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Sweeter by the Dozens

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Written by Doug Smith

Paula Huber says she’s “a dying breed,” but don’t call the coroner yet.

She’s much too busy -- teasing her customers, dusting off her daughters and managing a staff of 22 -- to hold still for an examination.

That’s life in the land of Paula’s Donuts, a hole in a mall at the edge of Buffalo, New York, demonstrating one dozen at a time that the independent baker can break free of the chains. Two miles to the north, a Krispy Kreme shuttered in 2006.

“People can tell the difference with ours,” she says. “We still hand-cut. Almost nobody does that any more. Seriously, our doughnuts are made with love.” When she says it, the word is stuffed with the extra letters.

Paula says “love” more often than a dating-service ad. (Actually, she’s happily married to a food-service whiz who oversees nutrition at a retirement home. Her business has helped finance two daughters’ college educations.) “I just love it,” she says, pausing while a customer stops by with news that his brother has just found work.

“The Chevy called him,” he says. Somehow, the brother has swum upstream against the tide of layoffs at the area's three General Motors plants.

“That’s great, Nate,” says Paula. “I just love it.”

You have to love it to come to work at 4 a.m., earlier if another baker’s on the disabled list. That’s why Paula finally shaved a few hours off her round-the-clock operation, closing between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. “The middle-of-the-night clientele was fine,” she said. “Truckers, delivery people, all kinds of folks, good folks. And we did a good business. But it was just too much.”

Paula produced the first donut of her own a dozen years ago. “We used to own a Dunkin’ Donuts,” she says. “Their leases were horrible.” In addition to the franchise fee, she would be assessed an “override” if her sales exceeded a certain amount. “We were actually being penalized for doing well.”

So she decided to “do well” for herself. Still bearing a diploma from Dunkin’s “Donut U” near Boston (“Six enrolled, I was the only one who passed”), she placed Paula’s where once a Dickie’s Donuts died, in a four-door plaza near a University of Buffalo campus. Kenmore, America’s original suburb, lies just across the road.

Paula’s doughnuts are fancy (“Try the maple cream, I love it”) but her place is plain, with four and a half formica booths, eleven stools and a modest resin-table outdoor patio, mostly to accommodate smokers. She had just opened when New York State banned smoking in all public places, to the anguish of many bars and coffee shops.

“Actually, we welcomed it, ” she says. “We really wanted to have a nice family atmosphere, where everyone could come in. The no-smoking law made up our mind for us and it hasn’t hurt our business at all.”

The restaurant area’s a tight fit, but it’s Grand Central Terminal compared to the kitchen, a twelve-by-twelve tiled outpost where four bustling employees jockey with three eight-foot doughnut racks. Paula dusts the baker’s bench, tosses out an off-white slab the size of a party pizza, bunches it up like a beloved pillow, flattens it again and starts cutting.

“Hardly anybody hand-cuts anymore,” says Paula, who first learned the craft from a brother. “We’re a dying breed.” Nuggets of dough flop to the side as she extracts the tin O-ring from the mass, to be retrieved and folded back into the mass. “Holes” for sale will be cut later, separately. A clerk once fixed a coco-holic’s craving by taking three holes to the back and having them re-rolled in shaved coconut, returning so dusted in powdered sugar that it was hard to tell where the product left off and she began. All this for 50 cents.

“That was my daughter,” Paula would say after that singular sample of service surfaced in a review. She has two, 24 and 25, one married, both in her employ. “This helped put them through college,” she says with a powdery gesture.

Most days she will sell around 200 dozen, including a dawn patrol delivery run to hospital cafeterias and, amazingly, a nearby Comfort Inn. When most chain motels put out a “continental” breakfast, the continent is Antarctica. Imagine a plate of Paula’s pride amid the generic bran flakes and melted-Crayola orange juice.

In store, Paula’s dishes up easily two dozen varieties, not counting the exquisite flat faschnachts -- a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch donut served just before Lent begins -- produced in five varieties around Easter time. While greater Buffalo cut its teeth (and probably cavitied a few) on maple glaze donuts, Paula figures her biggest sellers as maple cream, peanut cream and peanut sticks. All border on the addictive.

At the outset, she says, “Our first ads were actually in church bulletins,” seconding the notion of Paula’s as a family place. “Then we went into the weeklies and, once in a while, in the Buffalo News,” an expensive risk for a small neighborhood place.

She “coupons” religiously. Seldom does a Paula’s coupon carry an expiration date, so many a dog-eared, double-folded coupon crosses the counter like a chit from a time capsule. That’s just fine with her. In this inflationary world, her coupons are specific to volume, not price – “Three free with a dozen,” or “Free coffee with any three donuts.” Daily in-store specials frequently offer a better deal anyway.

Paula’s profits lightly from Lottery tickets. While she shares the view that lotteries impose a 51 per cent tax on the people who can least afford it, she decided she couldn’t act as everyone’s financial planner and succumbed to her customers’ pleas. “The place that was here before, they used to come in for Lottery tickets, and the folks just really want to have them.” They’re not widely displayed; some of the reels of “instant” tickets hang way to the back, almost out of sight.

With an intensely loyal clientele (“One guy, first day back from Arizona, he’s got to come in here”) and a widening reputation, Paula could probably franchise locally, but “that just wouldn’t be me.” Even with Paula, there’s just so much love to go around.

Full disclosure postscript: After a third interview, Paula insisted on sending a dozen full-sized donuts home with the author, who scrupulously limits himself to three “minis” a day. He took three across the street to a neighbor who is, to put it very charitably, very discriminating. As he beheld the plate, his jaw dropped. “Nobody makes donuts like this anymore,” the neighborhood Grinch declared. Paula would take that as the ultimate compliment.

Paula’s Donuts, 380 Kenmore Avenue at the corner of Englewood, Buffalo, NY, open 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., no credit cards, no smoking, parking easy, 716-862-4246.

Doug Smith is one half of the Cheap Gourmets, the Niagara region's experts on roadside dining. Doug's better half Polly are both long-time friends and contributors to Roadside Magazine.