Refuge Cafe — Restaurant in Center Township

Atmosphere was lovely, this is a great place to sit down and do work. I love love love the decor of this place. You can tell a lot of love and thought was put into the interior design. The employees were kind enough, nothing notable though.

The coffee was okay. Nothing to write home about, but still good. Though for me personally, it was so strong that it was hard to finish. And I love strong coffee. It was sour and bitter and overall just weird. It may just not be for me though.

The food, however, was semi-disappointing. While the quality of the individual ingredients does seem to be top tier, fresh and high quality, the food items themselves weren’t great. We paid $40 for 2 coffees, 1 “wrap” (was really a small flatbread), and 1 smoked salmon bagel sandwich. This price would be okay if the food was better. The “wrap” had zero flavor, the most flavor was in the mayo. The chicken didn’t even taste seasoned. With all of the delicious ingredients in the bagel sandwich, you’d think it would be better than it is. Somehow all of the flavor got erased and the most flavorful ingredient was the cream cheese.

I wouldn’t come back here for the food, maybe for the coffee if it were cheaper. The main thing I would come back for is the atmosphere. I would gladly hang out here to get work done. Overall everything was just okay. Not great, but...

My personal favorite coffee place locally. It has a drive thru, the coffee and espresso taste great (the drip coffee doesn’t have a weird unnatural flavoring and isn’t too acidic), the bagels and sandwiches are delicious, and prices are decent for quality. Admittedly I haven’t tried any speciality drinks as I stick to drip or a cortado, I also have only tried the bagel bfast sandwich or bagels w/ cream cheese but they’re so good I can’t not order them, their drive thru isn’t super speedy but again at least they offer one which is a life saver with kids, I have had orders messed up before but nothing crazy and they are always willing to fix (also have had my order messed up literally everywhere else too). In comparison, better quality and more consistent than Sip or Fluid, better prices than Smalltown while still maintaining a craft coffee experience and also has food options outside of weekends, and Starbucks is convenient but the quality for the price is horrendous so I’m picking literally anywhere...

UPDATE: So the owner contacted me and said that he would refund my whole purchase initially…then he said because I ordered through DoorDash and they refunded me for my sandwich that he couldn’t do anything else for me! I have the emails if anyone else would like to see what ripoffs they are here! My daughter surprised me and ordered lunch from here. She made sure to leave off my sandwich two ingredients that are deadly to me. It’s even on the receipt that those two ingredients need to be left off. I open my sandwich and there are the very two ingredients that were supposed to be left off and in huge piles. You guys need to be more careful. That could kill someone. Then someone contacted me from this place and said to send the receipt and info for my daughter and I did and then never heard from them again. Bad business to do that. At least acknowledge that I sent you everything, but nope…they chose to just ignore me after that. If you have allergies…DO...