Vietnamese coffee filter set

Preparing delicious Vietnamese coffee is quick, easy and doesn't require much clean-up afterward. The coffee filter is stainless steel and there are three parts (filter, screw-on damper, and lid). Simply place the filter on top of a cup, so it looks like a hat. Add 2-3 teaspoons of coffee to the filter, then screw on the damper so it's snug (not tight). Shake the filter a bit to settle the coffee. Fill up the cup about 1/3 with hot water then wait 20 seconds. Unscrew the damper 2 turns and fill the cup entirely with hot water. Place the lid on and wait a few minutes until the water has dripped though. Add a spoonful (or more) of sweetened condensed milk to the cup before or after you start the process. The final result is fabulous. Printed instructions come with the filter. The filter set is made in Taiwan of stainless steel, and quality is excellent--it will last for years. We offer Vietnamese coffee as well, Simply click Other products by ImportFood.com above to view our other products. Additional images, recipes and detailed description at ImportFood.com.
Customer Review: Unique, yet ubiquitous use
The Vietnamese styled coffee filter is really a nice bit of kit. It makes the often mundane act of drinking coffee into a ritual. While its origins are south-east Asian, its has a cosmopolitan use that is quite underrated. If you're like me and have several different blends of coffee in your home to choose from, its nice to offer guests their choice of coffee without having to make several pots to do so. You can alter the strength of the coffee by how tightly you compress the top filter in this apparatus. Thus enabling a "Lungo" or "ristretto" type of taste as you would find with espresso machines. This is however, not technically an espresso maker as espresso is made by forcing water through the ground coffee beans, while this apparatus uses gravity to distill the coffee. Many people who first experience these will be in specialty Vietnamese restaurants, offered as a traditional "Cà phê sua dá" (translated "Coffee milk ice"), but you should be able to find this nice little filter at many oriental specialty shops for anywhere between $3-$4. Don't worry about manufacturer, as I have seen several, and there seems to be absolutely no difference in quality. So don't pay a high price for this item. Often, the best things are the simplest, and it doesn't get any simpler than this. It should last you decades of use.
Customer Review: All I want is 1 cup of coffee
And this little gadget does the job much better than a Melitta style funnel and paper filter. If you grind your own you'll need to experiment a bit with how fine to grind and how tight to screw down the tamper, but after a few tries you should have the cup of coffee you want. I have 4 now. They are pretty cool for serving coffee when you have company. I don't think the online price is outrageous, but if you are lucky enough to live in a city with a Vietnamese market you can pick these up for $3 each.

Were your customers. Thats right, we pay your bills so listen up. Why cant we understand your wine list? We know what we like, but your wine list doesnt give us a clue. Ok, so were not wine knowledgeable, dont hate us because wed still like some wine that well enjoy. We really like wine, especially with a good meal. But we dont want to study the stuff so we can understand your wine list and know how a wine will taste.

Count these up: 1) County of Origin, 2) Producer, 3) Vintage date, 4) Appellation, 5) Variety of Grape, 6) Vineyard, and 7) season the grapes were picked (Ice Wine, Late Harvest, etc.). Thats right, seven items of information must be catalogued and understood to give us a chance at knowing what a wine tastes like when reading your traditional wine list. Keep six of these, change the seventh, and all bets are off on how the wine will taste. We get as confused as a blind dog in a meat house.

If you hear a lot of us saying, Just give me a glass of your house white, you have a wine list problem. Hey, were not too cheap to buy a bottle of wine; we just dont want to make a sizeable investment in a bottle we may not like. So why keep us in the dark, trying to decipher your wine list code? Why not tell us how the wine tastes, and well pop for a bottle or two.

Expensive restaurants once solved this problem with a sommelier whose job it was to discern our taste preference, analyze the menu weve ordered, and recommend a wine we would enjoy with our meal. There are precious few qualified sommeliers around these days, especially in affordable restaurants. When your wait staff recommends, its usually wines they like.

The only thing worse than a traditional wine list is one with winese puffery descriptions.
Example: This wine has hints of dark tree fruit, root vegetable, autumn leaves, pears, berries and vanilla, with a strong finish of cigar box. Amazing! Do you have something that tastes like wine?

In January of 1980, Grey Moss Inn in Grey Forrest, Texas, implemented the Customer Friendly Wine List. Customers could order wines by the way they taste for the first time ever. The wine list was divided into categories:

1) Slightly Sweet, 2) Light, Soft, 3) Light, Crisp, Fruity, 3) Fuller, Rounded, Dry,
4) Elegance, Finesse, 5) Robust, Complex, Full Flavored 6) After Dinner Sweet

Red, white and rose wines all appeared in most categories. Some wines like Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon appeared under as many as three categories. As customers, we knew that by staying within a category we could be experimental ordering wine and still enjoy our selection.

Jill Goolden published the book, The Taste of Wine, around 1990 , and about a decade later Fiona Beckett published Wines by Style. The thesis of these books is to classify wine by how it tastes, rather than the seven criteria above. These books led to a rash of wine lists offering up their contents by taste profile but these glimmering lights seem to be flickering out.

If you lack the confidence to develop a wine list for your restaurant that lets us order wines by the way they taste, hire a qualified wine consultant, or work closely with your vendors to achieve your goal. Then watch your wines sales grow from glasses to bottles, as we feel comfortable ordering from your list.

Bill Stephens writes the syndicated column http://www.heyrestaurantguy.com . His 35 year career in food service includes restaurateur, caterer, food and wine columnist for Harte-Hanks, Murdoch and Hearst Newspapers, food and wine magazine journalist, and he consults for restaurants with Bill Stephens Associates http://www.billstephensassociates.com