Farley Elliott

Eddie's Italian Restaurant

It's important to remember that strip malls can happen any time, anywhere. Sure, you might be used to catching miles and miles of them as you reach towards the suburbs, but sometimes there's a strip mall right under your nose.

For example, take a look at the intersection of Lincoln Boulevard and Washington Boulevard in Marina Del Rey. The intersection of these two major westside thoroughfares should mean a boon of commerce, particularly with the marina-side luxury condos that exist just down Lincoln and the upscale beachcombers at the end of Washington. Yet there's there's the blocky 7-11 that anchors one end like a strip mall version of a department store, selling everything for cheap and driving in most of the business. There's a dry cleaner on site, a check advance storefront and a locksmith shop that's exactly the size of one parking space. This is classic strip mall stuff, in the shadow of exactly the sort of urban planning that seeks to kill off strip malls altogether.

More »

Bryan Ochalla via flickr

The first Friday in June is National Doughnut Day, and while these national-whatever-days are about as silly as any other cynical marketing ploy, National Doughnut Day actually has an interesting history -- it was launched in 1938 by the Salvation Army to honor the women who served doughnuts to soldiers during the First World War.

In any case, we do love a good reason to eat more doughnuts. That's especially true in L.A., a simply fantastic place to be a doughnut lover. So on this very special Friday, we thought we'd direct you to some doughnut events, free doughnuts, and all our fabulous doughnut coverage from the past.

More »

Flickr / Bunchofpants

While financial analysts speculate about the not-so-sugar-coated demise of the cupcake industry, another sweet pastry is experiencing its own renaissance, at least maybe in the art world. The doughnut, a traditionally symmetrical, doughy ring of frosted near-perfection, is the cupcake's delightfully modern alternative, and tomorrow it's being honored for the second year in a row at the LACMA-adjacent pop-up art gallery, ForYourArt.

More »

Photo: Ali Trachta

The chocolate doughnut and vanilla cruller from Spudnuts

L.A. graffiti artist Manny Castro made a name for himself by addressing fast food trends with his spray can. In August of last year, he was under investigation for vandalism after he tagged the words "tastes like hate" on a Torrance Chick-fil-A in response to the fast food chain's stance on same-sex marriage. Now, Castro is once again making art in response to fried food, but this time it's a food trend we can all get behind: doughnuts.

Los Angeles reportedly claims more doughnut shops per capita than any other American city, and Castro has turned our collective pastry obsession into a street art movement he's dubbed #donuting. His doughnut-saturated art show, featuring neon-painted doughnut sculptures made from recycled tires, opens tonight at FactoryLA during the downtown art walk.

More »

Plan Check

Crullers

In celebration of its one-year anniversary, Plan Check will offer all of its diners orders of sugar-coated crullers on the house today. Each order comes in a set of three served with whipped cream and fresh fruit. For larger parties, enough will be brought out to include everyone in the festivities.

More »

Flickr/psd

Watch out, Intelligentsia and The Donut Man. Dunkin' Donuts is coming to Los Angeles. The Massachussetts-based company, which was founded in 1950 in Quincy, Mass., announced plans to expand to Southern California this morning. They're recruiting now for franchises in L.A., Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino, Ventura and Orange counties. The new doughnut and coffee shops are expected to open in 2015.

More »

Harvard Common Press

A Baker's Field Guide to Doughnuts

Type "Field Guide" into the Amazon book search list, and you'll get, as of this typing, 39,688 results. These are the moments when we suspect the A Baker's Field Guide to Doughnuts, to be released in a few weeks, will come in handy. A little rainbow sprinkle, Boston cream, or old-fashioned buttermilk fuel to get through those endless textbook photos of reptiles, months and birds.

In the baking guidebook realm, author Dede Wilson has produced several field guides, among them a book on holiday candies, another on Christmas cookies, one devoted entirely to the chocolate chip cookie, and a new book on those single bites of cake that have become rather trendy of late (we refuse to use the term "cake balls," as it sounds like a really bad porn movie title). It seems Americans are a predictable baking bunch.

We normally wouldn't expect much more than a few cruller tips and spiced orange glaze (p. 36) ideas, given the book's parameters, but Wilson is a great baker. And in today's pastry chef bakeshop era, we should have known there would be a few revelations -- a pastry cream-filled yeast doughnut with a burnt sugar topping -- for the home baker here. Get more on the book after the jump, plus a recipe for peanut butter glaze.

More »

S. Bonar

Peach-filled doughnuts

Like Santa Claus, The Donut Man's fresh peach doughnuts come but once a year. So, if you've been good, you have every right to go over the river and through the woods to that outpost of civilization called Glendora.

The Donut Man, a.k.a. Jim Nakano, has been making doughnuts since 1972 to satisfy his wife Miyoko's craving for fresh, hot doughnuts. His most famous concoction is his fresh strawberry-stuffed doughnut, generally available February through June. But for just a few weeks each summer -- meaning now till mid-September -- the strawberry filling is replaced with fresh peaches in a light sugar syrup. Stuffed into a thin glazed donut shell, crispy on the outside and plushy on the inside, the sliced peaches burst with fragrant, oozy flavor. These doughnuts ($3.25) are served with a fork, but Nakano recommends they be eaten "like a hamburger." Which works just fine as long as you grab a huge stack of napkins.

More »

A. Trachta

The glazed doughnut from Du Pars.

They say sex is like a doughnut: Even at its worst, is it ever really bad? Well, once you consume, in rapid succession, as many doughnuts as we have in the last few weeks, you start to believe it can be.

Of course there's never a reason to eat a doughnut. No amount of self-delusion will allow you to believe that fruit filling is a dose of vitamins for the day. No, eating a doughnut is an act of pure pleasure-seeking, so if you're going to have one, every bite should merit throwing a wrench in your otherwise clean-living diet. Dry, bland pastry need not apply.

So as an act of public service, we scoured the city for the best doughnuts around, all worth the sugar crash you'll inevitably experience later. We focused our search on actual doughnut shops, as opposed to restaurants that serve them on the menu -- with the exception of one, because if you're going to order a doughnut from a waitress, it seems fitting to do so at a 24-hour diner. Turn the page for our list of the Top 10 doughnuts in L.A.

More »

A. Trachta

Glazed doughnut from Du-Par's.

It's Friday morning. Who needs a healthy breakfast? Certainly not you, because you'll be celebrating National Doughnut Day, if you have any sense at all.

That's because we live in such an amazingly doughnut-rich city. How do we know? Perhaps because we have a top 10 doughnuts post in the works. (Cough, cough. Suggestions? Favorites? Tweets us @laweeklyfood.)

More »