Every city has a few places that are less a business than a habit. In Da Nang, one of them sits at 123 Le Loi Street, and it has been a morning fixture for more than 40 years.

Do Long, the founder of Long Coffee, died on July 27, 2026, at 70, Tuoi Tre News reported, citing his family. His youngest daughter, Do Nguyen Nam Tran, said he had been ill for some time.

From the classroom to the roaster

Long was a schoolteacher until the early 1980s, when he left the profession to chase coffee. He learned to roast and brew in the central coast towns of Tam Ky and Tuy Hoa, then came back to Da Nang and opened a small sidewalk cafe on Le Loi Street, in what is now Thach Thang ward. Tuoi Tre describes it as one of the first coffee shops in the city.

His daughter said the signature taste came from years of experimenting with a blend of Arabica and Robusta beans in a proprietary ratio, meant to balance aroma and flavor while keeping the bold character of Vietnamese coffee. "That blend became Long Coffee's signature taste and has been enjoyed by customers for decades," she told Tuoi Tre News.

The brand has since spread to other locations in Vietnam and to the United States, where it serves Vietnamese communities. But the original Le Loi shop still runs the way it always has, simple, unfussy and busy, serving hundreds of cups a day, according to the report.

The bigger story in the cup

Long's career tracks the arc of Vietnamese coffee itself. Coffee is believed to have arrived with French missionaries around 1857, and the first plantations were planted in the north in 1888. The French later moved production to the Central Highlands, which is still the heart of it, according to Wikipedia's history of the industry. After the 1986 Đổi Mới reforms reopened private business, output surged. Vietnam is now the world's second-largest coffee producer after Brazil, and about 97% of what it grows is Robusta, the strong, bitter bean that gives a Vietnamese phin its punch.

The phin, a small metal drip filter set on the glass, is the other half of the ritual. Sweetened condensed milk became the standard partner partly because it kept well in the tropics before refrigeration was common. That gives you cà phê sữa đá, the iced milk coffee that powers most Da Nang mornings.

How Da Nang drinks it

The local style isn't complicated. Helen Le, who was born and raised in Da Nang, described it to National Geographic as "relaxed and unpretentious": a low stool, a tiny glass of strong coffee, and a morning spent talking. The same piece notes that Vietnamese baristas now experiment with coconut, salt, mango and even durian coffee, but the stool-and-glass version is still the default.

That's what Long built on Le Loi Street, before Da Nang had many coffee shops to speak of: a place to sit, a strong cup, and a reason to stay.

Paying respects, the right way

If you want to understand what he made, you don't need a tasting flight. Go early, sit low, order a cà phê sữa đá, and don't rush. The city has no shortage of cafes now. Few of them were there first.

Sources

This story was compiled by the Da Nang Voice news desk from the published sources listed above. Facts, figures and quotes are attributed to those sources; Da Nang Voice did not conduct interviews for it unless the text says so. Corrections are dated and noted at the top of the story. Read our corrections policy. Spotted an error? Tell us.