Wake Up Coffee serves drinks, bánh mi with a side of encouragement
As the same owner of New Century, Thoi Trang's new café, Wake Up Coffee and Sandwiches, specializes in traditional Vietnamese coffee and street sandwiches, known as banh mi. The café opened last Tuesday; by 12 p.m., it had sold out of bánh mi. Avery Magee | Photo Editor
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When you step off of Water Street into Wake Up Coffee and Sandwiches, a large wall features a dancing girl surrounded by: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
It’s not just a mural — it’s the cafe’s central message.
“Everybody has a bad day sometimes, but I want them to come in, look around and say, ‘Hey, not that bad. Life is not that bad. We can handle this,'” cafe owner Thoi Trang said.
Trang opened Wake Up Coffee last Tuesday, which offers traditional Vietnamese coffee and bánh mi sandwiches.
But, Trang is no stranger to the Syracuse food scene. In 2000, he opened New Century, a sit-down restaurant with an expansive menu of Vietnamese food.
Most Syracuse customers are not used to the cafe’s kind of coffee, Trang said. Wake Up Coffee uses an extremely dark roast and brews it using a traditional Vietnamese phin filter, a slow-drip method that produces a single pitcherful over the course of several hours.
“We extract all of the flavor out of the coffee,” Trang said. “I always say darker, darker than dark.”
The result: a concentrated, intensely flavored coffee that Trang said requires sweet condensed milk, the hallmark of a traditional Vietnamese iced coffee.
The cafe’s bánh mi recipe is as authentic as the coffee, Trang said. Trang described what he calls the “traditional combo” — butter, mayo, pate, pickled vegetables, cucumber, cilantro and a pepper for heat — and is firm about what makes his sandwich authentic.
“If you make a sandwich without those things, then no way, no how, you call it a bánh mi,” Trang said.
Trang said his family was central to the opening of the coffeeshop. His eldest daughter, Annie, originally had the idea. But the food has always been second to a bigger mission: spreading kindness and inspiration.
“The main thing is not about the sandwich and the coffee,” Trang said. “The main thing is that we can use this place to send out a message to the younger generation.”
This message is important to him because Trang said he watched his eldest daughter struggle through college and wanted to make a space where students could locate quiet encouragement that is hard to find in a busy semester.
“We want everybody coming here to feel good when they come and feel welcome, and when they walk out, they feel good about themselves,” Trang said.
That ethos extends to the staff. Employees are instructed to hand back receipts and accept payment with two hands, a gesture of respect rooted in Vietnamese custom.
Seventeen-year-old barista Kayla Dinh said the familial environment has made her look forward to going to work.
Wake Up Coffee and Sandwiches uses a slow-drip method for their coffee. Typically, a single pitcherful takes several hours. Avery Magee | Photo Editor
“I’m not thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to go to work again,'” said Dinh, who has known Trang since childhood. “It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I get to go to work!'”
For some customers, Wake Up Coffee fills a gap that has long existed in the city. Joyce Chen, a Le Moyne College student and multi-time customer of the new cafe, said authentic Vietnamese food is harder to find in a “really white dominant” area.
Chen said places like Wake Up Coffee are especially important given the current cultural climate — pointing to recent social media trends of non-Asian users claiming to identify with Chinese culture without understanding its complexity.
“A couple years ago there were a lot of xenophobic events happening, and now it’s just a complete switch,” Chen said. “And they’re not even understanding the complexity of the different ethnicities.”
Chen said she visited New Century before Wake Up Coffee opened and was eager to see what Trang would do with a new concept. The cafe’s opening comes at a moment when Asian-owned small businesses are still rebuilding visibility lost during the pandemic, she said.
“It’s so important to have authenticity and Asian-owned small businesses, especially in Syracuse,” Chen said.
The grand opening last Tuesday drew more customers than Trang anticipated. By noon, the cafe sold out of bánh mi. Because one of the bánh mi ingredients takes five to six hours to prepare fresh each day, there was no way to restock. Trang said this was a problem he was glad to have.
For now, Trang said his focus is simple: keep the coffee brewing and the messages on the walls.
“We just keep telling each other,” Trang said, “just keep dancing.”
