Do-Rite Donuts & Coffee

Chef-built doughnuts and the old-fashioned test

Do-Rite Donuts & Coffee started as a joke between two chefs, Jeff Mahin and Francis Brennan, who met in the kitchen at L2O, where Mahin was a line cook and Brennan chef de cuisine. Work on a passion fruit-filled pastry turned into an idea, and the first shop opened in the Chicago Loop in 2012 as a compact carryout counter.

The programme is narrow on purpose. It is doughnuts, made in small batches with close attention to shaping, fermentation, fat, proofing and glazing, and the old-fashioned is the benchmark. The founders treated it as the technical test: the cracked exterior, the two-tone colour and the soft interior all had to land before anything else got made. The named line-up runs through the Chocolate Old-Fashioned, the Buttermilk Old-Fashioned with vanilla bean glaze, a Vanilla Bean Glazed Carrot Cake Donut with cream cheese frosting, a Valrhona Chocolate Cake with chocolate glaze and frosting, candied maple bacon, and pistachio-Meyer lemon. Dark Matter coffee is poured beside them.

A downtown counter built for the morning rush

The room is a grab-and-go counter rather than a sit-down bakery, and the tone inside is practical: order at the case, take the box, keep moving. Seating amounts to a few tables outside the door, which is the honest signal about how the place is meant to be used.

The morning defines it. Commuters, tech workers, finance people, actors and lawyers queue at the windows before work, and the production model is built for that pace: doughnuts made 36 at a time, continuously through the morning, so the case is refilled rather than depleted. The founders built much of the shop themselves, sanding the counter, constructing racks and restoring a delivery van to move fresh product. The reasoning behind all of it was direct. A hot doughnut is a better doughnut.

Order the buttermilk old-fashioned first

Start with the Buttermilk Old-Fashioned with vanilla bean glaze. It is the clearest first order because the style reveals the process: a cake doughnut that should be rich and substantial, cracked outside and soft within. The Chocolate Old-Fashioned follows the same logic, while the Valrhona Chocolate Cake goes denser and more chocolate-heavy. If the Vanilla Bean Glazed Carrot Cake Donut is in the case, its cream cheese frosting makes it another strong cake-doughnut option.

Then branch into the specialties. Candied maple bacon covers the sweet-salty side, and pistachio-Meyer lemon is the nut-and-citrus one. A daily selection of vegan and gluten-free doughnuts sits alongside the standard yeast and cake formats. Pair whatever you choose with Dark Matter coffee and keep the visit focused on what the counter is for: fresh, small-batch doughnuts eaten soon after they are made.