Met Museum Cafeteria, 82nd Street and 5th Avenue

Location: 1000 5th Avenue

Subway: 4/5/6 to 86 Street

Neighborhood: Upper East Side

My order: Plain sugar, small coffee, chocolate cupcake

Cost: $7.75

I really hate to gloat (by which I mean that I thoroughly enjoy it and am about to do so once again), but there's no way I can properly report on a NYC museum cafeteria donut without first gleefully confessing that, thanks to my connections, I never have to pay to get into museums. Never. Ever. Not in years. I don't even know what admission costs these days!

And because I'm saving so much money on admission, I always treat myself to something nice in the museum cafeteria (which I do pay for). Now, the nicest museum cafeteria in the city is, by far, the one on the second floor of the MoMA. It's beautifully designed, drenched with sunlight, delicious, completely un-institutional, and has actual table service. And the second-nicest museum cafe has got to be Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Gallerie on 86th and 5th, where in just a few steps you can go from admiring Klimts in a chilly, near-empty marble-floored gallery to devouring Klimttorte in a 19th-century wood-paneled dining room where very strong Viennese coffee is made in imposing pressurized brewing equipment with many twisting pipes, valves, and precision gagues. If you want a full lunch, do not pass up the Bratwurst mit Sauerkraut & Röstkartoffeln.

And so beneath these two cafes is a lower tier occupied by the rest of the museum cafeterias. The only thing that really makes the Met's basement cafeteria stand out (and this is no small thing!) is their elusive but profoundly delicious jelly donut. Longtime readers of NYC Donut Report!! know that I have fond memories of this donut, despite having caught it only once, and I have wasted many trips down to the Met basement in search of that warm raspberry filling and that soft, yielding donut flesh.

I failed again on this trip. But I came close enough to snag a plain sugar that was really quite good. The sugar crystals were just the right size: larger than the grains in common table sugar, and somehow stickier. And although the donut might have been a couple of hours past its prime, it was still soft without being chewy, and it held up very well to dunking.

After the donut, I strayed into enemy territory and tried a Met cupcake, which at $3.75 was more than twice the cost of the donut. I'm no cupcake expert, but I liked this one. It had some sort of molten-chocolate vein inside it. Also, I've had plenty of cupcakes that were rendered inedible by a frosting whose consistency was somewhere between sand and astronaut food, but this cupcake had a rich, moist chocolate frosting that was almost better than the actual cake.



After this, I went upstairs and took in actual art: obscure ancient musical instruments, arms and armory, and those awesome pre-Rennaisance Madonna and Child paintings in which the limbs and torso of the baby Jesus are totally out of proportion. Was that just the style of time, or was it supposed to symbolize something, or did babies in the dark ages actually resemble frail 65-year old balding Greek men in locker rooms?

Anyway, to finish off the day I wandered around Madison Avenue in the 70s and 80s, which is a repeating loop of luxury jewelry stores, luxury clothing stores, luxury chocolatiers, luxury baby-supply stores, and incongruous shabby diners (like this one) full of depressed people blowing on spoonfulls of greenish soup. Also, the population of the Upper East Side seems to consist of the same six angry women ramming their strollers into passersby.

After nearly having my Achilles tendon ruptured in such a collision, I took refuge in the Dean & Deluca on Madison and 85th. As you may know, Dean & Deluca sells Doughnut Plant. So I picked up an apple fritter for $3.75 that was the size and weight of a brick. It was actually heavy.



In case that photo doesn't covey how huge this fritter was, I'm including this one...



... and this one ...



... and although I'm not actually certain that this was a Doughnut Plant fritter, despite the D&D staff's assurances that it was, I can definitely vouch for its tastiness. The apple filling was evenly distributed throughout the fritter and the bulbous, crispy crust was a delight to tear and to taste. You could probably feed the entire population of a small town with one fritter, though. This one was in my refrigerator for a few days before I finally finished it off.

Zaro's, Grand Central Station: The Sequel

Location: Grand Central Station, near the west side of the main terminal

Subway: 4/5/6 and Shuttle to 42 St - Grand Central

My order: Plain sugar, jelly donut, small coffee

Cost: $3.35

Those of you who have stuck with NYC Donut Report!! from its bitter beginnings will remember my earlier visit to Zaro's in Grand Central, which was clearly flawed in two respects: 1) I somehow missed the larger, official Zaro's on the west side of the main terminal and ended up at a tiny, harshly lit, concrete-floored monastic cell of a mini-Zaro's on the east end; and 2) the object I consumed turned out -- after close examination by you, my bright and vocal readers -- not to be a donut but rather an almond horn. Although it must be said it was a delicious horn.

Well, I found myself in Grand Central yesterday with some time to kill, so I found the "real" or "correct" Zaro's (it's on the opposite end of the terminal from Metrazur) and was pleased to see they had a good selection of donuts. I got a coffee, a plain donut, and a jelly donut -- which was unremarkable in every way and was overfilled with chilly supermarket-grade grape jelly -- and had an impromptu breakfast at a shuttered window of the information booth.

There's really nothing to say about the jelly donuts from Zaro's. The world is full of middling jelly donuts and, honestly, I'm starting to feel like a real sucker for ordering a jely donut from anyone. No one knows how to make a good jelly donut (unless it is a Polish paczki in Greenpoint) and I am beginning to suspect that no one much cares. Are jelly donut fans considered such Philistines by the Donut Establishment? Are we really worthy of such little care and consideration?

The plain sugar was pretty good and I'm sure if I'd gotten it at 9:00 instead of 11:00 it would have been excellent. It was a worthwhile donut. And it was an interesting experience for me. As I stood there in the terminal, chewing on that almost-perfectly-soft donut -- and also wondering why in the world the Maserati corporation had chosen this week of all weeks, as the stock market utterly tanks, to display $100,000 automobiles in the main terminal behind a phalanx of velvet ropes -- I found myself reassessing the way I think about plain sugar donuts.

To wit: The way the plain sugar is dusted with that sugar is very important. There's actually a very complex, multi-phase process at work when you eat a plain sugar. First, as you bite into the donut, the sugar is released from the surface of the donut (and, one hopes, not all over your clothes) and, if all goes well, your tongue is enveloped in a sort of sugar cloud. Then, as you chew, that sugar pleasantly mingles with the donut flesh. And finally, after you've swallowed, you inevitably lick your lips and get one last hit of sugar to finish things off. So the sugar that starts out just on top of the donut actually is delivered to the entire donut, both physically and temporally. It's very deep.

And once I realized this, I realized why so many plain sugar donuts are failures: Either there's too much sugar or not enough, or else the sugar brushes off too easily and gets all over the front of your shirt, or else the sugar sticks to the top of the donut and never sweetens the donut innards, or else the sugar is that cheap, run-of-the-mill grainy junk you could shake out of a glass jar in an I-80 truck stop or, for that matter, a penitentary mess hall.

As for the Zaro's plain sugar, there was probably a bit too much sugar, and the sugar was probably slightly on the cheap, gritty side. I definitely had to spend some time brushing sugar off my sweater, which is never a good sign. But overall the sugar was delivered to the right places at the right times.

Up next for NYC Donut Report!! will be another exciting assignment outside the city. I can't tell you anything about it now. But know that I am literally en route to my destination now, on the amazing Bolt Bus which includes electrical outlets and free Wi-Fi for every seat.

Donut History and Donut Recipes in Today's NY Times; Plus a Brief Fit of Donut Demagoguery from Your International Donut Reporter

Check it out here or, if you prefer the physical paper on a Sunday morning -- as you should, ideally with a donut and hot, fresh coffee -- you can find the article in the magazine's "The Way We Eat" column.

In addition to some very mouthwatering photos -- including one of churros, which I contend are not really donuts, but anyway -- there are some recipes that look pretty complicated and hard but might yield delicious results. I'm going to try them later this week if I have time, and if any of you try them, please report back. I'm particularly curious about the Earl Grey Doughnuts, which could either be a delightful revelation or a too-cute nouvelle cuisine abomination.

The article also includes a very short history of donuts -- or at least it presents one of several contending histories of the donut -- and then sadly devolves into a typical New York Times Magazine take on donuts. The main point of which seems to be: Thank the Lord for Mark Isreal and Doughnut Plant and Thomas Keller and Alain Ducasse and Bouchon et. al., who saved the donuts for all mankind by including them in $200 tasting menus and peddling them to very wealthy people for $5.00 apiece in the Time Warner Crystal Palace.

Again, I say, it is not donuts themselves that are in peril. We are drowning in donuts. It is the culture of donuts that is vanishing before our eyes. And I'm really not sure that a restaurant like Per Se -- where reservations are needed months in advance and the bill is likely to exceed the GDP of some countries -- is really going to keep donut culture alive.

Halal Bakery & Pizza, 36th Street and 8th Avenue

Location: 521 8th Avenue

Subway: A/C/E to 34 St - Penn Station

Neighborhood: On paper, Midtown. But this is the south-of-42nd, west-of-6th version of Midtown, where "work" is actual physical labor, no one in the crowd of frantic walkers will even turn their shoulders aside as they barrel straight at you, and everyone you meet seems to be right in the middle of the worst day of his or her life.

My order: Coffee with milk and one sugar, plain sugar donut, cruller

Cost: $2.00

If you ever find yourself drunk and hungry in Penn Station in the middle of the night -- and you have my sincere sympathy if you ever actually do -- Halal Bakery & Pizza is going to save your life. It is the only 24-hour establishment I know of in NYC that serves both donuts and pizza, which are like the yin and yang of the inebriated person's cravings.

Now, it's true that 7th Avenue Donuts in Park Slope is also open 24 hours and is across the street from Smiling Pizza, which is a very good pizza joint. But remember that (a) Smiling Pizza closes around 1:00 a.m., and (b) it's in Park Slope! What good will that do you when you're three sheets to the wind in godawful Penn Station and you just missed the last train to Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey?

Although I first spotted Halal Bakery & Pizza at night, from the windows of a Chinatown bus coming back from Philadelphia, I visited the establishment on a weekday during the lunch rush. A key fact about this place is that is has no seating. It's really almost an overgrown coffee cart with a narrow chrome ledge that wraps around the northwest corner of 36th and 8th and doubles as an eating surface. Sweaty, overworked Spanish speakers in white aprons and paper hats scramble from oven to coffee urn, handing out slices to the hordes and reaching into rack after rack of donuts in glass cases. Actually getting a spot at that chrome ledge involves fighting through a scrum of elbows, but your reward will be six inches of personal space and, if you're lucky, an abandoned copy of the Daily News blotchy with pizza drippings.



The blocks in this area are lined with sweatshops, smut emporiums, unmarked Chinese noodle shops, curry stalls for cab drivers, double-parked trucks covered with layers of graffiti, and delivery-man bicycles held together with duct tape. Car horns and jackhammers blast from all directions. UPS guys and FedEx guys strap on their weightlifting belts and drag hand trucks down the uneven sidewalk. Men eat their lunches with plastic forks out of plastic bags and lean against grimy doorways or stand shoulder-to-shoulder with packs of fellow sufferers under a weathered 1970s-era awning that says WIGS. And everyone seems to be wearing a soiled work uniform while angrily shouting into a Bluetooth earpiece. (The Bluetooth headset is like the 21st-century equivalent of the janitor's key ring.) An incongruous pair of fashionable young Korean women carrying designer handbags are having a heart-to-heart talk outside the Excel Sewing Machine Shop.





Even though the donuts are not made on the premises at Halal Bakery & Pizza, but rather somewhere in Queens -- presumably by the ubiquitous yet enigmatic Mac Donut Corp. of Long Island City, but this needs to be confirmed -- they are remarkably fresh. Massive turnover probably has something to do with this. The cruller was light and airy and delightfully sticky with glaze, although right on the verge of being too chewy. The plain sugar was soft and tender and had a wonderful, fresh smell that could transport you right out of gritty 8th Avenue into the idyllic Donut America of a bygone era that probably never was. Also, more concretely, it was perfect for dunking: soft enough to soak up the coffee, but strong enough not to fall apart.

The one question that remains, I regret to say, is: What exactly makes a donut halal?

One reason why there was a delay in publishing this report was that I wanted to get an answer to this question. But unfortunately there was a language barrier between the staff and your international donut reporter. If I am ever able to get a response, I will let you know.

Until the next NYC Donut Report!!

Courage!!

Here's a Look at What We're Working on in the NYC Donut Report!! Newsroom

Just a teaser for now. Full report coming tomorrow.