Chillà Coffee

While it’s possible that Orange County reached “peak Vietnamese cafe” earlier in the 2020s, new options continued to open in the Little Saigon area at a rate of several per month, and Chillà Coffee joined their ranks at the very end of August 2025. The small cafe has seating for perhaps 10 people across tables, chairs, and a low sofa, offering almost exclusively coffee and tea drinks alongside cream puffs, choux puffs, and small collections of sandwiches and che/pudding-style desserts. There’s also a DIY ramen rehydrating station in the corner for guests looking to carb up on inexpensive noodles.

Chillà’s drink selection is quite small but tightly focused: Vietnamese coffee with additions such as egg foam, salt foam, coconut cream, milk, or condensed milk, plus matchas with condensed or regular milk, coconut cream, corn foam, or strawberry milk. Beyond Thai red and green teas, that’s it for the basics; mungbean milk, iced cocoa, “chewy cheese milk” (a thick yellow liquid cheese), “golden lava milk” (salted egg), and foam-topped mango cloud are less common. All of the drinks go for $5.50 to $7, with most at $6.50 or up. Mini banh mi que sandwiches come in two-sets for $6 to $7, with six flavors of turtle-shaped cream puffs at $3 to $3.50 each, and six Singaporean-style “chewy choux” in the same flavors for $2 to $2.50. Egg bread sandwiches with sausage or shredded dried pork go for $5 each.

Rarely do our group’s opinions split in as polarized a fashion at they did with Chillà’s drinks, but they were justified: our coffee and matcha drinks were strong and great, while the menu’s single non-milk drink option was strong and decidedly not great. We were thrilled with the powerful robusta base of the Sunny Egg Coffee ($6.50), which would have been excellent even without its egg foam topping and included skewered set of three cheese bread balls. Similarly, the Chillà Matcha ($7) delivered super strong, perfectly sweetened matcha and creamy foam layers, disappointing only in its significant quantity of crushed ice.