We're Turning the Screws on Whole Foods

I'm still waiting for Whole Foods to tell me why they have an entire wall of cupcakes for sale but no donuts to speak of. Also, NYC Donut Report!! has received corroboration from a well-placed Whole Foods insider (commenter Jenn) that despite talk to the contrary, there are no donuts for sale in the Chelsea branch of Whole Foods.

Meanwhile, the cry of outrage has been picked up by our comrade Peggy Wang at BuzzFeed. Thanks, Peggy and BuzzFeed!! Together we will bring Whole Foods to its knees!!

If you have a minute, check out the rest of Peggy Wang's stories on BuzzFeed. She covers the gamut from "adorable food" to techniques for filtering bad grammar from Internet comment threads and the very latest developments in "cupless" bras.

Watch out, Whole Foods. Don't mess with the donuts!!

UPDATE: Our fearless inside source, Jenn, has provided some extremely helpful information in the comments section. It appears that donuts are sometimes available at Whole Foods in NYC in the form of donut holes. (I count those as donuts.) And I wouldn't count on the return of Doughnut Plant donuts if they're meant to be priced under $2.00, which is definitely below the going retail price at Doughnut Plant.

Donut or Not Donut??

Discuss.


("Jell Rings" stocked alongside jelly beans at Sahadi's, 187 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn)

Tim Hortons, Quebec City, Canada

Location: 1060 rue Louis-Alexandre Taschereau

My order: Medium coffee, chocolat glacé, glacé au miel (aka chocolate frosted and plain glazed)

Cost: $3.34 Canadian

Tim Horton is a Canadian ex-hockey star, now deceased, whose donut chain has expanded to almost 3,000 franchises in Canada and even a few hundred branches in the upper Midwestern U.S. You could call it the Dunkin' Donuts of Canada if it weren't for all the Dunkin' Donuts shops already in Canada.

In fact, the first thing I saw after hailing a taxi at the Quebec City airport was an enormous Dunkin' Donuts glowing in the night. It was next to a French-Canadian convenience store called "Couche-Tard," which, since I speak literally no French at all, gave me a prolonged case of the giggles.


(A different Couche-Tard, but the same logo. Note the owl's expression: Is he half-asleep, winking saucily or having a seizure?)

But I digress. The greatest thing about the Tim Hortons I visited, which is the only branch within walking distance of the gates of the historic old city, was its location inside a municipal building that included a library. How perfect is that? Yes, here in NYC we have Zaro's just a few blocks from the NYPL, but this place is actually inside the library building. And apparently this is the norm for Quebec donut shops. Witness:



But back to Tim Hortons. This branch may be one of the chicest donut shops in North America. All around me, French Canadians lounged on sleek modernist furniture as electronica-tinged bossa nova jingled and blurped in the background. The place was bustling with donut lovers from all walks of Francophone life: jolly mustachioed policemen, scruffy graduate students, overzealous-looking civil servants and professional women with scarves tossed over their shoulder just so.





What's great about the Quebecois is that, unlike many Parisians, people here really do not mind if you can't speak French. Every time I had to expose my ignorance of the language I was expecting to be smacked around, but instead my interlocutor would just smile and switch over to flawless English. The staff at Tim Hortons was no exception.

As for the donuts themselves, they were good, actually a little better than I've come to expect from chain donuts. The chocolate frosting was dark and rich, and the plain glazed was exactly what a plain glazed should be: light, tender and -- this above all other considerations! -- a sticky, gooey, finger-licking mess.

And in case I'd forgotten I was in Canada, a sign hanging over that high-class modernist furniture advertised a truly amazing lunch special: a chocolate donut, a cup of coffee and a foot-long sub for six Canadian dollars. I was just about to photograph it for posterity when I heard French voices laughing behind me and, seized by reflexive shame, I scurried out of the building.

The Inaugural NYC Donut Report!! Top 3 List

1. Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop

2. Doughnut Plant

3. Mansion Diner

These three establishments are certified by me -- Duane Reade, international donut reporter -- to provide the best donut experiences in the city.

However, this list is subject to change at any time. Possible reasons for a change in ranking include slippage in quality, the emergence of a superior donut establishment, poor treatment of this reporter by staff members, my own caprice and whimsy, graft or bribery, fits of nostalgia and, of course, force majeure.

You can always find the NYC Donut Report!! Top 3 on the sidebar, and I vow to inform you all if there are any changes to the rankings. That is my sacred promise to you.

Courage!!

Kampoeng Utami Donuts, Suitable for All Agendas

Best donut shop site ever. Just go check it out. And if you happen to be in Indonesia, by all means pay them a visit and tell me all about it!

Here's a sampling of the copy on their site. It was hard to know when to stop quoting!

Kampoeng Utami Donuts is suitable for all the kinds of the meeting agenda, the seminar, the upgrading, the party, the birthday, the vow, the religious agenda, the tour, the social gathering, the social service, the General's Stage, and consumption of the other agendas. . .

We were expert in serving the blueberry doughnut, the doughnut decorated imlek, the doughnut decorated valentine, the doughnut decorated chocolate rainbow, the margarita del campo doughnut, the meatfloss doughnut, the lemper doughnut, the pastel doughnut. . .

There is much more in this vein at the Kampoeng Utami Donuts official site. Go check it out!

And before you snicker, remember: Indonesia, just like NYC, is a former Dutch colony. And many donut historians have posited that the forerunner of the modern donut (the so-called "Ur-donut") was a Netherlandish pastry.
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Exciting Changes Coming to NYC Donut Report!!

Hi all,

I'll be back from my mysterious foreign assignment soon. I hope you've been vigilantly policing the comments in my absence and meting out punishments to any spammers or knuckleheads.

Once I've returned and unpacked, you'll start to see some changes around here. The site will have a new look that I hope will make it more useful to you, easier to navigate and prettier. I also hope there will be fewer irrelevant ads for donut-shaped ass cushions, franchise opportunities and Bharati matrimony.

This will be a work in progress so please let me know what you think.

Until the next NYC Donut Report!!

Courage!!

Why No Donuts at Whole Foods??

To: Whole Foods Market
RE: Why No Donuts at Whole Foods??

Hi there!!

I happened to notice that there is an entire wall of cupcakes for sale at your Columbus Circle location, but no donuts whatsoever. May I respectfully ask you what is up with this?

I certainly understand that Whole Foods prefers to champion products that are healthy, organic, cruelty-free and generally wholesome, and perhaps you simply do not feel that donuts fit that profile. But, in that case, I ask again: What's up with the cupcakes?

Although you have not made the nutrition facts for your two-bite cupcakes available on your Web site, I did notice the information for your blueberry muffins. (They look delicious, by the way.) Now, a blueberry muffin has to be healthier than a cupcake, right? And the Whole Foods blueberry muffin has 330 calories and 13 grams of fat. That's about the same as a Dunkin' Donuts old fashioned, which has 280 calories and 18 grams of fat.

So again, I ask you (respectfully of course): If your muffins and cupcakes are just as unwholesome as a Dunkin' Donuts old fashioned, then why no donuts? What's up with that?

Is this because cupcakes and not donuts were featured on "Sex and the City" and this makes you somehow feel that donuts are not chic enough for your customers? I hope this is not what you're thinking. Because just upstairs from you, the Bouchon bakery sells an extremely popular, extremely high-end donut that is all the rage among the wealthy and beautiful. (You know that Bouchon is run by Thomas Keller, who was the first chef in America to get three Michelin stars, right?)

I hope that by now you are indeed asking yourself, or perhaps even someone in your company's senior management team who has decision-making power, "Wait a sec! What is up with that?"

I look forward to seeing donuts for sale in a New York City branch of Whole Foods very soon.

Yours truly,

Duane Reade
International donut reporter

Bouchon Bakery Closed Until August 19

Just so you know.

On the bright side, since the Bouchon donuts are now rumored to have broken the $5.00 barrier, this will give you more time to work out the necessary financing arrangements with your banker.

Remember that you can only count on seeing the donuts on the weekend there, so your next donut opportunity probably won't be until Saturday, August 23, 2008.

Sullivan Street Bakery, 47th Street between 10th and 11th Avenue

Location: 533 W. 47th Street

Subway: None, though theoretically "near" 50th St C station

Neighborhood: Far West Hell's Kitchen, aka "Lincoln Tunnel Heights"

On the Web: www.sullivanstreetbakery.com

My order: Bomboloni donut, coffee

Cost: $3.75

Well, I guess if you live or ply a trade at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, then you have hit the culinary jackpot. There is no doubt that Sullivan Street Bakery produces very fine bread and pastry (and, yes, donuts too) and does so according to an exceedingly strict and ponderous bread-baking dogma. You can see the entire manifesto on their Web site: it seems to involve a "slow food philosophy," "handcrafted yeast" (or "artisan yeast") as well as doctorate-level expertise in the "art and history of fermentation" and profound knowledge of obscure regions of Italy where master craftspeople sift through oaken casks of auteur yeast with their bare hands in dark and musky ancient Tuscan leavening-cellars.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the bakery is situated next to an auto repair shop (dare I say an authentic NYC chop shop?) that reeks of grease and ozone. Completely insane people wander up and down the block and shriek at no one in particular.

So in short, by the time I finally arrived here, feeling as though I had undertaken an Admiral Peary-grade expedition to reach the bakery from the nearest subway station, I was fully prepared to despise the place and was already relishing the chance to eviscerate it on this Web site. (Full disclosure: It didn't help that they have been blowing off my e-mails for weeks now, either.)

Even as I was ordering one of the $2.50 bomboloni donuts (which were on a rack that was actually labeled with a laminated text, as though the donuts were hanging in the Uffizi), I was still sneering. But then a funny thing happened. I took a bite of the bomboloni. And sweet, wholesome vanilla pastry creme surged from within the soft panattone bread. It was like time stopped.

The donut bread (panattone bread, according to the rack text, but without the raisins and dried fruit in) was also excellent -- very light and airy compared to a typical donut. But that filling was the real star. Unlike the thick and grainy Bavarian creme you have probably resigned yourself to after a lifetime of chain donuts, this filling is more like a pudding. It's sweet, but sweet in a natural, healthy-tasting way, and it honestly does taste as though it was concocted by a feeling person. Next to the Doughnut Plant coconut cream filling, this is the best donut filling I have ever tasted.

So now how about opening another branch near pubic transportation?

Hey, Can You Watch My Blog While I'm Away?

I love to amuse you all and myself on this Web site as frequently as possible. But it only figures that since I am a jet-setting international donut reporter, from time to time I will be sent out of the country to gather the latest worldwide donut scoops. This week is one of those times. I will be abroad. I am sorry to be so mysterious about my destination and the "get" I am pursuing, but I must protect my sources.

A few items will still appear on the blog this week, however. This is because you are all very good-looking and I love you.

While I'm away, can you please make sure no one posts spam comments here about mail-order Cialis, forged diplomas, Nigerian inheritance schemes and so forth? Thanks.

Until the next NYC Donut Report!!

Courage!!

Hostess Frosted Donettes

I really wanted this to work out. At $2.49 for a bag of 20, the price is unbeatable. And I have many fond childhood memories of another Hostess chocolate product, the Ho Ho, which is a log made from rolled-up layers of synthetic chocolate and cream. I consumed hundreds of Ho Hos over the years while a student at Alice Gustafson Elementary School. They cost 40 cents back then and came in a flimsy foil wrapper that could not be opened without causing the various layers of the Ho Ho to crumble and separate.

But mostly what I loved about the Ho Ho was the Hostess corporation's supercharged and totally synthetic take on the flavors and textures of cream and chocolate cake. It was as though a mad scientist had tried a cake made normally with natural ingredients and then reconstructed the whole thing from memory with laboratory chemicals in a test tube.



After refrigerating the donettes overnight (a crucial step you cannot omit if you want the frosting to harden into a nice, tasty shell), I opened the bag and was immediately overpowered by that familiar Hostess artificial chocolate smell. So fake! So sweet! So strong! So wrong! It was the gustatory equivalent of hearing "The Flight of The Bumblebee" shrieked into your ear by an insane little piccolo.

At once, countless grade school memories came flooding back to me: the manadatory rope climbing in gym class, the food fights, the violent recess free-for-alls that went under the name of "rugby," the thinly disguised insults volleyed during "creative writing hour," the special group I had to attend every Wednesday afternoon that was supposedly for gifted students but which I always secretly suspected was actually some form of group therapy for the criminally retarded. I remembered how my creepy, perpetually angry fourth grade teacher had a nervous breakdown and was replaced by a kindly substitute who once brought her shaggy black dog to class, and we spent all day playing with the dog instead of learning.

It was a Proustian melange of triumphs and traumas, all rolled together like the layers of the selfsame Ho Ho whose cloying, burnt-sweet smell was virtually identical to that of the frosted donettes to which we now return our attention. So: there the donettes were. Twenty donettes in a bag, of which I had three or four. Each was more disappointing than the last. The chocolate frosting never properly hardened into a crisp shell the way the Entenmann's frosting does. Instead, the frosting and the donut cake all took on the same rubbery texture. And the aftertaste was simply horrid, like sucking on a penny.

You cannot go home again, people. It is as simple as that.

Tour de Donut

Why not combine competitive bicycle racing with competitive donut eating? I think one of the interview subjects in this video puts it perfectly: "It's disgusting. Disgustingly beautiful."



I know that some of you will want to hate on the Tour de Donut. But I won't. I have done worse than this and I have enjoyed doing it. As a young boy, I did the Des Moines Register's cross-Iowa bike ride every year (better known as RAGBRAI). This was more than 20 years ago, before the event degenerated into a sort of pastoral Girls Gone Wild shoot. (I think this semi-work-safe snapshot pretty well captures the spirit of what it has now become.)

Anyway, back in those idyllic days you would be riding in the middle of nowhere with the corn bobbing in the wind all around you and suddenly see a hand-lettered cardboard sign for pork chops. And anyone who doesn't know how good the pork is in Iowa and is not forbidden from consuming pork for religious reasons ought to fly themselves out to that state at once. So, obviously, what you would do is pull your bike over, eat an enormous pork chop with your hands by the side of the road, then hop back on and struggle another 50 miles in the unbearable heat. What, is there something wrong with that?

Starbucks Really Pushing the Donuts in Brooklyn

I don't know if this is the case throughout NYC, but the Starbucks branches in my part of Brooklyn are now vigorously promoting the Top Pot mini glazed old fashioned donuts. You can now buy a box of 18 mini-donuts for $10.99 (a cynical person might compare this to, say, 12 Entenmann's mini-donuts for $3.49, but whatever). And here on Wyckoff and Smith they are giving away free samples of the mini-donuts as well.

They really are good donuts. Profoundly unhealthy, but delicious.