Pull apart the apple fritter at Missouri’s best donut shop, and the glaze shatters like glass. Underneath is soft yeasted dough and chunks of spiced apple, and the recipe behind it has not been altered since the Eisenhower administration. The thing is roughly the size of a dinner plate; it costs under two dollars, and it sells out every single day.
Donut Drive-In is a small white-and-red building on Chippewa Street in southwest St. Louis, which is to say, it sits directly on the old Route 66. John Harter built it in 1952 and opened it the following year. His daughter and her husband ran it until 1996; the Schwarz brothers took over after that, and in 2020 Kevin McKernan bought it specifically because it had been his childhood favorite and he wanted it preserved.
Alton Brown put it on television and confirmed the obvious: the chocolate long john and the cinnamon rolls still come from the early-1950s family recipes. It has won the vote for best donuts on Route 66. If you’re chasing 50 donuts worth a detour, this is the one where the neon sign out front has been restored, and nothing behind it has been touched.
What to Expect When Visiting Donut Drive-In in St. Louis, Missouri
Order the apple fritter early. It is the item any argument about St. Louis donuts ends on, and it disappears daily. Past that, the case is deliberately conservative: long johns, cinnamon twists, cinnamon swirls, custard-filled, chocolate-glazed, jelly, old fashioneds, crullers, cake donuts, blueberry, and donut holes by the bag.
The pricing is part of the appeal and genuinely hard to believe in 2026. Long johns have run under a dollar, fancies like the fritter around a dollar eighty, and donut holes a couple of dozen cents apiece. Cards are accepted, which not every shop in this series can say.
Two practical tricks that regulars use. On weekends there is a separate takeout booth behind the shop where you can grab a random assorted dozen and skip the main line entirely. And you can pre-order online before 3 p.m. for next-day pickup, which is the only reliable way to guarantee a fritter…