Allie's Donuts Named a "Best Donut Shop in America"

NORTH KINGSTOWN, RI—This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has made a weekend trek down Route 2 to wait in line at Allie’s Donuts: Thrillist has named the landmark Rhode Island bakery one of the ”Best Donut Shops in America.”

The digital lifestyle publication picked Allie’s along with 32 other donut shops across the country to round out their list of the best. To determine the winners, the editorial staff said they ate a lot of donuts over the course of the year, writing down the ones they liked. They also took suggestions from other staffers and freelancers who argued in favor of who they liked.

“And then we all argued about the list for a while until we got it down to 33. Point being: we actually ate the donuts, and now we want you to eat them too,” they said.

Allie’s got second mention in the list, which is dominated by many new and ”gourmet” donut shops in hipster havens like Seattle and Portland, Brooklyn, southern California. While the humble donut might be trendy there, here, in Rhode Island, Allie’s has been cranking them out for decades.

Thrillist was gobsmacked by Allie’s legendary donut cake, which is exactly what it seems: a cake made of donut. They can be crafted into most anything. And if you’re a child of Rhode Island, birthday parties usually had a fifty-fifty chance of featuring either an Allie’s donut cake, Fudgie the Whale, or if you were lucky, both.

The real secret to Allie’s success, though, is getting the classics right, “from old-fashioned crullers to glazed donuts and jelly sticks,” writes Thrillist Senior Production Assistant Sarah Anderson. “But the top seller is a fluffy yeast donut with fluorescent sprinkles atop sugary, melt-in-your-mouth white frosting. It’s a child’s dream donut. It’s an adult’s dream donut. And it’s best enjoyed en route to the ocean with the windows down and sprinkles all over the car.”