh and ube at their pop-up in Brossard’s DIX30. When the logistics of their stall made ice cream impossible, they pivoted to coffee.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” Sara laughs.

Café 2^nd Gen was born, a child of many cultures. They start with a Vietnamese coffee base and mix it with flavours from around the world: crème brûlée from France, hojicha from Japan, knafeh from the Middle East, yuenyeung from Hong Kong, and ube from Philippines for matcha.

Their drinks might have international identities, but they represent a very real experience of growing up right here. “Fusion sometimes gets a bad rep, but it’s really what we do,” Benji says.

The coffee is fusion, much like the experience of being a child of immigrants in Montreal—surrounded by different cultures, always a little in-between. For Sara, it’s an Egyptian background, and for Benji it’s Vietnamese, but always shaped by the experience of having grown up in this city.

“It’s the reality of being a third culture kid,” Sara says. “We’re a mix of both cultures. Depending on the circumstances, I’m something, and another time maybe I’m something else.”

Sara wants to create a community for the people who feel like they don’t always belong. “I’m hoping people can feel at home. Even something as small as saying their name the way they pronounce it when I take their order can make a difference,” she says. “It’s just small things like that. And being able to celebrate that.”

So the question of “Where are you really from?” at Café 2^nd Gen gets flipped on its head, and the answer is simple: Here.

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The traditions of generation zero

A first-gen preservation of history

The second generation: Fusion becomes the story

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Olive Zeynep Kartal

Three cafés, three generations, and one new wave of Vietnamese coffee