Do-Nut Dinette

** THIS RESTAURANT IS PERMANENTLY CLOSED **

The neighborhood of Ghent in Norfolk, Virginia, has gone upscale in recent years and has become home to some of the finest fine-dining dining rooms in Hampton Roads. It also is where you will find Do-Nut Dinette, a counter-only diner with a salty short-order cook, sassy staff, and stools for scarcely more than a dozen customers (plus some wooden tables outside). The menu is a hash-house paradigm featuring eggs and various breakfast meats, greasy-good hash browns, and buttery grits; plus, as you might guess, donuts.

One big batch of donuts is made each morning (about twelve dozen on weekdays), so good sense demands arriving early. They will be fresh; and, more important, they will exist. It is not uncommon for a day’s supply to run out by noon. There is only one kind: raised & glazed. They are light, not cakey; but there is a pleasant doughy substance to them very unlike common donut blobs of sweetened, deep-fried fat that taste ethereal hot from the fry kettle but soon become leaden sinkers. One stool-sitter, who had lived in North Carolina back in Krispy Kreme’s salad days, declared Do-Nut’s donuts to be “Like Krispy Kreme was before they got full of themselves.”