Em Cafe

More about Em Cafe

Poem - “At Em Café”

Rain beads softly on the glass,
the scent of coffee curls like memory.
Laughter, half shy, half echo,
spills from the corner table
where two umbrellas lean together
like conspirators of fate.

A girl walks past in blue,
her shadow trembling in the puddle’s heart,
the lamplight bends to greet her.
Inside, the old record hums,
a voice like dusk,
a song that knows your name.

Here, the walls remember
every first glance, every last word,
and the steam rising from a porcelain cup
is a little ghost of love,
warm, fleeting,
and utterly human.

Story - “The House of Soft Rain”

They say Em Café was built on the quietest corner of Hanoi, where rain loved to linger a little longer than elsewhere. It wasn’t famous. There were no neon signs, no influencers taking pictures, only an old gramophone that played music as if the air itself had memory, and shelves lined with handwritten haiku books by a poet named Ti Mơ.

The café had a simple rule:
First dates, coffee on the house.
Not out of marketing, but mercy. The owner believed that love, in its beginning, should taste warm and free.

Couples came, hesitant and bright-eyed. Some stayed to write each other’s names in the fog on the windows. Others never returned, leaving behind only the ghost of their laughter, woven into the evening’s jazz.

Every painting on the wall was a dream, soft rain on old streets, women in blue dresses walking toward light. And each dream was signed, not with ink, but with a whisper: Em dreamed this for you.

On certain afternoons, when the rain fell sideways, visitors swore they could hear someone reading softly from “Haikus of the Fragile Vision.” And if they listened closely, the rain itself would answer, turning every drop into a syllable of longing.

Those who left Em Café carried a little warmth on their palms, as if the doorknob still remembered their touch.
And those who stayed long enough always said the same thing:

“It feels like I’ve been here before
maybe in another life,
when love was still rain,
and rain was still love.”