Tra Atiso

Artichoke (Cynara scolymus), a Mediterranean thistle, reached Vietnam with the French during the colonial era. After the physician Alexandre Yersin helped identify the Lang Bian plateau as a hill-station site in 1893, the French developed Da Lat from the 1910s onward as a cool retreat and an agricultural station for temperate European crops; the mountain climate, around 1,500 metres above sea level, suited vegetables that would not grow in the tropical lowlands. Artichoke took hold here in the first half of the 20th century, and Da Lat in Lam Dong became Vietnam's artichoke capital. Sources differ on the exact planting year — some cite the 1930s or 1940s — so the introduction is best dated to the French colonial period rather than a single year. Vietnamese growers, valuing the plant as much for medicine as for food, turned its leaves and roots into a herbal tea, and the dark boiled-down extract cao atiso became a regional specialty.

In the cup it pours a deep amber-to-brown, like weak coffee or strong black tea, with a faintly grassy, vegetal smell. The first taste is gently bitter — the green, slightly medicinal bitterness of artichoke leaf rather than the sharp astringency of tea tannin — and it finishes clean with a cooling sweet aftertaste once rock sugar is added. The mouthfeel is light and watery, never thick unless brewed from concentrated cao atiso, which lends a darker, more roasted, almost molasses-like depth. Iced, it drinks like a soft herbal soda without the fizz; hot, it is mellow and comforting.

The bitter, liver-tonic reputation rests on the plant's caffeoylquinic acids — chiefly cynarin (a di-caffeoylquinic acid) and chlorogenic acid, concentrated in the leaves — together with the bitter sesquiterpene lactone cynaropicrin. These compounds are water-soluble, so a long, gentle simmer rather than a quick steep is needed to draw them, along with colour, out of the tough dried stems and roots; the brown hue comes from oxidised polyphenols. Boiling the infusion down for hours evaporates the water and reduces it to cao atiso, a concentrated extract in which sugars caramelise slightly, deepening both colour and flavour. Cynarin is choleretic — it stimulates bile flow — which underlies the traditional use as a digestive and liver tonic, though the everyday cup is taken simply as a cooling drink.