A donut man for all seasons
Acomposite of Jim Nakano’s average customer would look somewhat like his air-conditioning repair man, local chamber of commerce members, his insurance man, a unicycle
club that arrives at his door only by unicycle, cops, Nobel laureates, college students in droves, Elvis Presley’s former karate teacher and--if you believe him--Elvis, too. The cops show up for the coffee. “They won’t eat the strawberry doughnut,” Nakano says.
This is, ultimately, understandable, for the sight of law enforcement delicately negotiating a discus-sized glazed doughnut bursting with bright, luminescent strawberries could call their authority (or, at the very least, self-image) into question. The strawberry doughnut, however--which Nakano produces by the thousands at his Glendora doughnut shop starting next month through June--is why everyone else shows up. The doughnut gets people thinking. “He could really make a killing here,” a customer says, “if he’d just put pineapple in these like they have at the Dairy Queen.”
Well, maybe. Yet for a man who says, “I don’t come from doughnuts,” Nakano has made a killing at Donut Man, an especially arduous task in the age of Starbucks and the recent landing of Krispy Kreme. “It’s hard being an independent doughnut man,” Nakano, 59, says. Where he does come from, specifically, is JCPenney’s, where in 1971 he looked over his life’s schedule--places he should exist, financially speaking. “I figured I was at least two years behind my schedule,” says Nakano, who quit to go into doughnuts, the business that required the least amount of financing at the time.
The breakfast dessert placed Nakano back on schedule. He does cake doughnuts (“We make them smaller to avoid oil absorption”), he does fills (“The contractors love a couple dozen of those whenever they’re out bill collecting”), but the giant strawberry is his metier. There is a siren-song element to the strawberry, which draws customers to Glendora from as far away as five freeway interchanges.
“The strawberry is a tremendous amount of work,” says Nakano. “Tremendous.”(He makes his own glaze and, in season, buys berries vine-ripened that morning at a local farm.) Yet the giant doughnut is necessary, because Nakano worries about something other than a Krispy Kreme outlet opening across the street. “We die when it’s hot, we just die,” says Nakano. “We need the strawberry to get us through summer.”
Donut Man, 915 E. Alosta Ave., Glendora; (626) 963-7412.
A hole in one
With 1,600 doughnut stores, Southern California is the undisputed doughnut capital of the world.
Caltech once ordered 3,000 doughnuts from the Donut Man for a Nobel laureate luncheon. “I’ll never do that again,” Nakano says.
The Donut Man says his fantasy fruit filling is raspberries, “but the cost is just prohibitive.”
Nakano recalls his wife saying, “That kid is really motivated,” when Anthony Robbins used to bike to the shop long before he became a motivation guru.
