Spudnuts

subject: Spudnuts Donut shop
take-out vehicle: paper bag
price: $3.14

(editor's note: 8:23am—mmm, ate 3.5 donuts)

I'm sure there's a restaurant in Charlottesville that's been around longer than spudnuts, but I couldn't tell you what it is, and I bet you $5 I don't like it as much. Spudnuts has been around since Richard Wingfield (who sadly passed away in 2005) opened it in 1969, and I've been eating his tatery confections for as long as I can remember.

When I was growing up, on some lucky Saturday mornings, my dad—always unannounced—would go out and pick-up a dozen-count box of glazed spudnuts. Those were the best saturday mornings ever (well, until those bastards as Fox cancelled my favorite Spider-Man cartoon. A-holes!).

(editor's note: 8:48am—whee! sugar!)

Anyway, I grew up in a household of four, which was nice because it was easy to divvy up a dozen of anything. Three per person. Easy. Done. So we would all gather for breakfast, I would take my three donuts all at once and inhale them, because that's how healthy growing boys (and men, it turns out) consume donuts. Then, my blood sugar nice and high, I would jitter my way to the TV to watch cartoons.

Inevitably, I would end up back in the kitchen later in the morning. Why it took me so long to recognize this pattern of events, I don't know, but it turned out that while my routine was to eat donuts whole then run to the television, the rest of my family actually sat at the table and talked to each other—and in so doing, forgot to eat their third donuts! So everytime I would start looking...

(editor's note: 9:14am—holy crap. no more whee. need caffeine.)

...for a snack , i would come upon three, whole, untouched spudnuts. Those fools! How could anyone not eat their entire allotment of spudnuts!? Was something wrong? Was this some kind of trick? Devious plot or no, I got three more spudnuts, and I was very happy.

Today, thanks to a slightly more tame sense of exuberance, I got only four donuts: one glazed, one glazed then coconut-sprinkled, one glazed then chocolate-iced, and one blueberry.

Of the three varieties of glazed, my favorite, by far, was the plain glazed. The coconut itself seemed a little on the dry side to me, and the chocolate icing tasted less like actual chocolate and more like a not-so-good mix of powdered sugar, cocoa powder, and water. Call me a purist, but if I'm getting chocolate on my donut, I want the real thing, or at least a close facsimile. I did not finish this donut.

The blueberry donut was the runt of the litter. Smaller and denser, the blueberry is one of spudnut's cake donuts. It was actually quite light compared to other cake donuts I've had in the past, and remarkably moist. The blueberry taste wasn't overpowering, definitely more donut than blueberry, but it tasted...right.

I've long argued with myself over which is better: the plain glazed or the blueberry, the apple or the orange. One is light and airy, the other less so and not so much. But both are reasons to get up early in the morning, and both are worth the near-obligatory mid-morning nap. It's an argument that I hope to keep having for some time to come.

Thank you Richard Wingfield.

(editor's note: 9:35am—found a reese's peanut butter cup. that should help, right?)