The Doughnut Gatherer

What happens when a restaurant critic gives birth to a child who won’t eat? Failure, icing, sprinkles, journeys among dinosaur road-diggers, tears, and a little bit of triumph.

Photo by Terry Brennan

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Perhaps what I like so much about Who Needs Donuts is that, aside from imagining a world in which children are unafraid of the city, it features the only professional doughnut-gatherer I’ve ever run across—besides myself.

In many years of restaurant criticism, I’ve written about doughnuts repeatedly. I actually have a sort of road map in my mind of what I consider the best doughnuts in town: There’s Mel-O-Glaze, in south Minneapolis, home to the city’s best raised-glazed doughnuts, as well as the cake doughnuts that I prefer above all others. Sweet and rich, they’re almost like pound cake. Even if I’ve been to six other doughnut places first, I can always eat a whole doughnut when I get to Mel-O-Glaze, which is saying something.

Then there’s the Baker’s Wife’s, a mere 10 blocks north of Mel-O-Glaze. A lot of people argue that they make the best cake doughnuts in town, and I see that as a respectable opinion. They’re less sweet, crisper, and they seem even more old-fashioned than most plain cake doughnuts.

I also really like Wuollet’s, which has the area’s best selection of the usual suspects: Long Johns, bear claws, and the like. Then there are our other lovable local doughnut places: Sara Jane in Northeast, Rosemark in St. Paul, Granny Donut in West St. Paul, Denny’s Fifth Avenue Bakery in Bloomington, the Old Fashioned Donut Shoppe in New Hope.

ON THE WAY to Denny’s Fifth Avenue Bakery in Bloomington, I fed Beans lines from all the books: “‘Scuse me, Mister,’ said the tyke/ ‘But where’s the donut that I like? It isn’t here, it isn’t there—You think it’s under that éclair?’”

We zipped down the construction canyon of I-35, between the dinosaur-sized diggers, oblivious to their dusty menace, for the topic of doughnuts was just that riveting. Denny’s Fifth Avenue feels like it has been lifted whole from the 1970s; it’s all Jimmy Carter bicentennial blue and naugahyde brown, slick, vinyl-touched, and awkward. Beans stood in front of the pastry case like a pro. There they all were, the Long Johns, the cream-filled, the jelly. Arnie had prepared him well for this moment.

“Is that brains leaking out?” Beans asked, rhetorically. “Nah, it’s just jelly.”

I got a dozen, and he got one just like Arnie, chocolate-covered, with bright-colored candy sprinkles. I placed it on a piece of wax paper and set it on his lap as he sat in his car seat. There it rested for the drive home. I fed him lines from the books all the way home: “Do you doughnuts know you’re going to be eaten?” I asked. “Yes, we’re delicious!” he replied. “Try us for yourself!”

When we arrived at home, I looked at the doughnut carefully. To the untrained eye, it might have seemed untouched. But there was one small blemish on the icing’s surface, as if a thumb had smudged it, or a little mouse had, perhaps, taken a lick.

A few days later, we went to Wuollet’s. The one on Hennepin Avenue that always has a pleasant mix of dog-walkers from Lake of the Isles, anti-coffeeshop rebel teens doing homework, and construction workers and tradesmen. We got a box of the assorted doughnuts. I particularly enjoyed the raised yeast one frosted with chocolate.It had a deep real-cocoa taste. However, even to my wishful eye, I knew that the sprinkle-topped doughnut I got for Beans was completely untouched. I coined a name for such perfectly lovely doughnuts that went unsampled: They were Holders. Beans liked holding them. In fact, he liked them so much that he would spend 24 hours holding on to them, moving them from plate to bag repeatedly. But if any icing got on his hands, he’d demand: “Mom, can you clean it up?”

We made a trip to Mel-O-Glaze. Sun twinkled from the wide parkway outside and into the vintage bakery. I thought the doughnuts were great. The raised glazed was light and dewy within, the cake doughnut was sweet and buoyant in just the right way. But, it, too, was a Holder.

We went to A Baker’s Wife’s, a tiny bakery cluttered as a church sale with baked goods, but the crisp little gem there was also a Holder. We even made the trip to Granny Donuts a nowhere-looking chain in West St. Paul. The doughnuts there were, at best, average, cold, and greasy tasting. I wished I had made mine a Holder, instead of a Taster.

Doughnuts, it turned out, were not the thin end of the wedge. In fact, doughnuts were starting to become a lot like parenting itself, which in my experience is a series of minute, constant, intolerable failures, interleaved with exhaustion, and punctuated by moments of heart-rending cuteness that somehow add up to general success. The success, of course, comes not from anything one does, but because of nature’s plan: The kids grow. Before I had kids I’d hear things like, “Parenting is humbling,” and I’d put that in the same basket as, “Life is sweet,” and “Happiness is worth pursuing.” Whatever. Now I know that parenting is humbling because you can put all the mighty force of your heart and mind into it and you will still be failing. Where’d I put that remote control?

Still, while doughnuts were looking to be a series of failures they also had become a habit, and when I picked Beans up from pre-school one day, he asked for a doughnut. It was the end of the day when we stopped at Wuollet’s, and they were cleaned out. So we crossed the street to SuperAmerica. I hoisted him up so he could peer inside the plastic doors at the plastic-looking donuts on their plastic trays, and Beans chose a raised-glazed and a vanilla-iced with bright candy sprinkles. Such doughnuts are the heroes, respectively, of The Donut Chef and Arnie the Doughnut. Beans put them in a plastic bag, and carried them around like carnival goldfish all evening. The doughnuts even came with us when we walked the neighbor’s dog to the neighborhood garden. And as we sat in this garden, next to an old wishing well, Beans turned a handle.

Ka-thunk, ka-thunk.

“Mom,” Beans said, “Mom I want to make a wish in the wishing well.”

“Yes,” I said. “You can make a wish. What do you want to wish for?”

“I wish for doughnuts,” he said. He looked at me intensely, a little smile tickling his mouth with its little baby teeth slightly too far apart. “I wish for doughnuts,” he said again.

I took the doughnut out of the bag and, to my astonishment, Beans actually tried eating it. Of course, he didn’t know how, and went in icing-first, from the top. In the process, he gave himself a clown nose of white icing, and a matching goatee and moustache, too.

All I could think was: Really? A SuperAmerica doughnut?

I re-direct your attention to the central tenet of my professional existence, namely, that good food is better than bad food. This could not stand.

We went back to Mel-O-Glaze. Those doughnuts were still Holders. Back to Baker’s Wife’s. Holders. But then one day we were heading back to the house from the playground when Beans requested a doughnut. We stopped at a coffee shop with baked goods straight from some warehouse store. Beans got a pink doughnut with candy sprinkles—and began eating it straight-away, spinning it until he ate all the sprinkles and icing off the top. His one-year-old sister, sitting next to him in a double stroller finished her doughnut, then lunged for his. Amid the tussle, his doughnut cracked in half.

“Mom!” Beans shrieked, preparing to cry. Until he realized the breaking had revealed a secret inner-nugget of icing and sprinkles. Which he ate.

And now Beans eats doughnuts. I feel pride, because eating more, and not less, is an enormous triumph in our little world, and somehow we got from eating less to eating more. But more than that I feel painfully amused, because as per usual, triumph comes at the end of a chain of near total failure. And this chain of failures has even forced me to come to terms with something that readers have been telling me for years, an idea that I have so hotly resisted—that good enough is indeed good enough, that any port in a storm is better than none, and that there may well be no such thing as a bad doughnut. Sometimes.
 

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Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a senior editor at Minnesota Monthly.