Traveling Feast

A month ago I decided to compare the acclaimed maple bar from Countryside Donut in Montlake Terrace (north Seattle) to the bar I consider the national standard: Spokane’s Donut Parade maple bar.  Countryside’s bar was a respectable entry, but not in the same league as those coming out of the fryer at the Donut Parade.

Countryside also loses ambiance points for its suburban strip mall setting that sucks out location character faster than a Dyson vacuum.  I’m happy to go food foraging in strip malls, but I’d always prefer a beat-up downtown cafe to a line of generic storefronts facing a sea of parking.  But I digress.

Donuts are the point; maple bars in particular.  When I originally mentioned my January maple bar hunt, several Facebook connections claimed that the BEST maple bar in the Puget Sound wasn’t Countryside’s at all.  CHUCK’S DONUTS in Renton was the real destination for a serious maple bar pilgrim.  Unfortunately I didn’t get to investigate their claims last month.  Today, though, I did.

Back in Seattle and with a need for a visit to IKEA, I slipped off 405 and headed to Chuck’s first.

Like Countryside, the current location of Chuck’s is a new strip mall.  But this wasn’t always the case.

Chuck’s started in another spot in the mid 1960s by Charlie O’Neil with a closely guarded recipe for his famous maple bar.

Other owners followed O’Neil, but each time the secret recipe was sold with the store and the testimony of faithful patrons is that the bars have remained transcendent through each change of ownership.

I tend to be a dining optimist – hopeful that the next meal or bite on the agenda will turn up something truly wonderful.  In this case, Chuck’s delivered.  The current owners are Vietnamese and probably look nothing like the original Chuck, but they can turn out a donut that should make O’Neil proud his name is still on the sign.

The best maple bars I’ve had before today came with a glaze-style frosting, and Chuck’s secret recipe calls for a whipped frosting that is quite different and quite wonderful.

Once you get past your wonder at the frosting, there is the bar itself to consider.  I found it to be soft and moist with just the right amount of bite.  I’ll certainly be back, but noticed the whipped frosting is unexpectedly rich compared to the more common glaze.

Back home at Donut Parade I can get through two or even three before the threat of a sugar coma becomes real, but Chuck’s bar presents clear and present danger after just one.  This should save me at least a $1.25 a visit.

Is Chuck’s the best maple bar?  Possibly.  It certainly is wonderful,  but I think a hot bar from the Donut Parade might still be my personal standard.   Barely.  And I think I’ll have to stop by Chuck’s almost every time I’m in town just to reconsider.

I claim that Spokane’s Donut Parade has the best maple bars in the Western Hemisphere (possibly the planet since large swaths of the world have no access to this pinnacle of raised donut perfect).  Yet food gurus Jane and Michael Stern have a different opinion in their fun volume entitled 500 Things To Eat Before It’s Too Late.

They claim the best maple bar they’ve had is at Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland where the iconic bar comes topped with strips of bacon.  I’m looking forward to trying a Voodoo bar, but believe a truly classic maple bar needs to stand on its own without a pork assist.

This leads me to their second recommendation: Countryside Donut House in Mountlake Terrace in the Seattle metro area.

Chance would have it that I’m in Seattle today for a family emergency, but I have a break this morning in my duties long enough to head to Countryside.  Who knows?  Maybe a fine maple bar delivered at the right moment could help in the family emergency.  I’m willing to try.  And I’ll get a chance to see how the bars at Countryside compare to Donut Parade.

The second to last day of 2009 started with an early morning visit to Psycho Donuts for the Cereal Killer and my first ever “hamburger donut.”

Psycho opened in 2009 to community protest and picketers on the sidewalk of their tiny strip mall at the corner of Winchester and Campbell in California’s South Bay Area.  It could have been the name.  Or offense at a case of donuts with names like Jekyll & Hyde, Headbanger’s Evil Twin, and Psycho Panda.  Maybe the protesters don’t like fried food.

I’m guessing, though,that the protests just helped business, and I would humbly suggest that there might be more urgent targets for protest than a donut shop with a slightly deranged theme.  Psycho Donuts staff wear nursing outfits reminiscent of Halloween, and they have an actual padded room inside the door (okay, it is more like a three-sided padded phone booth designed for photo opportunities).

Just for the title we had to try the Cereal Killer with its cargo of Cap’n Crunchberries on top.

The title is better than the donut truthfully.  But just the opposite should be said for the Apricotology.  It has my vote for the worst name on a menu with some other doozies, but the donut itself is brilliant.  I’ll never eat another apple fritter again without wishing it was a Psycho Donut apricot monstrosity.

Yet there is another great reason to go out of your way to visit Psycho and cross the picket lines (if they happen to reappear).  It is the Hamburger Donut.  For the sheer cheek of saying you ate one, it is worth $2.50.

But the truth is that this donut actually works: a donut sprinkled with sesame seeds is sliced in half and slathered inside with honey butter and strawberry jam before several sliced of bacon are slipped inside.  It is not what your taste buds expect of a donut, but by bite two or three, you just might have an epiphany and begin to ask why donuts are typically sugar bombs rather than pastries that combine sweet and savory in creative ways.

Or you can dismiss me as ‘nuts.’  You won’t be the first or the last.

Last Friday the urge for a maple bar from the Donut Parade overwhelmed any more measured reflection on how to start the day right with fruits and fiber.  It would be a morning for some of the best carbs and sugar on the continent.

I gathered up the three kids in the house at the moment (my daughter, one of my twin sons, and his friend that we affectionately refer to as ‘not my son’) and headed from Hamilton and Illinois just north of Gonzaga to order a dozen maple bars and donuts and four glasses of milk.  The milk is critical for true donut delight.

Yet another part of the Donut Parade perfection is the place.  It is frozen in time (circa 1950) and every hard-to-reach corner is covered by a quarter century of fine fryer grease that should preserve it for all eternity.  Our turquiose vinyl booth has a tear in the seat mended with duct tape.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Friday’s visit also reminded me of how much I love the old diner counter and line of chrome stools facing the kitchen.  Invariably, the line is occupied by neighborhood regulars nursing a cup of coffee, reading the paper, and discussing the sad state of the world over a plate of the sacred maple bars.

I’m sure the faces at the counter change depending on when you come during the morning, but the stools are almost always filled and all their occupants appear to have been here before.

New England Trip #2

The first time I set foot on Connecticut soil was late in the evening of May 22, 2009, and it didn’t register that night on the drive from the Hartford airport to the home of Michael and Amanda Hyman in Avon.  I didn’t consciously notice it the next day, a Saturday, or even Sunday.  But by Monday it hit me.

Virtually every corner in New England seems to have a Dunkin’ Donuts.  Coming from the Northwest that gave birth to Starbucks, I thought I knew what market domination looked like.  I was wrong.  Market domination… at least in the Northeast… comes in pink.

It is stunning.  They are omnipresent.  Every few feet it seems on any main street  is another sign.  And behind every second or third turn in the countryside you come across a gas station and another Dunkin’ Donuts.

I don’t yet have a clear fix exactly on what the draw is.  The donuts?  The coffee?  Something else?  People across New England rave about  the coffee and the sign has a picture of a steaming cup rather than a donut, but then there is the name.

Yet I am not sure either the coffee or the donuts full explain Dunkin’ market strength.  The coffee has nice flavor without a bitter edge, and the donuts beat plenty of greasy supermarket bakery types as well as clearly pounding the best of a competing regional chain called The Whole Donut.

There is still room for a mom-n-pop shops like Luke’s in the Farmington Valley to offer something high quality and unique, but it seems that it would be a huge challenge for any smaller chains or independent stores to take on the truly massive company.   The puzzle for me is why they haven’t appeared to change their stores from the  sterile, utilitarian, and often uncomfortable feel that seems designed to push people out the door rather than welcome them in.  This might have worked in the past, but I suspect the future belongs to places that make people want to linger.  But then it is quite possible their market research tells them something different that will remain viable.  It certainly appears to have worked thus far.

S+

One of my strong childhood memories is of driving in from Hughes Bay with grandpa for a glass of milk and a powdered sugar donut at the Lakeside Mercantile.  Then while he finished the paper and his cup of coffee at the counter, I would wander the aisles looking at cans of food or fishing tackle or, more often than not, reading comic books from a revolving rack by the front windows.

Nearly 35 years later the Mercantile is long gone. Now the building houses a real estate office and a maze of other offices for who knows what.

So today, instead of a trip into Lakeside for a donut, I went in with my father to see the upscale brewery and pub several hundred yards down the strip of Highway 93 that defines the town.  The Tamarack Brewing Company has been serving up beers brewed on site and pub food for several years now, but I had not managed to make it in yet.  Maybe I was still pouting about the Mercantile closing twenty-five years earlier and cutting off yet another link to my past.

The other reason for my delay is that I’m also just learning to bother with beer.  It took a passionate group of home brewers in Washington State to get me interested in allotting any of what I consider to be precious calories to anything other than food and an occasional bottle of wine.

But today milk and donuts weren’t in the cards.  Beer and fish were.

The Dock Days Hefewizen was a good call with Tamarack’s Alehouse Fish and Chips. I settled on the fish and chips because the menu announced that the kitchen used fresh line-caught Whitefish from Flathead Lake.  I know better than to think that one of the neighborhood boys caught my fish at the dock on the other side of the highway, but I was excited anyway that they featured a local fish rather than something flown or shipped or trucked from thousands of miles away.  I  support local food, and if that food is battered and deep-fried, all the better.

Throw in some house-made tartar and the fire in the fireplace next to our table and it was a lunch almost good enough to make me stop moaning about change.

Daryl – the iconic figure behind the best maple bars on the planet has not returned to Spokane’s Donut Parade after nearly dying in ICU as a rare disease attacked.  But on my last visit a little over a week ago, Daryl’s maple bars are back on the shelves and the magic is still there.  For forty years he was the maple bar man, but apparently he was able to pass on some of his secrets.  The current bakery crew is turning out fine product that is still far better than anything else available.  I admit, this had me up worrying at night.

Get well Daryl and long live your brilliant bars.

One welcome change: the name “Donut Parade” is now painted on the door in rough letters.  For years there was almost no indication outside that the best maple bars on the market were available inside.  If you drove by on Hamilton, chances are you’d only see what appeared to be an abandoned building.  Of course they still don’t have anything so obvious as a sign.