The flagship of the best donut shop in Washington is two stories of glass with wall-to-wall books, which makes it look considerably more like a reading room than a place that fries dough. Writers actually work upstairs, where the light is dimmer. The monorail runs directly overhead. It is the least donut-shop-looking donut shop in this entire series, and the donuts are the reason it exists.
Mark and Michael Klebeck were construction guys before becoming entrepreneurs, and they opened the first Top Pot on Capitol Hill in February 2002, built on a recipe dating to the 1920s. The phrase they coined, hand-forged doughnuts, is now a Seattle idiom. More than 40 varieties are made daily, fried in zero-trans-fat palm oil, alongside coffee roasted in small batches downtown.
The signature is the Pink Feather Boa, and the maple bar is the one that sells out. If you’re working through our 50-state donut guide, this is the entry where the founders also wrote a cookbook, something most donut shops don’t get around to.
What to Expect When Visiting Top Pot Doughnuts in Seattle, Washington
Get an old-fashioned, which is the item other shops keep trying to copy. The shell comes out dense and crackly over a soft middle, and the salted caramel version is the one reviewers single out for not being cloying. The maple bar tastes like Sunday-morning pancakes according to more than one person who has tried to describe it, and it can be gone by 11:30 a.m.
The maple bar also stretches nearly a foot, which is worth knowing before you order three things. Past those, the apple fritter, the Bavarian cream, the double trouble, the chocolate glazed ring, and a raspberry-filled donut made with actual seeded raspberries are all named repeatedly. The classics stay put while seasonal specials rotate through, including a cherry blossom in spring and a pumpkin old fashioned in fall.
This is genuinely a coffee shop too, which the donut framing undersells. Beans are roasted in small batches in the city, and the espresso menu runs deep enough that people come for an Ovaltine latte or a matcha and treat the donut as the accessory…