Old Fashioned Donuts | Roseland, Chicago
Head to Roseland for some of the city's best fried dough
It was widely thought that pie would be the sweet to topple cupcakes' dictatorship. But in Chicago, at least, the doughnut has come out on top.
Though there are fine new specimens popping up across town, no discussion of fried dough is complete without a reverent mention of one of the city's oldest and best sources: Old Fashioned Donuts in Roseland.
The 39-year-old shop on South Michigan near 112th Street is a neighborhood mainstay, frequented by people who have been eating Buritt Bulloch's sugary circles for much of their lives.
Dough is rolled and cut in the shop's front window, and the fryers turn out dense cake doughnuts, airy yeast doughnuts ($1), doughnut holes ($1 for 6) and the near-mythic apple fritter ($2.50).
The hulking fritter weighs in at over one pound, its heft owed to a spectacularly rich combination of thick-cut apples, cinnamon, yeast dough and a generous sugar glaze.
On a recent visit, we ate a blueberry doughnut (made Monday, Wednesday and Friday) while chatting with customers, one of whom proclaimed, "I've been coming here since I was in high school in the '70s. Best doughnut shop in the city!"
Others in line nodded their heads, chiming in with, "Sure is."
Old Fashioned Donuts; 11248 S. Michigan Ave.; 773-995-7420