Meet the Coffee Connoisseur Bringing Rare Beans and Big Ideas to Philly

Joseph Nguyen of Coffee Connoisseur Club / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

Behind the Line is Foobooz’s interview series with the people who make up Philly’s dynamic bar and restaurant scene. For the complete archives, go here.

Hidden behind a swinging bookcase at chef Kevin Yanaga’s Yanaga Kappo Izakaya in Northern Liberties is an eight-seat sushi bar where, once a month, he and his friend, Joseph Nguyen, do something that isn’t being done anywhere else but Philly.

A coffee-and-sushi omakase. They call it “Oma-Café.”

The menu is wild — pours of rare coffee from smallholder farms in Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, paired with aged kanpachi tataki and uni chawanmushi. Anago with a coffee saccharum. Cascara coffee-cherry tea to start the night and a Vietnamese flan with coffee caviar to finish it. Nguyen and Yanaga have been doing this collab series for a few months now, and it has been incredibly successful. So has Nguyen’s Instagram-based Coffee Connoisseur Club, which he started in 2024, offering monthly drops of rare (and often expensive) beans that he gets from the small producers he works with in Vietnam and around the world — buying beans and, in the process, trying to spread the ideas of restorative farming practices.

Oddly, though, none of this is what Nguyen was working on when I got him on the phone to talk about coffee, the CCC and his dinners with Yanaga. He was in Seattle, working one of his other jobs: as a consultant and security and governance auditor for NGOs and defense contractors. Which, yes, might seem a little left field for a guy who once also ran CBD and THC-infused coffee companies with some buddies from college, but talk to Nguyen for ten minutes on pretty much any topic, and you’ll learn that he has already lived a multitude of lives.

He’ll tell you himself that he wasn’t a great student when he was young. Too easily distracted. Too likely to become laser-focused on one thing or one subject. But when he was in high school, he was on the rowing team and was recruited by Temple to row for the university. He made Team USA’s coastal rowing team, and was thinking about joining the Vietnamese team at the Olympics, but an injury ended that dream.

“I hate time off,” he told me. “I had bronchitis, but I kept training so my lung collapsed.”

When he couldn’t row anymore, he focused on other things. He began training as a Muay Thai fighter. He started that infused coffee business with friends from school, then sold it. He’s working on getting his pilot’s license. Right now, he says, things are actually a little slow for him. He’s been trying to scale things back because he has a fiancée — Cass Nguyen — and he wants to give that his attention.

“I proposed in July,” he said. “We’re getting married next year. So, I don’t want to be playing catch-up. I’m trying to stay ahead of the ball.”

And then he tells me how they met (outside a coffee tasting he was running at Starbolt here in Philly), how terrible their pickup lines were, how “she used to be a Dunkin’ black coffee gal until she met me,” and how, now, she usually runs out of the house with a cup of $100 coffee in the morning, drinking it like it was from Wawa.

All of which is to say that Nguyen contains multitudes. He has climbed mountains and flown planes, started his own businesses, taken incredible risks, traveled the world and (almost) went to the Olympics.

And he is just 28 years old.

So here, all the way from Seattle, is Joseph Nguyen talking about Muay Thai, spearfishing, Gundam models, his sushi collab with Kevin Yanaga, their plans for the future, and what is right (and wrong) with the coffee industry today.

Photograph courtesy of Joseph Nguyen

I grew up … in Atlantic City. I was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Honestly, I don’t remember how old I was when I came here. Maybe 3 or 4.

When I was young, I wanted to be … an archaeologist. Or an architect. One of those. Or either. Because both of them involve doing things with your hands and I like doing things with my hands. I like building things. As an architect, you can balance building with the art side of things, right? And you know how, when we’re kids, we all like dinosaurs? Well, I was a very misguided little kid. So, I would, like, leave school and just … go looking for them. And [in Atlantic City] we were so close to the sand, so you’d just see this kid digging holes right off Pacific Avenue.

I went to college … at Temple. I studied international business. Did an internship and, the next thing I know, I’m signing an offer with one of the big firms and then I ended up… Well, here.

My first real job was … Spearfishing. Actually, dude, I did so many different jobs. But [in college at Temple] I was an intern at an order fulfillment and logistics warehouse. The company was called Tackle Direct. For fishing. But for whatever reason, I didn’t know that the internship wouldn’t pay me over the summer. So, I went back to New Jersey, and I started spearfishing with these guys from American Diving Supply. For tuna. We would go, like, six hours out to sea, and we’re jumping into these deep, dark canyons off the coast of Jersey. It was crazy. But there were yellowfin and all kinds of things that we could get, and we were always bringing back these fish. Sometimes, I’d be working for a captain. But if not, I would sell to these sushi restaurants in town. And I started eating at their bars. Honestly, that’s what led me to being so into sushi.

Joseph Nguyen travels the world to source coffee beans directly from farmers. / Photograph courtesy of Joseph Nguyen

I first became interested in coffee … freshman year at Temple. I was addicted to coffee. We would have practice at 4 a.m. Then at noon we’d be in the weight room. Then another practice later in the day. Coffee became like water.

Back then I would get my coffee at … Starbucks, man. Knowing me now, you’d want to kill me, but I used to love Starbucks. Triple chocolate mocha lattes or whatever? Every day. But eventually I realized I was just drinking a lot of sugar. That’s when I started looking deeper at craft coffee.

Today, I drink … zero cups of coffee. A normal day? Zero. If I’m with Yanaga and we’re doing a menu tasting, maybe ten or twelve cups. And then the next day, none. Two days a week, I might drink one or two. For me, it’s about the ritual. The intent behind it. It’s like, I don’t know … It’s like a cigarette versus a cigar, if that makes sense. A cigarette is a habit, but I want that intention behind what I’m drinking. Some of the strains I’m picking out, they’re $100 or $200 dollars a pound, raw. And when you’re drinking a cup like that, you want to enjoy it.

Joseph pouring a cup of Hunduras Black Honey Caturra. / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

I started the Coffee Connoisseur Club … the month I got laid off from a job as an auditor. I booked a trip to the Catskills, just to kinda reset. The I booked a trip to Montana for a couple days to hunt river monsters — fly fishing. And while I was there, I booked my flight to Vietnam for a month to start meeting suppliers.

My plan for the CCC was … to take coffee and innovate. I still don’t really have any long-term goals except to improve the coffee that we drink and the lives of the farmers who produce it.

One thing I love about the coffee industry is … the more I dig, the more I find out what I don’t know.

And one thing that still pisses me off is … the lack of accountability. People in the coffee industry tend to start out right, with their focus in the right place: on the product and on the farmers. Then they sell out. It becomes a return-on-investment model. And I tell people, if you have shit and you package it nice, it’s still just shit in a nice package. There’s a lot of that in the industry. You see my packaging, it’s just plain paper with maybe a strange name on it. It’s the coffee — what’s inside — that matters. I try to let the coffee speak for itself.

Something everyone gets wrong about coffee is … trying to find a bean that does everything. A good bean for a pour-over might not be a good espresso bean. People who chase the optics of coffee forget that it’s all about the input. The input and the intention.

My goal with the CCC is … to redefine coffee. I don’t want it to be just a commodity for the caffeine, made with milk and sugar. And I’m not saying every cup of coffee has to have that ritual. It’s that some of them deserve that.

Photograph courtesy of Joseph Nguyen

One thing the coffee industry needs right now is … re-education. I want people to understand that commodities aren’t just for utility. They can also be for enjoyment. I mean, that’s why we have different brands of things and not everyone drives a Nissan. Most people, they start to get into coffee and they buy some beans that they think are good and they put them in their machine and what they get isn’t as good as they hoped it would be. Or it isn’t as good as what they get at their little coffee shop down the street, and they stop the questioning there. They just add more milk and more sugar or more syrup. But that’s not the answer.

My favorite coffee in the world right now is … Ethiopia Guji. It’s this super naturally-processed strain. It’s the best coffee I’ve ever had from Ethiopia, and it was dropped in our lap by a friend. I’m trying to plan a trip to Ghana, Rwanda, and Ethiopia — to do a month in Africa soon.

In my spare time, I … train. Muay Thai and jujitsu. And I try to fly. I’m getting my pilot’s license, so I gotta get my hours in. But also, I’m a big Gundam nerd. You know, like the model kits? Yeah, so those, too. But really, it’s mostly just work and trying to be there for my family.

Japanese flash brew of Rowandan washed bourbon / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

The biggest risk I ever took … is such a hard question to answer. I mean, I used to free solo, so it’s hard to say without context. But really, the biggest risk I’ve ever taken is something that I’m working on now. Yanaga and I are looking at opening a concept together. Something like a kissaten during the day that would become a fine dining restaurant at night. Kind of like a reverse omakase with four choices for a first course, and you pick one, then two options for the second and you pick one. And then a long counter for me to teach people about coffee. We’re still in the early stages. Still looking at places.

While Nguyen’s and Yanaga’s restaurant might still be a dream at the moment, you can see them in action yourself at their monthly “Oma-Cafe” dinners at 637 Sushi Club — Yanaga’s eight-seat omakase counter hidden behind a bookshelf at his Yanaga Kappo Izakaya in Northern Liberties. Nguyen told me he’s pretty sure the October pairing of coffee and sushi is already sold out, but seats for the November dinner (happening on the 30th) will be going on sale on October 30th right here.