On June 1, 1968, a dairy farmer from Point Judith opened a donut shop in a converted sub sandwich joint on a busy stretch of Route 2 with roughly $40 in his pocket and a $7,000 debt hanging over him. By the 1980s, the place was moving up to 800 dozen donuts a day. That is not a rounding error on a good morning. That is 9,600 donuts.
Frederick Alvin Briggs went by Allie, which is why people assume the shop is named for a woman and are wrong. He had spent ten years making and selling donuts at a shop in Wakefield before striking out, and he hand-cut everything, a practice the shop still maintains. In 1986, he handed the business to his eldest daughter, Anne Briggs Drescher, and her husband, Walter, and Allie’s descendants run it to this day.
Saveur put it among the twelve best donut shops in the country in 2008, and Thrillist named it again in 2016, and the lines still wrap the building with cars from Connecticut and Massachusetts in them. If you’re working through 50 donut shops across America, this is the one where the building is small, the payment is cash, and the state treats the place as a landmark.
What to Expect When Visiting Allie’s Donuts in North Kingstown, Rhode Island
The donuts are famously oversized, which is the first thing anyone mentions. Beyond that, the case runs plain, glazed, chocolate coconut, glazed crullers, powdered raspberry, blueberry, and a Boston creme that reviewers single out, plus turnovers and cinnamon buns on the pastry side.
The giant donut cake is the order that makes this shop a fixture at Rhode Island birthdays. It needs real advance notice, with reports of an 8-week lead for a custom birthday donut, and the shop does not use social media to take orders, so the phone is the only route. Office hours for calls run Tuesday through Sunday, which is a wider window than the shop itself keeps…