Seven donut flavors are added every week at Louisiana’s best donut shop, pulled from a catalog that now includes more than 100 options. Root beer float. Strawberry shortcake. Peach crumble. Sriracha. Bacon and banana. The case in October looks nothing like the case in May, which means nobody who goes regularly has ever had the same visit twice.
The place is District: Donuts. Sliders. Brew., which opened in 2013 and had the whole city talking within a month. Founding partners Aaron Vogel, Chris Audler, and Stephen Cali built it with pastry chef Liz Hollinger, and the company is still run by its original founders. There are five New Orleans locations now, plus one inside The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.
In a city that already had beignets locked down for 160 years, earning this much donut loyalty is a genuinely strange achievement. If you’re working through one great donut per state, this is the entry where the correct answer to what should I order is whatever is on the board today.
What to Expect When Visiting District in New Orleans, Louisiana
Donuts here are small-batch and made fresh throughout the day rather than all before dawn, which is why the shop can stay open until 9 p.m. and still have something worth buying at seven. That is close to unique in this series, where most entries are a race against a noon sellout.
The single most District thing on the menu is the dough a la mode: a warm griddled donut split and stuffed with Creole Creamery ice cream. The cinnamon rolls have a reputation of their own, and reviewers often describe them as the size of a head. Ask what the current seven are before committing, as they change weekly.
The rest of the name is not decoration. Sliders come in cheeseburger, fried chicken, and tofu versions plus a rotating feature; the biscuits and buns are baked fresh daily, and there are kolaches and scratch-made breakfast sandwiches. The hot chicken sandwich draws its own converts…