Some closures announce themselves with a line out the door for one last cup.
This one slipped by quietly for four months.
Hem 377, the Vietnamese specialty cafe on Victoria Drive, has closed.
The East Van original served its last orders back on February 15, and the team posted a farewell the next day, but the news barely registered until we drove past the dark storefront in mid-June.
If you spent any time on Victoria Drive, you knew the place.
It was the one with the bright plastic stools and the rugged, lived-in interior built to feel like a side street in Saigon.
The cafe leaned hard into Vietnamese specialty coffee, with drinks like the ube latte and the pandan drip, plus flan in flavors like coconut and Vietnamese coffee.
Beyond the drinks, the kitchen put out Vietnamese street food, from a shredded chicken fried rice bowl to caramel popcorn.
It was a study spot, a date spot, and a weekend hang where, as the owners put it, strangers slowly turned into regulars and then into friends.
The goodbye came in a long letter posted to the cafe’s Instagram.
“This chapter is closing,” the team wrote.
“The lights may turn off. The doors may close.”
“But the impact you made does not end here. We carry it forward.”
The note thanked customers for choosing them “in a city filled with endless options.”
It also thanked the staff who “stayed calm when the ice machine broke, when water leaked, when things didn’t go as planned.”
The whole thing read less like a business update and more like a love letter to a room full of people.
Hem 377 was always pitched as something bigger than coffee.
The farewell described it as starting from a simple idea, bringing “a small piece of Saigon’s Soul to Vancouver.”
That idea started on Victoria Drive and later grew into a second outpost.
Owner Khanh Dang opened that follow-up on Commercial Drive in late 2023, a long-awaited expansion we covered when it landed.
That location eventually shut down in April 2025 and was replaced by a Sushi spot.
For now, the Victoria Drive space has sat empty since February.
Hem 377 joins a growing list of recent Vancouver closures, including Robba Da Matti in Yaletown, Dulcey, and Burgoo Downtown.
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Address: 5026 Victoria Dr, Vancouver, BC V5P 3T9