Dunkin’ Donuts, Middle Village, Queens
Location: 6010 80th St, Queens, NY 11379 (delivered by Postmates)
My order: Double Chocolate, French Cruller, Glazed, Glazed Chocolate Cake, Jelly Filled, Old Fashioned. Plus a movie-theater sized iced latte (not pictured).
Cost: $26.60, including $10 tip and all kinds of Postmates fees.
After two months of lockdown, I decided that I deserved donuts. It had been months. I was losing my marbles (and still am). It’s times like these that donuts are made for. I placed this order two days in advance, for a day and time when I knew I’d be able to properly indulge and appreciate this. I set an alarm the night before and hardly slept, like a kid before Christmas.
There’s not much to say about donuts from Dunkin that you don’t already know. They make a double chocolate donut that is legitimately good. I’d choose it over just about any other shop’s double chocolate. The rest of their lineup is meh, but they are impressively consistent from one shop to the next.
Something new I learned about Dunkin’ from this meal is that when they say “large” iced latte, they mean it. These are movie theater sizes. By the time you finish one, the milk it’s made from might have already gone bad.
Dunkin’s greatest cultural contribution might not be a donut, but rather the 1980s commercials with the “Time to make the donuts” guy. The main characters of these ads was a beleaguered baker who hauled himself out of bed before every morning before dawn and sorrowfully intoned, “Time to make the donuts!” It’s like the motto of workers everywhere. Whether you’re a baker, a doctor, a programmer, a teacher, a senator, whatever, we’ve all had those mornings where you have to drag yourself into the office. You’d rather stay in bed, but… it’s time to make the donuts.
In that light, is especially sad that Dunkin donuts are to my knowledge never actually made on premises. Because donuts are at their best when they’re just made and plummet in quality thereafter, the poor guy’s efforts were never truly appreciated. I don’t know if there is a person alive who has ever actually tasted a freshly made Dunkin’ donut. It might be a revelation, but you and I will never know.
