The cốm ice cream stick melted faster than usual in my hand, probably because I had stood too long in the jostling crowd in the small forecourt of 35 Tràng Tiền. There were no tables. There were no chairs. People held their ice cream between two fingers, leaning aside to avoid one another, eating while standing as if that were the only way it had ever been done. I took it for the inconvenience of an old shop that had simply never been upgraded. Only a few weeks later, when the wooden door at number 35 closed for the last time, did I understand I had been looking in the wrong direction.
That standing habit — formed over decades of having nowhere to sit, rather than chosen as a style — only became worth noticing once people knew it was about to disappear. News that Kem Tràng Tiền was closing its shop at 35 Tràng Tiền spread faster than any sale the place had ever run, and the queue on 15 September 2026 stretched longer than any summer afternoon I could remember.
The Standing Place
The forecourt in front of the shop measured less than twenty square metres, tucked between the old French colonial buildings around Hoàn Kiếm Lake and the Opera House — a location where a seventy-year-old brand might reasonably have claimed a proper façade. Kem Tràng Tiền had never needed a façade. It needed a counter, a row of glass cases, and enough room for customers to form three or four ranks, pressed so close that the scents of cốm, mung bean, coconut, chocolate and coffee ice cream blended into something no longer separable into individual flavours.
No one had designed the space to create closeness. It was crowded because the plot was small. Yet that crowding, over many decades, trained Hanoians in a particular way of eating ice cream: quickly, on their feet, without chairs or tables, and always within a few centimetres of someone else.
Four Hundred Points of Sale
The ice-cream formula took shape in 1958, when 35 Tràng Tiền was still a state trading outlet selling a dessert that had once appeared only on the menus of French hotels. For more than thirty years, from 1961 to 1993, a single craftsman — the artisan Khánh — kept the recipes, never writing them down, never reproducing them in bulk, transmitting them only by hand. Cốm, mung bean and coconut ice cream were not products designed for a mass market. They were one man’s formulas, served at one address, to a volume of customers limited by the physical size of the counter itself.
That limitation — not a strategic choice but a physical constraint — turned out to be what created the collective memory. People did not remember only the taste. They remembered having to come to exactly number 35, stand in exactly that spot, among exactly those strangers, at exactly that hour.
The parent company of the brand, One Capital Hospitality, was carrying accumulated losses of nearly 383 billion đồng and loan debts of more than 1,331 billion đồng as of June 2026. With more than 400 points of sale already operating nationwide and plans to open roughly fifty franchise outlets this year, the business problem was no longer how to keep one address, but how to replicate a formula fast enough to offset a growing deficit. Replicating the formula is something that can be done. Replicating the physical constraint that once produced the memory — the narrow counter, people standing shoulder to shoulder, no one having space to separate themselves — is something no flagship store, however carefully designed, can recreate.
260 Metres
Exactly 260 metres from the old site, the Heritage Flagship Store at 18 Hàng Bài stood ready to receive the displaced customers. The lighting had been calculated more carefully. The glass counters had been designed to look better in photographs. The word “heritage” appeared on the signboard itself, as if to promise that the memory had not been lost, only relocated.
I had thought 260 metres an insignificant distance. It only becomes significant when measured in footsteps — not in the number of years a counter had stood still in one place. What has been recreated at 18 Hàng Bài is the image of the memory: glass cases, an old colour palette, perhaps a few pieces of furniture chosen for their symbolic value. Not the structure that once generated the memory. No one stands pressed against anyone else in a space designed to give each customer room of their own. That new comfort is precisely what makes the old experience impossible to recover: people are no longer obliged to stand close to strangers in order to finish their ice-cream stick.
What has been lost has produced something no one planned: a version of Kem Tràng Tiền designed to evoke memory, rather than a place where memory formed itself as a side-effect of crowding.
No one at 35 Tràng Tiền kept the old wooden door. It was taken down during the renovation, unmarked by any ceremony, photographed by no one as it left — only the ice-cream sticks, the faces in the queue, and an address that has now changed its function. Perhaps the only thing that remains intact is the way people still eat cốm ice cream between two fingers, leaning slightly to avoid collisions, even though they now stand at a different counter, wider, brighter, and no longer close enough to force them to do so.
September 2026
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