Chicory in the Cup

First in the cultural coffee traditions series — Vietnamese phin, café Touba, Turkish cezve, Ethiopian buna, and the Italian moka pot follow on scheduled Thursdays through July 2026.

A friend of mine drinks his coffee with chicory and offered to bring me a can to try. I'd vaguely heard of it — Café Du Monde, New Orleans, beignets — but I hadn't thought much about why the practice existed or where it came from. So I went to find out.

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If you order a café au lait at Café Du Monde in New Orleans, you are not drinking coffee — at least not by the standard the specialty world uses to define the term. You are drinking a mixture of coffee and roasted, ground chicory root, in roughly equal proportions, cut with hot milk and sweetened. The flavor is woody, slightly bitter, dark-chocolate-adjacent, and almost completely unlike anything served by a third-wave coffee bar in Brooklyn or Oslo.

Most specialty coffee writing treats this as a problem to be politely overlooked. The brand even publishes a careful disclaimer that its chicory blend is best understood through the lens of New Orleans history rather than the standards of single-origin coffee. The implied apology — we know this isn't really specialty, please appreciate the heritage — has become the dominant register for talking about coffee traditions that don't conform to third-wave expectations.

This is worth pushing back on. Chicory in coffee is not a deficiency relative to specialty. It is a different beverage, with its own history, its own flavor logic, and a cultural durability that the specialty world has not come close to earning. And in at least four distinct global traditions, the practice has outlived the conditions that originally produced it — which is the clearest evidence that it survived because it was good, not because it was cheap.

What chicory actually is

Chicory is Cichorium intybus, a perennial herbaceous plant in the dandelion family, with blue flowers that line roadsides across much of Europe and North America. Its roots, when harvested, dried, roasted, and ground, produce a powder that looks nearly identical to ground coffee. Brewed, it yields a dark brown liquid that mimics coffee's color, body, and bitterness — but contains no caffeine and almost none of coffee's aromatic complexity.

What chicory does contribute is a distinctive set of flavors that coffee alone does not produce: a woody backbone, a faintly nutty sweetness, a soft mouthfeel from the inulin (a soluble fiber) that constitutes most of the root's substance. In a blend, chicory rounds out coffee's edges. It softens the acidity of darker roasts, adds a chocolate-tinged depth, and produces a brew that holds up to substantial dilution with milk — which is why every chicory-coffee tradition in the world is, with vanishingly few exceptions, a milk-coffee tradition.

The French origin (1806–1814)

Chicory's career as a coffee adjunct began with a trade war. In 1806 Napoleon Bonaparte's Continental Blockade closed European ports to British shipping. Coffee, mostly imported and largely traded through British-controlled supply chains, became scarce across continental Europe. French citizens, accustomed to coffee since the 17th century, looked for substitutes.

Chicory was already familiar — Egyptian medicine had used it for millennia, and Northern European herbalists treated it as a digestive aid. During the Continental Blockade years, French drinkers and producers turned to roasted chicory root as a practical coffee substitute or extender, and the practice spread quickly enough that it outlived the shortage that helped popularize it. France began commercial chicory cultivation, and by the middle of the 19th century the country was exporting tens of millions of pounds of roasted chicory annually to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond.

When Napoleon's blockade ended in 1814 and coffee returned to French markets, chicory did not disappear. By then, an entire generation of French drinkers had grown up on coffee-chicory blends and developed a preference for the rounder, less acidic flavor. The "necessity" framing — that chicory was a wartime substitute reluctantly tolerated — had already been overtaken by genuine acquired taste. Chicory became part of how the French defined coffee, not a workaround for its absence.

Louisiana and the Civil War

French settlers and Acadian refugees — the latter expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in the 1750s and resettled across the Gulf Coast — brought the chicory habit to Louisiana through the 18th century. New Orleans, a French and Spanish colonial port that became one of America's largest coffee import hubs by the 1840s, was already roasting chicory before the Civil War made it indispensable.

When Union naval blockades cut off the Port of New Orleans in 1861, the city's coffee supply collapsed. Locals, drawing on a tradition they already knew, expanded chicory's role from supplement to substitute. Beets, acorns, parsnips, even burnt sugar (sold under the name "black jack") joined the list of stretching ingredients, but chicory was the one that stuck. When the blockade lifted, New Orleanians did what their French ancestors had done a generation earlier: they kept drinking the chicory blend because they preferred it. Café Du Monde, established in 1862 and long associated with coffee and chicory, is now the most visible inheritor of that preference. Its tinted-yellow can of dark roast with chicory sits on supermarket shelves across the American South — and, as we'll see, across Vietnamese American grocery stores in California, Texas, and beyond.

Vietnamese diaspora and Café Du Monde

This is the part of the story that gets told least often, and it is the part that matters most for understanding chicory coffee as a living tradition rather than a historical artifact.

When the French colonized Vietnam in the second half of the 19th century — formalizing French Indochina in 1887 — they introduced coffee to the highlands. They also introduced, alongside it, the chicory-blending practice that French coffee culture had carried since Napoleon. According to historian Erica Peters, who has documented French colonial foodways in detail, chicory was cultivated in Vietnam under the French and the coffee-chicory blend became normal in colonial Vietnamese cafés through the early 20th century. Whether Vietnamese drinkers themselves embraced the chicory tradition during the colonial period — versus encountering it as a French import — is harder to establish. What is documented is that the dark, smoky, chicory-tinged flavor profile of pre-1975 Vietnamese street coffee was real, and that it was what Vietnamese drinkers grew up tasting.

After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, more than 130,000 South Vietnamese refugees arrived in the United States. About 20,000 settled along the Gulf Coast — many in suburban New Orleans, in fishing communities like Bayou La Batre and Empire, with help from Catholic Charities and parish networks. They could not easily source the specific Vietnamese coffee they had grown up on. What they found instead, on local supermarket shelves, was Café Du Monde's chicory-coffee blend. The flavor profile — dark roasted, slightly bitter, woody, designed to be brewed strong and cut with milk — was close enough to home that it became a substitute. Then, over a generation, the substitute became the standard. Today, Vietnamese American restaurants from coast to coast brew Café Du Monde in their phin filters and serve it as cà phê sữa đá, sweetened with condensed milk over ice. The orange can is now arguably more central to Vietnamese American coffee culture than to New Orleans's.

This is what makes the chicory story remarkable. It is not merely that one practice survived two wartime blockades. It is that the same practice, born in one colonial context, was carried into another colonial context, then transplanted again via refugee diaspora, and in every transplant it stayed. Three centuries, three regions with little in common geographically — all drinking the same coffee.

South India, the Coffee Houses, and World War II

The fourth tradition is also colonial but follows a different trajectory. Coffee arrived in South India in the 17th century via the Sufi saint Baba Budan, who is said to have smuggled seven seeds from Yemen and planted them in the hills of Karnataka. The crop spread across the Western Ghats, and by the early 20th century coffee was a domestic staple in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh. Chicory was added later: most sources point to World War II, when Allied naval restrictions disrupted coffee imports and Indian roasters began extending their supplies with locally cultivated chicory root.

What makes the South Indian case different is that chicory became regulated. Indian food regulations formally define coffee-chicory mixtures as a commercial category and require the proportion of coffee and chicory to be declared, with coffee making up at least 51 percent by mass — a sign of how established the blend became in the market for South Indian filter coffee. Today most South Indian filter coffee is brewed from a 20–30% chicory blend, percolated slowly through a brass or stainless filter, then mixed with hot milk and sugar and served in the distinctive davara-tumbler set. The frothy, dark, chicory-tinged result is so different from the third-wave standard that Indian specialty roasters — there are several now — have to fight an uphill battle to convince domestic drinkers that single-origin without chicory is even coffee.

What this means for how we think about specialty

The specialty coffee movement of the last twenty-five years has done extraordinary work. Better farming practices, traceable supply chains, processing innovation, the rediscovery of varietals that commodity-grade buying had nearly erased — all of it is real progress, and day9's directory exists to recognize the roasters who carry it forward.

But the specialty framing also has a blind spot. It tends to treat any tradition that isn't oriented toward maximizing single-origin clarity as inferior to the third-wave ideal. Chicory coffee fails almost every third-wave test: it isn't single-origin, it isn't traceable, it isn't designed to express terroir, it isn't typically light-roasted, it isn't meant to be drunk black, and it doesn't taste like fruit or florals. By the strict criteria of specialty, it shouldn't exist. And yet hundreds of millions of people drink it daily and have for generations.

The honest reading is that chicory coffee is a parallel tradition rather than a degraded one. It optimizes for different things — depth, body, milk integration, durability of preparation, regional identity — and it has continued to optimize for those things long after the supply pressures that originally produced it have disappeared. That is the test of a real tradition: it survives when the necessity that birthed it no longer applies.

The day9 freshness curve still applies to chicory blends, by the way. A chicory-coffee blend benefits from the same off-gassing window as straight coffee — maybe slightly shorter, since the chicory itself doesn't off-gas. If you brew Café Du Monde the day the can is opened, you are tasting the same gassy harshness that a single-origin from Tim Wendelboe would give you on day two after roast. Wait a week. The blend rounds out. The chicory's sweetness comes forward. The coffee underneath gets clearer. Whatever tradition you are drinking from, the curve is the same.

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This is the first piece in an ongoing series on global coffee traditions that fall outside the third-wave specialty frame. Future entries will cover Ethiopian buna ceremony, Turkish cezve, Italian moka pot, Senegalese café Touba, Mexican café de olla, and Vietnamese phin filter brewing.

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Sources

On chicory the plant, the root, inulin, and its caffeine-free chemistry

• The Origins and Grandeur of Chicory Coffee — The Brew Adventures

On the Napoleonic Continental Blockade and French chicory adoption (1806–1814)

• The History of Using Chicory — New Orleans Roast
• The Roots of Café Chicorée — En Route

On the Acadian migration, the Civil War blockade of New Orleans, and 19th-century chicory practice in Louisiana

• How Chicory Came to Be a Fixture of New Orleans' Coffee Culture — Louisiana Cookin'
• The History of the Chicory Coffee Mix That New Orleans Made Its Own — Smithsonian Magazine
• Coffee in New Orleans — New Orleans Historical

On Café Du Monde's 1862 establishment and its identity with coffee and chicory

• Café Du Monde company history

On French colonial coffee in Vietnam and the colonial-era chicory blend

• Erica J. Peters, Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century, AltaMira Press, 2012
• The Secret Ingredient to America's Vietnamese Coffee — Atlas Obscura

On Vietnamese refugee migration after 1975, Gulf Coast resettlement, and Café Du Monde's adoption by the Vietnamese American diaspora

• Why Vietnamese Americans Use Café Du Monde Coffee — Nguyen Coffee Supply
• Vietnamese Coffee — Rouses Supermarkets
• An Unfiltered History of Vietnamese Coffee — Barista Magazine

On Baba Budan and the 17th-century introduction of coffee to South India

• The Story of South Indian Filter Kappi — The Good Life Company
• South Indian Filter Coffee: History, Technique, Recipe and Tips — Slurrp

On the WWII-era integration of chicory into Indian filter coffee

• What is South Indian Filter Coffee? — Food52
• South Indian Filter Coffee Is Like No Coffee You've Had Before — Salon

On Indian food regulation of coffee-chicory mixtures and the 51-percent coffee minimum

• FSSAI compliance letter on coffee–chicory mixtures (Nov. 2021), Tripura Health Department archive
• FSSAI letter via PFNDAI