I once went on a job interview in Toronto, and the companies offices were under some repair, so the interviewer took me to a Tim Horton’s to talk. It was full of working people having coffee and donuts. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I did notice that there were a hell of a lot donut shops around when I went back to the airport after the interview.
I didn’t take that job, but I did take one that was based in the Chicago area. Every time I came in to the HQ for meetings, there would be dozens of donuts in the meeting room to start the day.
That doesn’t happen here in Colorado. Meetings often have some pastry and muffins and bagels, and there may be a few donuts among the pastries, but not the big boxes of assorted donuts like there always were in Chicago. (The one exception to this was when Krispy Kreme came to town and everyone went gaga about them before the quickly disappeared.)
I did a little googgling to see if this was a common thing. My conclusion is that some cities are donut cities and others are not. The northeast seems to have the largest concentration of donut cities while the west has fewer. I pulled up Google Maps for some random cities and typed “donut” as a search term. The results:
Denver. Not many at all. There are about 2.5 million people in that map coverage and a couple dozen donut shops. If you go northwest to Boulder, there isn’t a single donut shop in a city of 100,000. The map shows one, but if you click on it and read the comments, you’ll see it has been closed for years.
It’s funny, but I have noticed the same thing on my travels around the country; Some places (Boston especially, but Seattle and San Francisco as well) seem to have a donut joint on every corner, while other places, like right here in Salt Lake City don’t seem to have almost any in the entire metro area of 500,000+
I’m in the D.C. suburbs. Not a donut town. My roots are in New England. I miss donuts, especially the spicy cake donuts you can get at mom & pop diners.
And that Google map doesn’t even hint at the delicious donut-ness of Chicago, because the best ones won’t be found at “donut shops.” They’ll be found at ethnic bakeries:
[ul] Pączki from Polish bakeries,
[li]a good Bismark from a German bakery, or,[/li][li]If you want to stretch the definition of a donut some, fresh churros from the truck at the Maxwell Street Market[/ul][/li]They are all things of beauty.
Sometimes, but mostly other things. Even in a Dunkin Donuts, most people don’t order donuts. They all get coffee but most will get muffins or bagels or an egg sandwich for breakfast.
Working in my industry, I learned two things: Savannah, Georgia is not a doughnut town. And tourists are often shocked that doughnuts aren’t on every street corner of every town. Especially the tourists from New England and Canada, IME. And even more especially when said tourists were traveling along I95 toward Florida, and wanted to know how to find the next Dunkin’ Donuts on their route…
(Those instructions began with “Are you going as far south as Brunswick or Jacksonville?” - 60 and 120 miles south of Savannah. People were HORRIFIED that DD was so remote!)
With Homer Simpson living here, Springfield would have to be a donut town!
Actually, we don’t have huge numbers of donut shops here, but we care enough about donuts that, a few years back when Krispy Kreme was all the rage, there were many heated arguments pitting Krispy Kreme against local chain Mel-O-Cream.
Having worked in LA the past year plus, I was blown away by how many independent donut shops there are here. No Tim Horton’s or Dunkin’ Donuts, that I know of though. The other weird thing is that people here all seem so fit and trim and it’s kind of rare to see anyone eating an actual donut or even going in these places. I suspect that it’s all an elaborate Cheech and Chong sketch.
St. Louis is a doughnut town. Alton Brown even featured several of the best mom-and-pop places on ‘Feasting on Asphalt’. My personal favorite isDonut Drive In, but there are others just as good, and the local bakeries (like Lubely’s and Federhofer’s) make them too. Yummy!
[quote=Chicken Fingers;14229953My roots are in New England. I miss donuts, especially the spicy cake donuts you can get at mom & pop diners.[/quote]
The roots were dug up, and ground into Dunkin’s coffee. The small local joints, for the most part, are gone. There are a few around, but you have to live in a city, or be lucky if they are in your immediate area.
Dunks was ok 20 years ago, but it’s gone way down hill in the quality department, IMO.
