Today’s side quest was egg coffee.
Calling it a quest might be overselling things, as there were no maps or dangerous river crossings, and nobody attempted to sell me a cursed monkey’s paw. I simply walked out of the hotel, wandered down a side street in Da Nang, and there it was: Egg Coffee. 35,000 dong. About $1.80 Australian.
For that price, back home, you’d be lucky to get a paper cup with a disappointed look from a barista.
I ordered one alongside a bánh mì and was presented with a complimentary glass of what I think was cold green tea. It may have been something else entirely, but at this point, I’ve accepted that half of travelling is drinking mysterious liquids and hoping for the best.
Now, if someone had suggested mixing egg with coffee before today, I’d have assumed they were either joking or attempting to recreate a medical condition. Eggs belong in omelettes, and coffee belongs in coffee. My first thought was, “This is how salmonella wins.”
Yet here we are.
The whole thing exists thanks to a man named Nguyen Van Giang, who, during a milk shortage in the First Indochina War, apparently looked around the kitchen and thought, “Well, we’ve got eggs.” He whipped egg yolks with condensed milk and sugar into a thick, creamy foam and poured it over strong Vietnamese coffee.
Somewhere between desperation and genius, a national treasure was born.
The result looks like a dessert pretending to be a coffee; I could drink litres of the stuff. Granted, this would almost certainly end with diabetes, the loss of several important limbs, and a stern lecture from a medical professional, but I’d die happy.
Thankfully, the hotel has a gym.
Because if I spend the next week pairing egg coffee with bánh mì every morning, there’s a very real chance I won’t fit into my clothes for the flight home.
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