Better Days Coffee & Donuts

Old-school doughnuts, made by hand

The doughnuts are the reason, and they are deliberately familiar ones. Better Days Coffee & Donuts opened in early 2024 in Dovercourt Village, Toronto, making classic Canadian doughnuts by hand: glazed, old-fashioned sour cream, apple fritters and filled doughnuts with rotating flavours. The lane is Canadian and old-school, and the shop stays in it. The style is retro on purpose, closer to what a Canadian doughnut counter tasted like decades ago than to a contemporary pastry case, and the shop keeps to it rather than spreading into croissants, tarts and scones. Coffee is in the name and in the offer, but the doughnut programme leads.

The case is the clock

Timing is part of the visit. The doughnuts are made in small batches by hand, and the shop has been known to sell out after opening, so the fullest case and the widest choice belong to the early part of the day. That is a consequence of how it makes things rather than a marketing device: there is no large back stock of identical product, only what has been fried and finished for the case, so it looks different early than it does later. Its place in Dovercourt Village is similarly plain. This is a local counter with repeat neighbourhood demand, in the middle of a residential community rather than on a tourist route, and it has fitted itself into the area’s morning routine since it opened.

Start with the apple fritter

The apple fritter is the clearest first order and the doughnut that drove the shop’s early attention. In this context it is not a novelty item; it is the best evidence of the retro Canadian lane Better Days is working in, craggy and generous rather than neat. Pair it with coffee for the full version of what the name promises, but keep the order doughnut-led. A doughnut and a coffee is the whole visit, and it is meant to be. After the fritter, take whatever hand-made classics are in the case that day, since the selection is defined more by style and batch than by a long fixed list of flavours. The retro framing is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is a bet that a well-made glazed doughnut still holds its own against a modern pastry case.