Perk: The Coffee Shop That Turned Into a Friendship

• Vibe: Coffee shop by day, cocktail bar by night.
• Signature: 24-hour fermented doughnuts, hand-rolled daily (sell out by lunch).
• Location: Church Street, Old Town — steps from the Victorian Market.

Perk is a doughnut shop that happens to also serve some of the best coffee in Inverness — or maybe it's the other way round; regulars argue about it. By day it's barely bigger than a front room, with a counter of hand-rolled doughnuts that change flavour every month and a menu built around Dear Green, a specialty Glasgow roaster. By night, a few times a week, that same small room turns into a cocktail bar. It's the kind of place where the drink you order isn't always the one you end up drinking.

That's not a throwaway line. Kersty, our daughter Hannah and I went in for a cocktail one evening and ended up sharing Perk's only big table — everything else is a couple of bar stools by the window and the far wall — with a couple we'd never met, Alan and Maria Johnstone. It was simpler than that: we shared a first name, and they were already on the margaritas. We ordered a round to match, then another. It turned out Nicole Mclennan, who owns Perk, is Maria's niece, though we didn't find that out until later. That was the spring of 2025. It's since become a proper weekend habit — a Saturday or Sunday decided on the day, out to see somewhere new, lunch along the way, home again by evening. In a little over a year, the Johnstones have shown us more corners of the Highlands than I could list in one piece. That's exactly the kind of thing that happens in a room this small: strangers get pushed together, and sometimes it sticks.

Doughnuts That Don't Last the Afternoon

Nicole Mclennan opened Perk in October 2018, and by her own account she got there the hard way — teaching herself doughnut-making from nothing, one failed batch after another, until it worked. The dough gets fermented for more than 24 hours before it's hand-rolled fresh each morning, and the flavours change monthly, so nothing on that counter sits still for long. There's usually a vegan option or two — worth knowing if you're travelling with someone who can't eat the standard version. The trade-off is availability: reviewers and locals both say the same thing — the good stuff can be gone well before the café closes at 3pm, so if a doughnut's the reason you're going, go in the morning, not after lunch.

"There were hundreds and hundreds of bad ones before I made a good one."

— Nicole Mclennan, The Press & Journal

The Coffee's Not Roasted Here — And That's Fine

It's a fair question, and one I've heard asked at the counter: does Perk roast its own beans? No — it uses Dear Green, a specialty roaster based in Glasgow, for the daytime coffee and, come evening, for the espresso martinis too. You can buy the beans by the bag if you want to take the taste home with you. What Perk actually controls is everything downstream of the beans — the grind, the shots, the training behind the counter — and it shows in the numbers. Perk holds a 4.8 out of 5 across more than a hundred Tripadvisor reviews and carries a Travellers' Choice badge, which in a city with no shortage of decent coffee is not nothing.

Perk by Night

A few evenings a week — Thursdays and Sundays until 8pm, Fridays and Saturdays until half past eleven — Perk switches from café to cocktail bar. It bills itself as an espresso martini bar, and the martinis are made with the same Dear Green coffee that goes into the daytime cups, which strikes me as decent joined-up thinking rather than a gimmick. There's no booking system for the evening side; you just turn up, and if it's busy, you might end up sharing that one big table with whoever else is in — which, as it happens, is how we met the Johnstones in the first place.

Small Room, Big Following

Perk is not a big space, and it doesn't try to be. Reviewers say the same thing over and over — great coffee, great doughnuts, not always enough seats to enjoy either. It's dog-friendly, there's free wifi, and the staff get consistent praise for being quick without ever feeling rushed. The doughnuts run close to £4.50 each, which a handful of reviewers call steep — I don't think it is, given the 24-hour dough and the monthly reinvention, but you should know the price before you order six. In November 2024, the Inverness City Centre Business Awards named Perk Café of the Year — decided by public vote rather than a judging panel, with more than five thousand locals casting over fifty thousand votes across every category that year. It picked up the Connoisseurs Choice "Sweet Treats" award again in 2025. That's not just visitors talking.

A Church Street Address — and Now a Second One in Hilton

Church Street sits in the middle of Inverness's Old Town, with the Victorian Market's entrance a few doors along and the River Ness a short walk beyond that — easy to fold into a morning spent wandering the castle, the cathedral, and the market stalls. Perk's success outgrew the one shop: in February 2026, Mclennan opened a second site, Perk Pantry, on Tomatin Road in Hilton — the former Utopia Cafe — set up as a combined bakery, kitchen and café. It's daytime-only, Thursday to Monday, 7:30am to 4pm, with the same doughnuts and pastries as Church Street plus its own savoury menu — shakshuka, soup and focaccia, breakfast bagels. There's no evening bar out there; if it's the espresso martinis you're after, that's still Church Street's alone. What the bigger space has done is bring the baking back in-house for both sites, rather than off-site as before.

We didn't go to Perk that night looking for anything beyond a coffee and a cocktail. We left with the Johnstones' number, and it's turned into a proper weekend habit since — a day decided that morning, somewhere new to see, lunch on the way, home by evening. I still order a margarita most times I'm in. Some habits are worth keeping.