The best donut in Illinois is an apple fritter that weighs roughly a pound, comes out about as wide as your face, and is made entirely from the dough scraps left over after everything else has been cut. Most bakeries throw those away. On Chicago’s far South Side, one man turned them into the state’s most famous pastry.
The man is Burritt Bulloch, who everybody calls Mr. B, and his shop is Old Fashioned Donuts at 112th and Michigan Avenue in Roseland. He opened it on November 4, 1972, after moving from Mississippi to Chicago in 1963 at age 23 and learning the craft by working for others first. He has been at the bench ever since, starting at 6 a.m. and working twelve-hour days, six days a week, into his eighties.
Chicago calls him the Donut King, and he did not name himself. If you’re chasing the best donuts in America, this is the one where the glaze recipe belongs to one person, the dough gets cut by hand, and the whole operation has never bothered with a single thing it did not need.
What to Expect When Visiting Old Fashioned Donuts in Chicago, Illinois
Get the apple fritter and get a glazed. The fritter is the reason people drive from every corner of the metro, stuffed with warm apple chunks and cinnamon under a glaze Bulloch mixes from his own recipe, and the best-seller version comes topped with fresh pecans. The plain glazed yeast donut is the volume item, and the one Mr. B is proudest of.
Then there are the Texas donuts, named purely for scale. One Texas donut is roughly equivalent to four regular ones, and Bulloch started making them years ago because people kept wanting more. Chicago has since filled up with giant-donut shops, and most of them trace back to this counter one way or another…