Georgia’s best doughnut shop has no closing time. Not a late one, not a generous one. The doors simply never lock, and the crowd between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m. treats the place as an alternative to a bar: people order, sit down, and stay for an hour talking.
Kamal Grant opened Sublime Doughnuts in 2008 near Georgia Tech, and his own summary of the moment is hard to improve on. “Before 2008, doughnuts were just chocolate and glazed,” he has said, which is roughly the entire argument for the shop’s existence. Grant is a Navy veteran and a Culinary Institute of America-trained pastry chef, and the travel that came with the first career fed directly into the second.
The calling card is the A-Town Cream: a Boston cream variation shaped into a capital A for Atlanta, filled with custard and dipped in Belgian Callebaut chocolate. If you’re chasing the donut shops locals defend, this is the one where the best time to visit might be the middle of the night.
What to Expect When Visiting Sublime Doughnuts in Atlanta, Georgia
More than two dozen flavors are available regularly across yeasted, raised, and cake doughnuts, twists, filled doughnuts, croissant-based doughnuts, and fritters. Grant says the most popular is the fresh strawberries and cream: a yeasted doughnut with no hole, cut open and filled with whipped cream cheese frosting and sliced strawberries. He has a standing argument with anyone who claims not to like filled doughnuts.
The Orange Dream Star and the s’mores are the other two names that surface constantly, and there is a dulce de leche version that has convinced more than one reviewer it was the best thing in the case. Alongside those sit genuinely strange experiments, including white chocolate peach, sweet potato, and a salt-and-vinegar doughnut that worked better than it had any right to…