Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop

Handmade donuts on a Greenpoint corner

The case is the argument: handmade donuts, made the same way for more than seventy years. Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop has been a Greenpoint fixture since the 1950s and is still family owned, and its reputation rests on three in particular. The red velvet cake donut is the dense, cake-style option. The honey dip French cruller depends on choux-style dough rather than a raised ring, which makes it the most technical thing in the case. The Old Fashioned is the plain traditional staple. Around them sit assorted pastries, bagels, rolls, sandwiches and coffee, which is why the shop belongs to the New York breakfast counter tradition as much as to the donut tradition.

A counter the neighborhood never left

The setting does as much work as the baking. This is a classic counter-service bakery, where the visit begins by reading the run of donuts and breakfast items in front of you and ends about ninety seconds later. Around it, the avenue has modernized, filling with newer coffee chains and contemporary storefronts, while the shop has stayed family owned and largely unchanged, which is what people mean when they say time stands still inside. The formats and the shape of the case have stayed recognizable through all of it, which is most of what regulars want. Its role is not only to sell donuts. It is part of Greenpoint’s shared breakfast memory, the kind of counter residents associate with coffee, a quick order and a business that has served several generations of the same families.

Order the cruller first, then decide how hungry you are

Start with the honey dip French cruller if you want the shop’s clearest signature and its best piece of technique. Choose the red velvet cake donut if you would rather have something denser, and the Old Fashioned if you want the most traditional order in the case. If the stop is turning into breakfast rather than a sweet snack, add the bacon, egg and cheese, or move toward the bagels, rolls, sandwiches and coffee that round the menu out. The shop has been named among Brooklyn’s essential restaurants of more than fifty years’ standing, and it has been called New York City’s oldest continuously running donut shop at seventy-three years of trading.