From the NYC Donut Report!! Archives: Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop, Manhattan Avenue between Norman and Meserole, Brooklyn
This report is from the original NYC Donut Report!! blog that is now lost to the sands of time. Written in June 2008, I think it was the post that people read and linked to the most.
Peter Pan Donuts still exists and is still the best donut experience in the city. No matter where you live in the New York City area, this shop is worth a special trip to Greenpoint and you should generously support it now. The same goes for the other bakeries in the area (although Bakery Rzeszowska tragically closed down last year).
Any New Yorker who is still breathing and mobile and has a few bucks in their pocket has a duty to help out these NYC treasures in their time of need. That means you!
Location: 727 Manhattan Avenue
Subway: G to Nassau Ave or G to Greenpoint Ave. If you want to hit all of the Manhattan Avenue Polish bakeries mentioned here — and you’d be an idiot not to!! — I suggest getting off at one station and eating/walking your way to the other.
Neighborhood: Greenpoint, NYC’s №1 Polish enclave and heaven on earth for donut lovers.
My order: Marble curler, creme filled, coffee.
Cost: $4.80, including $2 tip.
One of my saddest days in this city was when The Old Homestead Inn, an extraordinary Polish dive bar on 1st Avenue and 6th Street, was closed down and replaced with a pseudo-Irish pub — a detestable place whose name I will not mention here because this Web site is not in the business of rewarding criminals.
Simply put, The Old Homestead Inn was the greatest bar ever. Here was a place where you could crack open an oversized bottle of Zubr beer (pronounced “Joob”) and sit elbow-to-elbow with elderly Polish men gambling away piles of balled-up cash on obscure games of chance. And when these card games inevitably degenerated into fistfights, the kind and charming 60-something lady who tended the bar would simply sigh and dry her hands on her apron before wading into the melee and removing the aged offenders from the premises (literally) by their ears. On a related occasion, your own international donut reporter was rescued by the same woman after a series of miscommunications in English, Polish and Japanese ended with an angrily intoxicated young man from Krakow trying his very best to pull off my nose.
So when readers burned up the Donut Tip Line this week to recommend Polish bakeries in Greenpoint, I was thrilled to jump on the G train to check them out.
If you get off the G train at the Nassau Ave station, your first stop as you walk up Manhattan Avenue will be the Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop, which many people say has the best donuts in New York City. They seem to be churning out donuts non-stop in the back room at Peter Pan — you can see the men back there in white aprons, toiling in clouds of flour and powdered sugar, pulling the donuts from the oil on long skewers. And every few minutes another pretty young waitress in a turquoise-and-pink frock will emerge from the same clouds with a rack of hot, glistening donuts on her shoulder.
The donut scene at Peter Pan — yes, it has a donut scene — centers around a snaking, S-shaped counter that can seat about 20 people and takes up almost the entire interior. There was a merry buzz here. The young and old were there. A pasty man took his donuts with a giant glass of milk. Roommates scrolled through drunken party pictures. Someone kept trying to use the pay phone, oblivious to the sign that read PAY PHONE OUT OF ORDER! ONLY 911! The waitresses hustled back and forth, softly quibbling with each other in Polish, and a pale old man wearing enormous spectacles happily ogled them as they bent to retrieve ten-gallon bottles of Fox’s Vanilla Syrup and reached for the frosted donuts with sprinkles up on the highest rack. “Hi, slim!” he called to one waitress, who playfully jabbed his shoulder. “Hey, kid,” he said to the next girl, “you’ve lost weight!” Later, as another beauty passed, he undid the top two buttons of his well-worn tuxedo shirt, which had gone slightly pink in the wash, and gave her what I think was meant to be a provocative look.
On my server’s recommendation, I had a cup of very hot coffee (which needed sugar) and a dense and sweet marble curler — a huge donut that was kind of like a long john on steroids and had a hint of maple syrup flavor. She also brought me a creme-filled that was very good. The creme was light and sweet and tasted of vanilla. One of my tipsters had claimed that Peter Pan made a donut frosted with marshmallow Fluff and sprinkles, but it wasn’t available on this visit.
After Peter Pan, I stopped at a couple of Polish bakeries for paczki. Paczki (pronounced “punchky”) are traditional Polish jelly donuts that are much lighter than the typical USA donut, perhaps closer to the texture of challah bread, with a sweet raspberry or lemon filling that is more of a syrup than a jelly.
There are many Polish bakeries on Manhattan Avenue, but the two I tried were Bakery Rzeszowska (948 Manhattan Ave. at Java St.) and Old Poland Bakery (926 Manhattan Ave. at Kent St.) Of these two, the paczki at Rzeszowska were definitely superior. The bakery is a hole in the wall where any European-looking person will be addressed in Polish. When I responded in English, a daughter or niece with dyed hair and a lip ring was dragged in from the back to take my order. Even if there are no paczki in the racks up front, ask for them. In my case, they brought me one from the back that was still warm. I gobbled it up on the sidewalk — the raspberry filling was piping hot and tasted like actual, fresh raspberries. The paczki at Rzeszowska are 75¢ each.
Later, I was even offered free donuts right on the street! However, I politely declined after it became clear to me that I would have to join some sort of storefront church or cult if I accepted the donuts. Also, they were just Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins. Now, if they had offered me a hot lemon-filled paczki, I’d probably be happily going through some sort of initiation and brainwashing ceremony as we speak.
