Table of Contents
- Mustang Donuts
- Pinkbox Donuts
- The Donut Hole
- Hurts Donut
- Shipley Do-Nuts
- Top Pot
- Dandee Donut
- Randy’s Donuts
- Voodoo Donut
- Round Rock Donuts
- Stan’s Donut
- The Hollywood Donut Company
Map
Introduction
As I write this, I am on a diet. I am likely on that diet because I’ve always considered myself a donut connoisseur.
Growing up, family weekend mornings followed a reliable script: hit the donut shop after church, grab a cardboard box packed with a dozen warm donuts, and head home where I would inevitably eat far too many of them. That habit never really faded.
I wanted to make a list of my favorite donut places in the United States. Of course, there are so many of them that I can only tell you the best ones I’ve found so far. I will likely be coming back to update this list over time.
Before I get too far into the list: chains have their place for convenience, but the real gems are the independent counters where someone is running fryers before dawn and the glaze is still warm when you open the box. However, there are a few chains on this list. And if they’re on this list, it’s for a good reason.
There’s also some notable exclusions that I would have loved to put on the list, but just couldn’t bring myself to do it, as they were not “donut” places. (Porto’s in southern California is a great example of this. They have top-notch pastries and other items like “potato balls,” but they’re not a donut place.)
After years of field “research” (and the waistline adjustments to prove it), here are my top ten twelve (of course!) donut shops that are genuinely worth breaking any diet for.
12 – Mustang Donuts
Mustang Donuts holds a permanent spot near and dear to my heart simply because it’s our neighborhood place—the spot my family frequents whenever the weekend morning routine calls for a classic run. Tucked right by SMU, it skips the modern gimmicks and neon glazes in favor of doing the fundamentals right. You walk up to the counter, grab a box of warm glazed rings, a dense apple fritter, and a few sausage rolls, and you’re out the door with exactly what an unpretentious, old-school Texas donut shop should be. It’s no-frills, and just a genuinely good, old-school donut.
11 – Pinkbox Donuts
Pinkbox started in Las Vegas, and it leans entirely into that aesthetic. As The Killers sang about the city in “Somebody Told Me,” everything glows in a place like this, and these shops fit right in. Most locations are impossible to miss, wrapped in aggressive, neon-pink exteriors that look built for a casino corridor.
The donuts themselves are massive and distinctly memorable. A few of the heavily topped specialty options cross into an aggressive sweetness that I can only handle a bite or two of, but the core dough is well-made. They turn out a consistently good product that justifies a detour if you are in the area.
10 – The Donut Hole
Plenty of bakeries make fantastic donuts, but no other ones require a drive through a 26-foot fiberglass pastry to get it.
I know, I know. I’m a sucker for roadside America. Guilty as charged. Located in La Puente, The Donut Hole is one of Southern California’s best surviving relics of notable roadside architecture. You pull into the entrance through one massive fiberglass donut, idle down a narrow tunnel past the ordering window where you order and the staff hands over your goods, and you pull out the other side of the donut.
Gimmicky buildings usually come hand-in-hand with mediocre food (a topic widely discussed in my Dad’s Rules of Life for Eating Out, which I published on my last blog), but the donuts here are legit. The architecture might get you off the freeway, but the frying keeps the lane backed up.
Or, as the side of the building suggests, “IT’S THE QUALITY.” It really is.
9 – Hurts Donut
While we’re on the topic of touristy gimmicks… Hurts Donut is built entirely on sensory overload and sheer novelty.
Born in Springfield, Missouri, in 2013, the franchise skips traditional glazed rings in favor of heavy-handed specialty concoctions loaded with breakfast cereal, candy bars, bacon, and frosting that could double as spackle. They run 24/7, rely on goofy dad-joke branding (complete with emergency “Whambulance” delivery vans), and serve donuts that feel less like breakfast and more like a dessert.
The donuts here quite remind me of Pinkbox. These just have a certain “je ne sais quoi” about them that pull them higher than Pinkbox for me.
8 – Shipley Do-Nuts
OK–this is a chain, and a far less touristy one, but I have to admit. It’s kind of a homer pick.
Shipley will always occupy a special corner of heart. When I wrote the introduction for this article, it was Shipley that I was thinking about. Specifically, when I was a kid, I would be OBSESSED with their “bullseye” donuts–which basically were Boston Cream donuts, but instead of being filled with custard, they were filled with cake frosting and topped with a little “kiss” of cake frosting as well. I’ll never forget the super rich deliciousness of the donut… nor the sugar rush afterwards.
They don’t usually have bullseyes anymore at the Shipley loctions I’ve been to in my adulthood, but when I see one, I’ll try to eat one. I generally focus on their stellar selection of filled donuts, which are filled AND glazed–the best of both worlds.
7 – Top Pot
I used to live less than a mile from a Top Pot, which was both convenient and dangerous. Their donuts always carried a premium price tag, but the cost matched the output. They were massive, dense, and legitimately high-quality. Instead of airy sugar rings that dissolve into nothing, their donuts were substantial. You really didn’t need more than one.
Top Pot was the first donut chain that I encountered that served real, substantial donuts. I thank them for raising the bar… though I miss them.
6 – Dandee Donut
Operating in Pompano Beach (with a direct spinoff lineage to The Hollywood Donut Factory… we’ll get to that stellar location in a bit), Dandee Donut Factory is the antithesis of modern pastry trends.
Part 24/7 short-order diner, part old-school bakery, it excels at massive, straightforward staples rather than Instagram gimmicks. They are just damn good donuts: big, tasty, substantial, and fresh.
Note: with Dandee, we’re crossing into a threshold of some seriously amazing donuts. Shops #7 down to #1 are last meal worthy.
5 – Randy’s Donuts
While Randy’s has started franchising across Southern California and beyond (I recently saw one in Greenwich Village in New York City), the only stop that really matters is the original stand on Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood, sitting right next to the flight path for LAX.
Opened in the early 1950s (originally part of the Big Donut Drive-In chain), the 32-foot gunite donut perched on the roof has made it a Hollywood establishing shot for decades. (Or, even referenced in the Simpson’s: Randy’s + Big Boy inspired “Lard Lad Donuts” in the series.)
You can spot the famous rooftop sculpture directly from the 405 or through an airplane window on final descent into runway 24R. As I’d mentioned earlier with The Donut Hole, most roadside tourist magnets can coast on visual nostalgia and serve mediocre food, but Randy’s still turns out a top-tier product–in this case, even better than the Donut Hole.
Because the drive-thru and walk-up windows run 24 hours with constant turnover, the pastry case stays fresh in my experience. It is in kind of a rough area, so watch out for some of the aggressive homeless in the area. (Though, the other side of the spectrum is also represented–I’ve met celebrities while standing in line at Randy’s along with me.)
4 – Voodoo Doughnut
Before cereal-topped pastries and novelty bacon glazes took over social media feeds everywhere, Voodoo Doughnut pioneered the countercultural donut shop in downtown Portland back in 2003. Known for its unapologetically gaudy pink boxes, velvet-lined walls, and late-night sidewalk lines, Voodoo made ordering a donut feel like entering a punk-rock dive bar.
While they built their fame on shock-value creations (like the iconic jelly-filled Voodoo Doll stabbed with a pretzel stake, or the Maple Bacon Bar) the underlying dough still carries its weight. (Some of their donuts were so taboo and controversial, they can’t sell them anymore–take the “Vanilla Pepto Crushed Tums doughnut” and the “Nyquil Glazed doughnut” (which actually came with a shot of Nyquil). The FDA stepped in and banned the sale of both of these donuts. What a bunch of squares.
Between the eccentric names and the sugar rush, the fluffy raised donuts they make are not only huge and high quality, they HIT THE SPOT. Voodoo Doughnut turned novelty donuts into a national trend, and now they’re even on both coasts at the Universal Hollywood and Universal Orlando Resorts.
3 – Round Rock Donuts
Operating out of downtown Round Rock since 1926, this place takes the old “everything is bigger in Texas” cliché and fries it up into a literal reality. Their calling card is the absurd, two-pound “Texas-Sized” glazed donut. It measures roughly 14 inches across, requires an entire sheet cake box just to carry it to your car, and is practically impossible to eat with any degree of dignity. (No, I haven’t eaten one of them. And if I did, I would hope you, dear reader, wouldn’t judge me.)
The novelty size has brought many through the door over the years, but the recipe itself is what keeps the drive-thru line backed out onto the street. The donuts are fantastic–no 2-pound parlor tricks necessary. Their yeast dough has an unmistakable yellow-orange hue from an egg-rich recipe that leans closer to a brioche than typical commercial dough. They still roll and cut everything by hand, producing irregular, pillowy rings that hit the fryer and take a dip in warm glaze. The glaze dries to a delicate, crackly shell rather than a sticky slurry, and the interior stays remarkably light instead of heavy and oil-soaked.
While they are pretty “normal” looking donuts, they really aren’t like any other donut on this list. You really have to go try them.
2 – Stan’s Donuts
Tucked into a nondescript strip mall on Homestead Road right on the border of Santa Clara and San Jose, Stan’s has been running the exact same playbook since 1959. Similar to Round Rock–again, there are no gimmicks, no bacon sprinkles, and no social media stunts here. Just a low-slung counter, swivel stools, and a glass-walled bakery where you can watch the fryers in real time. You snake through the steadily moving (though discouragingly long!) line to enter the store, follow the wall, and then switchback your way to the counter, making conversations with the locals on the bar stools, who I found were rather excited to share their favorite donuts that they’ve been coming here and having for decades.
You can’t go wrong with any of them, though. These are the best glazed donuts I’ve ever had (and I don’t say that lightly). The dough is so soft and airy that the donut practically collapses under its own weight, held together only by a paper-thin, crackly sugar shell that melts the second you bite into it. Their other donuts are phenomenal as well–which is why this is in the second position on this list–but if you leave without at least half a dozen of the standard glazed, you really missed the main attraction. They are cash only, so make sure you have enough.
1 – Hollywood Donut Company
While most donut places specialize exclusively in sweets and treat savory options as an afterthought, Hollywood Donut Company runs circles around the competition on both fronts. The donut wall boasts every flavor of donut you might want. Their standard glazed and filled donuts are tough for anyone to beat, and their cronut pulls off the tricky laminated layering that gives you genuine flakiness instead of an oil-heavy pastry brick.
The non-donut items on the menu also are fantastic. Their breakfast sandwiches are genuinely great, built hot to order with real ingredients rather than limp microwave patties slapped between frozen rolls.
The main event are the donuts, though. They are phenomenal. My favorite donut is a filled donut, and there aren’t any better than right here at the Hollywood Donut Company. And there’s no cutting corners here: they’re made fresh, daily, in the back. They’re hand dipped, and hand filled. Put simply, this is what every donut shop should aspire to be.
What anchors the shop, though, is the hospitality behind the counter. The owner, Kat, is phenomenal, especially with kids. She treats young families like neighborhood regulars the moment they step through the door, patiently waiting out indecisive children staring down the glass case and making the whole morning ritual feel welcoming. Come for the donuts, but say hi to Kat. She is awesome. Like most great restaurant managers, she seems to always be there when I walk in.
Of course, I know for certain that I missed some, but I’m always on the outlook for another stellar donut place. Please let me know in the comments if there’s any donut shops that I’ve left off that I simply must include!
