Puffle Cafe

At Puffle Cafe, the first order is usually a slice of Japanese cheesecake and a glass of Vietnamese slow-drip coffee — a pairing that says the place was built on two ideas at once. One is a dessert café: puffle waffles, cream puffs, sundaes, and composed crepes, with the airy Japanese cheesecake at the centre. The other is a proper coffee café, pouring phin-filtered Robusta brewed with condensed milk the patient way. Both run out of one small storefront on Silvercreek Parkway.

The sweets read like a tour of textures. Japanese cheesecake is the lighter, airier cousin of the dense New York style, and it anchors the baking side of the menu. The Cheese Puffle is the waffle that explains the name — a warm bubble waffle folded around French vanilla ice cream, cheesecake, strawberries, and Nutella sauce, with the Lilly running quieter on vanilla ice cream, banana, shredded coconut, and caramel. The crepes are built the same way: Gone Nuts layers Moose Tracks ice cream with crushed almond, banana, and peanut butter sauce; Oreo Sensation stacks Muskoka mocha ice cream with Oreo, brownie pieces, and Nutella; Peachy keeps things calm, with mascarpone cream, peach compote, and caramel. For a table that wants the full production, the Trinity sundae arrives with three ice creams, crushed peanuts, banana, and strawberries.

What keeps Puffle from being only a treat stop is the savoury crepe lane. The Avo Chicken folds baked chicken breast with avocado, cheddar, and chipotle; the Classic runs bacon, egg, cheddar, and sautéed mushroom; the Smoked Salmon goes lighter, with capers and dill. Those plates turn an afternoon dessert run into a light lunch, and they are the reason a small café can absorb so many different visits without feeling like it is stretching. The menu is wide enough that a table rarely has to agree on what kind of stop it is.

The coffee is where the owners' story shows through. Khanh Tran and Linh Vu opened Puffle Cafe in the second week of July 2020, and built the drink list around a Vietnamese coffee tradition they knew firsthand; local reporting traces it to a family coffee-farm background. Launching a dessert café in the middle of that first pandemic summer was its own kind of bet, and the coffee is the part of the menu that feels most personal to them. The slow drip uses Robusta beans and a phin filter set over the glass, the grounds releasing into condensed milk a few drops at a time, served hot or over ice. For something colder, the espresso affogato drowns French vanilla ice cream in espresso, hazelnuts, and shaved dark chocolate.

Beyond the slow drip, the drink list keeps a wide café range: fresh drip coffee, a London Fog, matcha lattes hot or iced, a vanilla frappe for the walk back out. That breadth is part of how Puffle holds so many kinds of visits — a student parked over a matcha, a family on a treat run, a quick cream-puff pickup, a coffee on a patio seat when the weather allows. Most orders can go to a table, out the door, or onto a delivery app without changing what comes out of the kitchen.

None of it runs expensive, which is part of how the café works. A visit can be as small as a cream puff and a drip coffee, or as full as a savoury crepe, a waffle, and a slow drip to finish — without ever crossing into special-occasion territory. It is an easy place to underrate from the sign out front, a dessert café in a Silvercreek plaza, until the slow drip lands at the table beside a slice of Japanese cheesecake and the two ideas turn out to be one.