Blk Dot Coffee

Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk, typically sold in Vietnam as Café Sua Da, is perhaps one of the biggest low-key beverage success stories of the past decade. It’s unownable in the sense that the recipe is so basic and widespread that it can be found at countless places in Orange County, but that hasn’t stopped some local cafes from branding or building upon it. Once one tastes the super-strong Vietnamese coffee, with most of its bitterness offset by sweet cream, it’s hard to go back to traditional American or European alternatives.

Blk Dot Coffee sells Café Sua Da as an Iced VTM, a “light” version with regular milk as a LVTM, and one mixed with matcha tea as a VTMatcha. It also sells BLK Tigers, clones of Tiger Sugar’s brown sugar milk drinks, VTM Tigers with coffee, and plenty of other teas and hot chocolates that thankfully dont have abbreviated names. Everything we’ve tried here, we’ve enjoyed.

Except for one thing: Ice content. The cups are routinely assembled with so much ice that the actual drinks disappear within minutes, if not seconds, of first sip. Blk Dot has known that this is an issue for years, and so makes clear when you order that you won’t get any more beverage by ordering less ice – there will be additional charges for more liquid. So expect to add $1.30 more so your $6+ cup of ice… err, coffee isn’t gone in a flash.