Do not touch your face. Do not gather in groups of 10. Do not hug your mother.
In this year of “do nots,” many are finding a reprieve in doughnuts.
Artisanal doughnut shops are popping up everywhere. As such places tend to do, they are getting huge on social media, attracting around-the-corner (socially distanced) lines, and becoming prestige purchases as urban professionals with money to burn and carbs to spare go nuts for doughnuts.
Washington, D.C., alone has five prestige gourmet doughnut shops, which inspired a 2,500-word essay from the food blog Eater D.C. Eater Editor and eater/editor Gabe Hiatt did the shoe-leather reporting himself, tasting the fares of Donut Run, Toscana Market, Rose Ave Bakery, La Bodega, and a bagel shop called Call Your Mother.
The dough is nuts: $4 a pop at most of these places.
Donut Run doughnuts are so fluffy that owner Nicole Dao said, “We sell air.” If the air doesn’t have virus droplets in it, apparently, Washingtonians will shell out. La Bodega sells massive doughnuts to justify the cost. Call Your Mother was late to the doughnut game because the demand for their artisanal bagels was too high. “Bagels [are] so crazy,” one baker said, “It’s so hard. Dealing with dough, it’s a nightmare.” In other words, dough is nuts.
Rose Ave Bakery’s Rose Nguyen is a woman of the middle. “I live in the middle,” she says, referring to her moderate fluffiness and moderate size. But also, her doughnuts have middles instead of holes. They are dough nuts in the botanical sense of nuts: They are spherical and oh-so-edible with a crispy “shell” and deliciousness inside. She’s not nuts, though. She knows those doughnut nuts often want their doughnuts to be dough nuts in the hardware sense — like the nuts that screw onto bolts. So, she pokes out the middle in some (and probably eats them).
And some more nuts-and-bolts doughnut places around the country have thrived during the coronavirus pandemic.
In Old Sacramento, the California city’s delightfully walkable riverfront historical district, people go nuts for Danny’s Mini Donuts, a mainstay that has adapted fine to the pandemic. The neighborhood is made for strolling around outside, and so, Danny, when forced to shut down, took the occasion to turn his shop around. He locked the front door, opened a window to face the sidewalk, got a custom-made pass-through for doughnuts and dollars, and began operating like an old beach-town boardwalk funnel cake shop.
What will happen to ordinary doughnuts as the money flocks to elite doughnuts? A tale from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey might give us a clue. A Jersey man with “some inside contacts at a famed doughnut outlet” tends to get his hands on “just-expired pastries,” and according to local columnist Jay Mann writing for the Long Beach Island Sand Paper, “he dumps the humanly prized delights outside. His backyard deer go gonzo over them!”
Doe go nuts for to-go doughnuts.
Who doesn’t?
