Alpha Donuts, Queens
Location: 45–46 Queens Boulevard
How to order: Pickup or takeout only. I called ahead at (718) 472–4725.
My order: glazed, creme filled, jelly filled, cruller (note: is this a cruller?)
Price: $5 (I gave them $10).
Alpha Donuts is the kind of place you hope stays in business. It’s one of the few legit donut places in Queens. It’s open 24/7 (or at least it was). It also seems to be a true local mom and pop store. If we weren’t on the verge of the collapse of civilization right now, I’m sure you’d find lots of colorful local characters here. The signs are either old timey or handwritten on paper plates with lots of superfluous underlines. It’s almost exactly what you’d get if you asked a Brooklyn hipster to design a gritty Queens donut shop.
I’ve been out of the donut game since the George W. Bush administration, but as far as I can tell nothing much has changed. NYC donuts are still as divided as ever into two camps.
In one camp are the artistic donuts with outré flavorings like passion fruit, beet, black pepper and such. They are “doughnuts”, with all those extra letters sprinkled into the word, and they’re sold to you for $5 each by young artisans who have tattoo sleeves, spacer earrings, and master’s degrees. You don’t eat them, you “enjoy” them, and you do so in fine eateries like Doughnut Plant and The Doughnut Project that have Wi-Fi and top of the line espresso machines behind the counter.
Then there are the classic donuts that have not changed in decades. You have a limited range of options that never updates (glazed, jelly or cream filled, frosted) and which are all basically just different ways of putting sugar on top of or inside fried dough. They are sold in decrepit joints that never have a “gh” in their name, and rarely have an “A” health code rating in the window. You buy them for a dollar each from an old person who is wearing an apron and one of those paper hats and often does not speak your language well. Your coffee is sloshed into a styrofoam cup from a plastic handled carafe that has been sitting on a hot plate for … no one knows how long. Months? The other customers seem like regulars who have been sitting there all day. Nobody is Instagramming crullers.
Is one type of donut better than the other? No. The formula for rating donuts is very simple and unvarying. Donut quality is inversely proportional to the amount of time that has passed since it was made. A “bad” donut that just came out of the fryer is far better than a “good” donut that was made yesterday.
Alpha Donuts did a pretty good job representing the classic donut. The clear winner was the glazed donut. It was light and had just the right amount of glaze, where you definitely need a napkin or two but you don’t have to brush off your pants afterward. As for the filled donut, the jelly distribution was off. I want to get at least a little jelly with every bite and I don’t want to excavate the donut to get to it. The donut that was described to me as a cruller seemed to have lived a long and full life before it ended up in my bag. It could have doubled as a murder weapon.
All in all, you should go to Alpha Donuts and give them your business, and you should tip generously, not just because we love donuts but also because we want places like this to survive in our communities. They are observing all of the required pandemic ordinances and we should reward them for that as well. And above all, you should go because you’ve suffered enough. You deserve to treat yourself. You deserve donuts.
