From the mouthwatering frozen custard of Ted Drewes, to the hot toasted ravioli at Sportsman’s Park Restaurant & Bar, St. Louis is home to some great restaurants and food traditions. It’s the birthplace of the ice cream cone, gooey butter cake and a delicious thin-crust pizza cut into squares and coated in provolone cheese. St. Louis is also a quiet hotspot for doughnuts, with fast food chains and mom-and-pop shops surrounding any Google Maps search like the glaze on a pastry. 

My fellow pastry connoisseur, Ethan Beyzer, and I set out to find the best two doughnut shops in St. Louis and then compare them to a proven fast food commodity. 

The Sweet Spot, located on Adie Road in St. Ann, is perhaps best described as a wonky combination. It’s all about two things: gyros and doughnuts. And the eatery is not shy about promoting either. Oblong laminated posters cover the outer facade, showcasing the recipes and food customers come from all over St. Louis to enjoy. 

The inside is an entirely different ambiance from anything Ethan and I were used to. It’s straight out of the 1970s, with orange-and blue-colored walls and painted bubble letters scattered about. On this particular morning, it’s almost empty, with one customer checking his phone in the corner and two employees chatting with us about their favorite doughnuts.

The glazed doughnut from Sweet Spot is special; more gooey than solid on the inside but covered by a hard and sugary outside. The dough strands literally make sounds as you munch away, a symphony of sweet delicacy. And true to the restaurant’s name, the doughnut is sweet, though not overwhelmingly so. Just enough to make you keep wanting more. It’ll be really hard to top this.

Tony’s Donuts, operating in Maryland Heights since 1995, might be the exact opposite of the calm, sleepy Sweet Spot. Where our first destination was an open space, Tony’s packs perhaps twice the volume into half the space. Things are everywhere. Televisions and screens line the walls, with racks of chips and drinks throughout the place. Tables and chairs fill it out, making standing space conspicuously low in quantity. So we sit.

The glazed doughnut here is different, not gooey and moist, but almost like a sweet cake. It’s solid, bread-like in texture. But what really makes the doughnut shine is the glaze. The people at Tony’s aren’t stingy about their glaze; it’s lathered on like icing, making each bite that much more sweet. It almost serves as a sauce for the relatively dry base. 

Now, we head over to the proven commodity, Dunkin’ Donuts. In operation since 1950, it’s the eighth largest fast food chain in the world with 11,300 locations. People from just about everywhere come to this place. Must be good, right?

Wrong. Maybe we were spoiled by the first two local shops, but these doughnuts don’t do the trick. They were thicker than the homemade ones, drier and less flavorful. Perhaps most incriminating was the filling. That’s not a problem we found with the other doughnuts, whose dough was so light and semi-sweet that we only wanted more. This one truly left us feeling stuffed, bloated and unhappy.