How are those New Year’s resolutions panning out, fam? If you’re still going strong, more power to you. If you’re ready to return to your wicked ways but just need a little push, well, how about some sugar for breakfast?
For this story on some of the Bluff City’s finest fare, we turned to the people behind the pastries to find out their secrets to such sweet, sugary success.
Go on — you deserve a donut.
Blues City Donuts
“I hate baking,” Rueal Braden says, “with a passion. I went to L’Ecole culinary school. I did good on the savory; on the baking side, I struggled a little bit. So when I graduated I knew I was never going to do baking.” But two years ago, Braden opened the first Black-owned donut shop in Memphis, Blues City Donuts. “I hadn’t made any donuts before this. I trained for a week before I was released to the world as they say.”
Braden was working as a sous chef at the Nike warehouse when his cousin, who initially owned the shop, asked him to check on some of the kitchen’s equipment. “He called me two days later and asked me if I wanted the donut shop. At the time, I was real comfortable at Nike. I was in line to become the executive chef,” he says.
“He gave me two days to decide. I always wanted a business before I turned 50, so I just made the leap. And here I am with a donut shop and I actually love making donuts.”
Despite hating baking, Braden has found donut-making to be an opportunity for experimentation. “We don’t have the average donut. We have very different flavors,” he says. “I try to think outside the box.” He’s used candy, champagne, cereal, s’mores, and cotton candy in his creations, but Braden has not abandoned his savory side and continues to introduce unexpected savory flavors to his creations. “We do a sandwich called the Chicken Bismark. It’s a fried chicken breast dipped in Memphis honey gold, served between a Bismark donut.” But the most elaborate donut just might be the Ain’t It Mane Surf and Turf — lobster and steak served on a donut.
“When I got the donut shop, I knew I had to do something different to bring customers out that way,” Braden says, and come they have, from bloggers and foodies to “people who never thought of having steak and lobster on a donut.” For Braden, that support has been one of the most surprising parts of running Blues City Donuts. “I get support from Bartlett, Arlington, Memphis, Mississippi,” he says. “People come from all over to come to Blues City.”
Even so, a few weeks ago, he posted an update to Instagram and Facebook confessing that he was contemplating closing his donut shop. “I mean inflation is kicking our butt, rent is up, ingredients prices [are] skyrocketing overnight it seems, and who knows what Covid got in store for us,” he wrote. “And in walks a customer with her nieces and she’s taking them on a field trip telling them about Blues City Donuts and how we are the only Black-owned donut shop in Memphis and they were so excited. When I told her what I was going to do, she told me [that] God gave this to us, that we can’t stop now. And it seemed like everyone started coming and I sold out.”
“I try to keep my customers informed and be transparent when we’re struggling,” Braden says. “We treat everyone like family because we’re family-owned and family-run. We just want you to come give us a try.”
— Abigail Morici
Blues City Donuts is located at 5735 Raleigh Lagrange. (901) 266-5152
Gibson’s Donuts
Rev. Al Green comes to Gibson’s Donuts often, says owner Don DeWeese. He buys two “old fashioneds,” DeWeese says.
That just goes to show, DeWeese muses, that you never know who you’re going to bump into when you’re at Gibson’s buying one of some 40 flavors of donuts, which range from a glazed donut to a more elaborate maple bacon donut.
“I do know that Z-Bo loved caramel.”
And Zach Randolph, aka Z-Bo, is one of the “biggest tippers ever at Gibson’s.”
That’s $100 a pop.
But, DeWeese says, “We appreciate celebrities coming in and we don’t bother them.”
The success and fame of Gibson’s is like a jigsaw puzzle, DeWeese says. “There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle. One of the biggest is quality. The second part of the puzzle is service. The third is the atmosphere or what we create here. And another is the location, location, and location. And plenty of parking.”
When he bought Gibson’s from Lowell Gibson September 1, 1996, DeWeese owned DeWeese Construction Company.
DeWeese, his wife Rita, and Britton DeWeese, one of their four sons, “used to go in there three or four days a week and eat donuts. I got to know Mr. Gibson.”
When Gibson decided to sell the business, Don bought it for his 26-year-old son, Blair, to run. When Blair decided the donut business wasn’t for him, Rita ran the business. Then Don took over.
Don still works at the shop five days a week. Britton, who was an avid snowboarder, moved back from Colorado and began working at the shop. “The Donut Shop That Never Sleeps,” Britton’s storybook about Gibson’s, is available at the store.
“Lowell Gibson once said, ‘You have two businesses here. You have a manufacturing shop and you have a retail shop. If you make a bad donut, you will go out of business. On the other hand, you can make the best donut in the country and if you have horrible service, you also will go out of business.’”
He said, “You have to be good at both of them.”
As for their donuts, Don says, “We use a little more yeast than most donut shops. That makes our donuts a little lighter and airier. Every bag of donuts [mix] has the recipe on it. And every donut shop has that same recipe on the bag of mix. We just do a few things differently. We let the donuts rise three times where most donut shops let them rise once or twice. That makes them airier and lighter.
“We also have an antique glazer that you cannot find anymore, and we glaze our donuts on both sides. That keeps the freshness in so the bottom doesn’t get dry like [it does at] every other donut shop in America.”
And, Don says, “The quality of the product is absolutely number one. But the show that we put on is the big piece of the puzzle.”
That show turned into an extravaganza in June 2016 when Drew Holcomb of Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors performed at Gibson’s. “One of his agents or somebody in his posse called the store and said he’s going to play at the Levitt Shell and that he grew up in Memphis eating our donuts. He’d like to bring 12 of his friends there and buy them all donuts.”
But after Don got more than one phone call to get to the store that night, he arrived to find 500 or so people had shown up to see Holcomb. The store and the parking lot were packed. “Britton is on the roof throwing donuts,” he remembers.
Holcomb performed a mini show for the crowd. “He started up on the roof, but the people couldn’t hear it and he came down and got on top of the SUV.”
— Michael Donahue
Gibson’s Donuts is located at 760 Mt. Moriah Road. (901) 682-8200
Donut Man
When he moved from Cambodia to Massachusetts to attend college in 1997, Vanchann Kroch (rhymes with “coach”) probably did not see himself as a donut entrepreneur. “I worked in construction all my life, actually,” he says. “And I still do it sometimes, but now I’m in the donut business.”
That’s an understatement. Since he took the helm at the Donut Man shop on Austin Peay Highway five years ago, he’s steadily grown the customer base and now has a second location in Bartlett. “Since we opened, we picked up a lot of customers,” he says. “We come to the shop every day at 12:30 in the morning and we’re open every day from 3:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. We have great customers who come in every day to get donuts and coffee, and besides that we have breakfast sandwiches. Like ham, bacon, or turkey with egg and cheese on a croissant. We also have a smoked sausage that is wrapped in croissant bread. Everything we serve, we make in-house.”
While other breakfast items do a brisk business, the donuts are the main attraction. “We have our own recipe that’s different from other places, and a lot of different flavors and fillings — probably about 50 to 60 flavors in the case every day. Our biggest sellers are glazed and chocolate.”
Those flavors keep customers coming back, and have even earned Donut Man some regular large-scale clients. “In addition to walk-in customers, we also do wholesale,” he says. “We deliver to three or four gas stations, and we have regular customers like the Sheraton Hotel, who order a lot of donuts whenever they have a convention. And Hope Church on Walnut Grove has a big order every Sunday.”
But humans cannot live on donuts alone — we must also have coffee. It’s a subject Kroch takes very seriously. “I drink a lot of coffee and I haven’t found any that’s better than ours,” he says. “It’s John Conti Coffee from Kentucky. Our customers just love it.”
Most importantly for Kroch, the business has a personal dimension that brings more than just donuts into his life. “The previous owner was also Cambodian, and he liked my family, sold the shop to us, and taught us how to make the donuts. It took us about a month to learn everything from him. After that, we took over. And I like this business because I can stay home with my family more.”
— Alex Greene
Donut Man is located at 6525 Memphis Arlington Road, and Donut Man Bakery, 3224 Austin Peay Highway. (901) 388-9500
Midtown Donuts
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So why not commemorate that old adage by scarfing down as many sweet circles of dough as possible? If anyone’s New Year’s resolution is to eat way more sweets, then Midtown Donuts is a great place to start. The shop’s Union Avenue location is hallowed ground for baked-good aficionados, with the site formerly the home of Donald’s Donuts.
While Donald’s is no more, Midtown Donuts owner Ly Touch has revitalized the space and put his own unique stamp on the business since taking over in early 2019. The big donut sign is still there, a beacon for hungry Memphians with a sweet tooth. Inside, Touch starts his routine at 3 a.m., showing up early to bake for several hours and open the doors for early birds at 4 a.m. And he’s no stranger to the donut business: A few of his relatives run Howard’s Donuts over on Summer Avenue and showed him the ropes when he struck out on his own.
All that is to say, Touch knows a thing or two about making donuts. I popped in on a rainy Sunday morning, and the smell of freshly baked sweetness was enough to elevate any gloomy mood. The shelves are fully stocked with a variety of treats every morning, making it a tough decision whether grabbing a single or a dozen. Luckily, the staff is more than happy to walk indecisive customers through some of the local favorites. One of the top sellers, I was told, is the blueberry, a strong fruity flavor balanced out by a smooth sugary glaze. The crumb cake is also popular, the Midtown version combining plenty of bright and intriguing sweet flavors.
But don’t overlook the rest: simple glazed donuts, chocolate with bright sprinkles, lemon cake donuts, chocolate eclairs, shaved coconut, your basic fried donuts, or really anything else that a donut lover might want (my favorite so far are the Oreos, with the chocolate cookie tops crumbled over a white glaze). Take ’em to go, or take a beat outside on the patio and watch morning traffic zoom by.
But Touch wanted to make Midtown Donuts more than just a donut shop. If one member of the party isn’t into sweets, or you need to make a quick stop, there are other options too, like a variety of savory sandwiches and snacks, salads, and coffee. It truly is a one-stop shop for a morning commute, and somehow manages to be a quiet, sugary oasis on a busy section of Union right across from the bustling Kroger.
— Samuel X. Cicci
Midtown Donuts is located at 1776 Union Avenue. (901) 347-2020
Twitter- M. David Rudd 
Twitter- M. David Rudd 
