A half hour drive away in Cuba, NY is the recently opened coffee shop, The Perfect Blend Coffeehouse and Eatery. Located downtown along Main Street in the historic opera house building, next to the Cuba Cheese Museum, The Perfect Blend provides a hybrid coffeeshop-cafe feel. It offers a good place to go off campus for breakfast or lunch, to do homework, or simply escape from the typical everyday scenery around Houghton.
The environment is comfortable — the kind of place you can go for a quick visit or stay and spend an entire afternoon. The staff are friendly, helpful, and excellent baristas. As for music, there is a good mix of pop, alternative, and indie, including Lorde, Imagine Dragons, and Capital Cities. It’s the kind you would probably want to listen to at a coffeeshop.
With booths, tables, and cushy furniture, The Perfect Blend offers a place to eat or sit and just drink coffee, depending on your mood. An electric fireplace surrounded by a leather couch and two armless chairs sits against the wall decorated with an assortment of clocks of varying size and shape. The rich wood coffee bar goes nicely with the beautiful old hardwood floors which throughout the second half of the shop, which is also decorated with burlap and other natural colors. The large front windows let in a lot of natural light, which is complemented by tasteful lighting from lamps and hanging ceiling lights.
With fresh brewed coffee, espressos, lattes, and cappuccinos with an assortment of flavors on their menu, they have all the staples of a good coffeehouse. All their coffee is sourced locally from the Finger Lakes Coffee Roasters. They also have hot teas and cold drink menu which includes iced tea, frozen lattes, chai chillers, and soft drinks. Most of their drinks average around three dollars.
Their colorful chalk board food menu has a variety of breakfast items, salads, and paninis. Many have local names such as the “Western New Yorker,” “Patriot,” or “86er” (named after interstate 86, which runs through Cuba). Continuing with their locally sourced theme, all the sandwiches that made with cheese use the famous Cuba Cheese Shoppe. Their food items are fairly priced with most ranging from four to seven dollars. You can get a soup, sandwich, and drink for right around ten dollars, maybe a little more with dessert.
There’s also a variety of sweet baked goods to choose from. These include muffins, cookies, cakes, and their delicious energy-filled Go-Go Balls made from peanut butter, nuts, chocolate, and flax seeds. You’ll definitely want more than one.
With pretty much everything you could want from a coffee shop, there is precious little it is lacking. However, there are a few out of place “corporate coffee” poster advertisements which take away from the antique, old opera house feel of the place. They are your typical pumpkin spice or other photographic advertisements and they don’t fit with the overall decor.
Perhaps to be attributed to the old building, a somewhat weird or quirky aspect of the shop is the location of their bathrooms. To get to them you feel as though you are exiting the building as you go through a backdoor, down a hallway and turn left to find them.
For their winter hours The Perfect Blend is open weekdays from 6:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday 8 a.m. to 2 p.m, but unfortunately they are closed on Sundays. Starting in March they will be open longer hours. To get directions, their address is 14 West Main St, Cuba, New York. While you’re there you can visit the vintage shop, By the Light of the Moon, which is connected to the coffeehouse.