By Barry O’Kane
Hoi An is a pleasant little town with a beautiful centre full of interesting architecture, nice restaurants and a billion ‘custom tailors’. Its a very significant stop on the tourist trial but doesn’t have the same appeal for digital nomads as other cities in Vietnam. However, I did enjoy my short stop there this trip and found some very pleasant places to work from.
Like most places in this wonderful country almost every restaurant, hotel, coffee shops and cafe has free wifi. Here are my favourite three coffee shops to work from in Ho An – with a map!
Highlands Coffee Indo
Highlands is a chain, so there is little unique about this place.
However, it is spacious, not busy, has excellent wifi and plenty of power points. Even the music wasn’t horrendous or too loud. It also has lots of unhealthy options for non-coffee drinkers like me! I did most of my international calls from here with very little problems.
TIỆM-CÀ-PHÊ Cafe
My favourite place in Hoi An, lovely, quiet coffee shop that is down a little alley. It shows the benefit of exploring some of the quieter Vietnamese streets and lanes.
Fun décor and some greenery with quiet music make this a great place to spend a few hours. The other patrons where exclusively local Vietnamese when I was there and the staff had little or no English (though the drinks menu did). The wifi was usable but not the best I have experienced, which was a shame as otherwise I would have spent much more time here. Note that it doesn’t have air con so may not be so pleasant at other times of the year.
El Nino
This is a little further from the old centre of town, though there are several hotels nearby so a mix of locals and tourists come in. Another spacious and very pleasant coffee shop. It was very quiet when I was there, which made it ideal for concentrated work. Usable wifi and enough power points makes this number 3 on my list.
Have you been to Hoi An? Got any recommendations to add to this list?
Thanks for posting this. Most cafes in Hoi An seem to be open spaced without any air conditioning (bad for work) and this post was incredibly useful.
Your welcome! Feel free to add any updates to the comments. It was over a year since we were last year, I’m glad it’s still helpful.
TIỆM-CÀ-PHÊ Cafe is now Le Fe Cafeteria, similar interior (with a koi pond now!) and is still a good place to work.
El Nino looked like it was closed as of January 2017? At least I couldn’t find it.
A 15 minute walk east of the old city is a cafe called U Cafe right on the river. It has *beautiful* ponds (on multiple floors!) and is a really nice pleasant place to work.
Closer to the old city but a bit farther from the tourist center is Ư Chi Cafe. It’s not on the map, but you can find it using the coordinates 15.882119, 108.333839 in google maps. It’s very cheap and the interior design is one of the best I’ve seen anywhere in Asia. Great chairs and a very nice place to work.
(I’m here in winter so not sure how the cafes A/C in summer.)
Thanks for the update!
Very much appreciate the update