Ăn uống

A coffee shop with a working room that never closes — and does not charge for the seat. In a town where almost everything goes dark by nine, and the one proper coworking space shuts at midnight and costs 120,000₫ a day, that is a rare thing: you can turn up at three in the morning with a laptop, when the client in Europe is mid-working-day.

Bữa sáng kiểu Đà Lạt. Xíu mại trong nước dùng nóng kèm bánh mì để chấm — là một tô chứ không phải ổ kẹp, và cả thành phố ăn món này lúc 7 giờ sáng.

Lẩu gà lá é — loại rau rừng thơm chỉ mọc ở vùng này. Quán gốc, và là món đúng bài cho buổi tối lạnh Đà Lạt.

Nem nướng tự cuốn với bánh tráng, rau sống và chuối chát. Ở đây nhận thẻ — hiếm với quán ăn đường phố tầm giá này.

Bánh căn đổ khuôn đất kèm trứng cút. Địa chỉ kinh điển, và lối vào qua sân cũng là một phần trải nghiệm.

Bánh tráng nướng với trứng, tôm khô và hành lá — món “pizza Việt Nam” sinh ra ở đây; ăn đứng là ngon nhất.

Những bậc thềm nhìn xuống thung lũng cà phê — đúng khung hình mà người ta đến Đà Lạt để chụp. Vào cửa miễn phí, bạn trả tiền qua ly nước.

Quán cà phê văn nghệ từ thập niên 1950, nội thất gần như còn nguyên. Nhà văn và nhạc sĩ đã ngồi trong những khoang ghế này suốt bảy mươi năm.

Billed as the first Korean grill in Da Lat, now with several branches. Gimbap and tteokbokki alongside the barbecue, right by the night market.

A multi-storey concrete labyrinth you crawl and climb through to reach the rooftop. Not really a bar, more a building you drink inside. Free to enter.

The place to go in Da Lat if you want coffee the European way: cappuccino and latte pulled on an espresso machine, not the phin drip with condensed milk that most cafes around here serve. There is no kitchen — the only food is cookies, four kinds in glass jars on the counter, and a small shortbread one comes with every cup.

A cafe in a glass pavilion in the middle of a green yard: a greenhouse frame, wooden tables, and nothing in the windows but trees and a wall under vines. The second room is wooden, with tubular leather armchairs and paper lamps shaped like fish. The yard itself is dressed as Japan — koinobori carp streamers over the roof, a concrete Totoro with a yellow umbrella, a Japanese bus-stop sign by the entrance.

A roastery cafe: an espresso machine and a pour-over station behind the bar, brewing posters on the wall, and a menu with a page of its own drinks — cold brews on local fruit and coffee with almond. Upstairs is a wooden room with tall windows into the greenery, bookshelves and soft benches: a place people sit in for hours, not a five-minute stop.

A cafe and bistro on a slope where the view belongs to the room rather than the terrace: upstairs the windows run the full height of the wall, with the roofs and hills behind them, fabric draped across the ceiling and tables lined up along the glass. The kitchen is European: breakfast and brunch until 4pm — a big English breakfast, shakshuka, eggs Benedict with salmon, ham and cheddar toasties. A separate page holds an entirely vegan menu that runs all day: bagels on their own buns with cashew cream cheese and carrot 'bacon', an English breakfast without a single animal product, a Buddha bowl.

An all-you-can-eat vegan buffet on the main colonial street. Da Lat's Buddhist food tradition is strong and the vegan scene here beats most Vietnamese cities.

Twenty-plus Da Lat vegetables in one buffet for the price of a coffee. Da Lat supplies most of Vietnam's temperate produce and this is the cheapest way to see why.

A private cook making European-style snacks and delivering them around town: chicken liver pâté, bacon and onion jam, salmon cured lightly or heavily, and focaccia both plain and with olives and rosemary. He bakes the bread himself and sells it on its own or in a set with the pâté or the jam. Delivery is included in the price, and if you do not like the food he promises your money back — few here offer that.

A two-floor restaurant where Vietnamese and European dishes share one menu: local food sits next to eggs benedict, thin-crust pizza and cheesecake. It is neither a local-food spot people visit for bánh căn nor a purely European cafe — it works for a group where some want rice and others want breakfast.

The place is built around one idea: your tea is warmed on charcoal at your own table. A grate is cut into a solid wood slab, coals glow underneath, a glass pot sits on top — the drink finishes in front of you and stays hot through the whole conversation, which in Da Lat damp matters more than tasting notes. The garden sits under a roof: tree ferns as tall as a person, a stream with wooden footbridges, gravel underfoot, a fire pit in the middle of the room and folding chairs around it. The roof is translucent with strips of cloth stretched over it, so the light stays daylight and the rain stays outside. Some tables are set at the edge of the slope, with a view over the valley and the built-up hill opposite.

Mở lâu năm và đúng chất Ý: pizza lò củi và ravioli nặn tay, không phải phiên bản Việt hoá.

A two-level hall with continuous glazing on a slope: the tables run along the windows and behind them lies the whole valley with pine hills and the town below. You come in through a stone gate with a wooden canopy and a path through the garden. Inside it is bright and roomy — pendant lamps, plants, deep sills, separate corners with armchairs by arched windows. They open at five in the morning, which almost nobody in town does, so you can meet the sunrise here with a coffee. The place is well known among bloggers, and at weekends you feel it.

A small bakery-cafe that bakes daily and sticks to its own short list rather than a menu that covers everything. The signatures are cinnamon rolls, tiramisu and its matcha version, cheese rolls and shio pan, the Japanese bun with butter inside. They brew coffee too, but the place is first of all about the baking: that is what people come for.

Breakfast that looks like breakfast at home — British, American and Mexican plates — in a French villa on the quiet ridge above the centre.

Món Âu và view núi trên đường lên đồi Robin. Người nước ngoài đến đây ngồi lâu với laptop: bàn có ổ cắm, mạng 35 Mbps.

Fully vegan hotpots and stir-fries, not a vegetarian menu with fish sauce hidden in it. Rare and worth knowing about.

Matcha here is not an add-on to the coffee, it is the whole point: the matcha list alone runs to eighteen drinks, from a plain latte to matcha with coconut water, cantaloupe juice, soda and yuzu. The powder comes in two grades — standard Vietnamese and a premium one for a surcharge — and the menu carries a chart of how they differ in colour, bitterness, astringency and umami. The building matches: a half-timbered front with a tiled roof and an arched entrance, dark beams and paper screens inside, a raised tatami platform with low tables and cushions, and along the wall a dry garden of white gravel, stepping stones and a bamboo screen. There are ordinary armchairs by the window too, if sitting on the floor is not for you.

The place Europeans end up at on the second morning: eggs any way you like, avocado toast, muesli and yoghurt, at local prices rather than tourist ones.

Phòng khách của người nước ngoài ở đây. Brunch kiểu Úc, burger và mì Ý; tầng ba là chỗ gần giống coworking nhất Đà Lạt.

The city seen from above: a rooftop over the tenth floor with the whole valley in front of you. Open from six in the morning, so the sunrise view costs the price of a coffee.

A bakery-cafe in a garden: through a wooden gate wrapped in greenery there is a yard, and at the back a room with a long display of pastry and desserts. Come for the cocoa and the sweet things rather than the coffee. Tea is brewed in pots for the table, so it also works for sitting out the rain in twos and fours.

Three floors of work seats plus separate rooms, and the seat itself is free — you pay only for what you order. The glazing is continuous, so every floor gets plenty of light: tables run along the windows, the upper floors look over tiled roofs and the town, the ground floor over the trees and the street. Sockets are well placed and there is one at every seat, so no cable across half the room. The coffee is roasted here and it is genuinely good: the roaster stands behind a glass wall in a room marked PHÒNG RANG, with scales and beans beside it. The separate rooms are the move when you need to shut the main room out.

European breakfast and its own pastries: eggs your way, pancakes, French toast, croissants. Italian and Vietnamese coffee, ice cream.

Xưởng rang kiêm quán lớn nhất thành phố, khu rang nhìn thấy ngay từ bàn. Đà Lạt và Cầu Đất trồng arabica chứ không phải robusta như phần còn lại của Việt Nam — ngồi đây sẽ thấy rõ khác biệt.

Thương hiệu trà ô long và cà phê sinh ra ở Đà Lạt rồi lan ra cả nước. Syphon, V60 và bình ép kiểu Pháp đều được làm đúng chuẩn.

The Vietnamese chain that behaves like a European one: air conditioning, sockets at every table, English menu, open till eleven. Useful when the independent cafes have closed.

Hợp tác xã của nông hộ: khoảng 120 hecta và hơn 60 hộ liên kết, rang nhiều vùng nguyên liệu. Cà phê hạt 145–450 nghìn ₫ một gói nếu muốn mang Đà Lạt về nhà.

A cafe on the Hoang Hoa Tham slope whose terrace opens onto pine hills, tiled roofs and greenhouses on the slopes below. The point here is not the view itself but that you get to enjoy it in peace: SOHO, where the bloggers and tourists go, stands on the same street, while here on an ordinary day there are a few people — with a panorama that is no worse. Inside is a bright room with armchairs, plants and a full-height mirror in which those same hills appear a second time. And the prices carry no view surcharge: a black coffee costs 27,000₫.

Proper Italian — pizza and pasta cooked by people who care about the dough, not a Vietnamese take on it. The one address to know when you want that specifically.

French and Italian cooking away from the tourist streets — the place locals send you to for a dinner that is not street food.

Useful when a child refuses local food, or when you just want a taste you know. The menu is the one you are used to, plus rice dishes and a fried chicken line.

Where you go when you have had enough rice: fish and chips, schnitzel, bangers and mash, burgers. Owned and run by an Australian, sport on the screens, English everywhere.

Food comes straight away, and it suits both the child who only eats familiar things and the adult who is simply hungry.

The reliable national Korean BBQ chain, with Korean and English menus. When you want no surprises, this is it.

A vegetarian buffet: chay in Vietnamese means meat-free — no meat, no fish, no eggs. The counter holds rice, soups, stewed and fried dishes, and you take as much as you will eat for one fixed price. Of the vegetarian buffets we have collected, this is the cheapest.

Nông trại gia đình của người K'Ho: arabica hữu cơ từ giống những năm 1940, hợp tác xã gồm 50 hộ. Trải nghiệm cà phê sâu sắc nhất quanh Đà Lạt, và tiền ở lại với buôn làng.

Opens at five in the morning — earlier than any other cafe in town — so it is where you wait out the gap between a night bus and check-in. Card payment, clean toilets, wifi, and coffee that tastes the same as at home.

Korean set meals rather than barbecue — closer to home cooking, and Bui Thi Xuan is the street with the densest Korean cluster in the city.

A coffee shop in a central alley.

Ramen; an order comes with takoyaki.

Japanese katsu curry.

A home fermentation business that has been running in town for a year. The regular range is sauerkraut, kefir, courgette caviar and salted fish, with kvass and kombucha on the way. Everything comes packed and labelled: the label carries the ingredients and the best-before date — cabbage, carrot, salt, sugar and lactic acid bacteria in the kraut, cow milk and a starter culture in the kefir, and nothing else. Orders go through Telegram, and that is also where you ask what is available this week, because the range changes. The customers are not only Russian: there are French and Vietnamese among them.

A cafe that turned the local oddity into a menu: black garlic is grown in Lam Dong, and here it goes into a signature coffee, a latte and even ice cream. The taste is not garlicky in the usual sense — fermented garlic reads closer to molasses and balsamic. The other half of the place is a bakery: butter croissants baked daily. We tried the coffee and the pastry ourselves and have no complaints. The stone-walled room looks into a garden, and upstairs there is a roastery with its own roaster and shelves of beans.

A bar built on milk and the picture in the cup — the sign says it outright: by dhc latte artist. Behind the counter stand latte-art awards in the name of Dang Hung Cuong, including a judging certificate from the 2025 championship, and this is the rare case where the paper on the wall is backed by the cup: the cappuccino and the latte here are genuinely good. The building is French, with mouldings and arched windows; inside the floor is a black-and-white harlequin, bright and tight, with some tables out on the pavement. The room next door holds a long bar with a professional machine and a wall of certificates: that is where barista and latte-art training happens rather than service.

The cats genuinely live here: they lie on the floor by the glass wall, sit on the sill above the valley and go out onto the wooden deck once the sun reaches it. The building is a glass box on a slope — full-height walls, a translucent roof, gravel underfoot, and beyond the glass the hills, the roofs of the town and a mountain on the horizon. You can sit inside in the armchairs or out on the deck at a slab table. The coffee is ordinary Vietnamese and Italian, the cold brew comes on plum and on citrus, the tea on fruit — nobody comes here for the cup, they come for the cats and the view.

A cafe with rabbit pens set around the room, and the rabbits can be picked up. The owner is Singaporean, meets guests himself and talks to them; there is no separate charge for the rabbits, you just order something from the menu. The house is built out of coloured shutters, old doors and planks, with books and lamps inside — homely rather than a photo set. The coffee is strong: even the latte comes out dense, worth knowing if you are used to a milky one.

A cafe that serves a proper European breakfast: sourdough toasties with avocado, salmon, prosciutto and halloumi, three kinds of eggs benedict, a full English with sausages, bacon, baked beans and hash brown, omelettes and croque monsieur. The building is green, with a striped awning and the name across the whole wall; inside, the ceiling is painted as a European street of brasseries and tiled roofs, the seats are striped, the bar holds an espresso machine and a juicer, and upstairs there is a glazed veranda with palms and a view over the roofs. Coffee comes both the Vietnamese way and off the machine, right down to a flat white and a yuzu espresso tonic.

A roastery cafe spread over several floors. Downstairs is the counter: glass tubes of beans on a wooden rack behind it, a La Marzocco espresso machine and a row of tall stools. Beyond it a room sits under a translucent roof on wooden beams, with leather benches and windows onto the lane. Above that comes a floor walled in glass, and over it an open roof with wooden benches: from there you see the tiled roofs of the town and the mountains behind them. Beyond the ordinary coffee there is a specialty bar, where beans sorted by origin, Vietnamese and imported arabica and specialty robusta, are brewed by hand in a V60 or an Origami. The room is furnished piece by piece: a silver relief of painted eyes above the bar, shelves along the walls with wall clocks, globes, rotary telephones and a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

A cafe on the shore of Tuyen Lam, four and a half kilometres out from the city market: people drive out here for the view of the lake. In the daytime it does coffee, breakfast and lunch, music plays, and two dogs live on the grounds. Inside there is a wooden room where black-and-white photographs hang in frames, each with a label, the way they do in a gallery. In the evening they sometimes light a fire bowl.

A coffee shop by Tuyen Lam, seven kilometres from the city market, where you drink coffee looking at the lake and the hills around it. There is no entry ticket, but you do have to order one drink.

The coffee shop has taken over an old house under red tiles: heavy wooden columns, open rafters, a concrete floor and a gravel yard with trees. Vinh Son church is visible from the yard, its spires standing right behind the roof. There are several rooms: one with a glass wall onto the garden, another with sofas and pictures on the walls.

A kitchen that cooks without sauce on top of sauce: sous-vide chicken breast, vegetables, salads, pasta and protein pancakes. Every dish lists what is in it in the app, down to the grams. Delivery only, no dining room; the app rating is 4.8 across nearly a thousand reviews.

A coffee shop on Yersin, a kilometre and a half from the market. The yard has gravel, folding chairs and umbrellas; inside there are concrete vaults, shaded lamps and plants all through the room. We tried the coffee and the pastries ourselves, and both are good. Behind the bar stand grinders, bean hoppers and pour-over cones.