The village of Burdett is four corners and a general store, a volunteer fire department, a post office, a church, and — at the corner of Main Street where the road drops toward the lake — a coffee shop in a small frame building with a gravel lot in front. This is Overlook Coffee Company. You drive past it at thirty-five miles per hour on the way from Route 414 up to the Finger Lakes National Forest and you miss it entirely unless someone told you. The first time through, most of our guests do miss it. The second morning of their stay, we point them.
The shop is a small operation. A roastery at the back, a counter at the front, a handful of seats, a window that looks out onto Main Street and, beyond it, toward the long western drop down to the lake. The beans are roasted on-site in small batches. The baristas know the menu by heart because the menu is short and because the same three or four people have been running the counter since the place opened. This is a neighborhood coffee shop in the actual sense, not the marketing sense. If you live in Burdett, you come here once or twice a week. If you are a weekender at one of the houses along the shore, you come here every morning of your stay. If you are a tourist driving the wine trail, you might not come here at all, because nothing about the building's presentation is designed to pull a tourist off the road.
We are not going to pretend to know the details of the ownership story that we have not directly confirmed. Overlook is a small enough operation that most of what is written about it online is wrong in small ways, and we would rather write an accurate paragraph of one sentence than an inaccurate paragraph of five. What we can say is this: the roaster is the same person who has been roasting there for years, the beans are ordered in small lots from specific importers, the roast profiles are consistent across visits, and the shop has the pace of a place run by people who show up for work and care whether the espresso pulls correctly. That is what you want. You do not need more than that.
The roast that gets our attention, morning to morning, is whatever single-origin is on the board as the pour-over option. Overlook keeps two or three origins live at a given time — rotating through Ethiopian washed, a Central American washed, occasionally a Sumatran — and the pour-over is made to order on a V60 or a Chemex at the counter. This is the pour you order if you actually care about coffee. The barista will ask you whether you want it black. You will say yes. The cup will arrive four minutes later and will taste like the origin it came from, which sounds like a tautology and is not, because most coffee in this country does not. The espresso drinks are fine — the cortado is the best of them, which is usually the case at shops that take espresso seriously without obsessing over it — and the drip coffee, which most mornings is a medium-roast blend, is the correct workhorse cup.
The pastry case is small and rotates. Some mornings there is a proper croissant from a bakery we do not know the name of and are not going to guess at. Some mornings there is a banana bread that is clearly being baked somewhere nearby and brought in hot, which tells you the sourcing relationships are real. Some mornings there is almost nothing left by ten because the regulars have cleared the case. Arrive early. That is one of the two rules of the place.
The other rule is that the rhythm at the counter is important. You order, you pay, you move to the right, you wait for your cup. You do not linger at the register to discuss beans unless the line is empty. When the line is empty — which it sometimes is on a Tuesday in April or a Thursday in November — the baristas will talk beans with you, and the conversation is the kind of conversation you can have at most good small roasters: the roast was pulled eight days ago, the crop is from the Yirgacheffe region, the importer is one they have worked with for three years, the brew recipe for the current single-origin is forty-two grams to seven hundred grams, a three-and-a-half-minute pour. You can take or leave this level of detail. The coffee in the cup tells you the same thing on its own, which is the test a good coffee shop has to pass.
What we like about Overlook, and what we tell our guests about when we hand them the companion and circle the address: it is a place that belongs to the village first and to the weekenders second. The people at the counter on a Tuesday morning in January are the neighbors. They know one another. They ask about the dog, about the grandkids, about the ice on the lake. You are a visitor in their morning, not the other way around. That is the right posture for a guest to adopt in a small village. It is also, for a certain kind of traveler — the one who has been to too many coffee shops that were engineered for Instagram — a genuine relief. Overlook is not engineered. It is just a coffee shop that the village of Burdett happens to have, run well, on a particular corner, with particular hours.
The corner matters, too. The shop sits at one of the higher points in the village, and in the winter, when the trees are down, you can stand outside with your cup and see west-facing slivers of the lake beyond the Main Street storefronts. On a January morning, with ice on the shale shoreline four hundred feet down the hill, the view from the parking lot is the kind of view a person could convince themselves to move for. Some people have. The village has slowly, quietly, over the last decade, accumulated a few more of them — escapees from Ithaca, from Rochester, from New York City — and a coffee shop at Overlook's level is part of the reason they stayed rather than left after the first winter. A working small roaster is a thing a village notices.
We do not, as a rule, write about coffee shops. The voice of this companion is about restaurants and wineries and a lake, not about the things that appear on the "sixteen best cafes in upstate New York" listicles that the internet has produced in abundance. The reason we are writing about Overlook is that it is ours, in the small geographic sense — it is the place we send our guests for a cup on their first morning, and it is the place we ourselves stop at on the way up to the Forest, and it is the kind of morning ritual that turns a stay into a stay rather than a visit. If you are at Lakeside Landing for four nights, you will be at Overlook on three of those mornings. That is the rhythm we want for our guests, and Overlook makes the rhythm possible.
Why it matters, to us, to the list: because the mornings are what people remember from a Finger Lakes weekend, and because the first thirty minutes of a morning — before the dock, before the drive, before anything else — are set by the cup of coffee that starts them. Overlook is the correct first cup. The rest of the day follows from there.
What we tell our guests to order
- The pour-over of whatever single-origin is currently on the board - A cortado if you want the short, concentrated cup - Whatever pastry is in the case that morning — the rotation is small but the bar is high
How to plan the visit
Open mornings; hours shift by day and season, so check before you drive. The lot in front holds five or six cars; Main Street parking is fine. On summer weekends, arrive before nine. On weekdays, any time works. Cash and card both accepted. Four minutes from the Landing.