HOME-COOKED FAVORITE

By Jeanne Starmack

NEW CASTLE, Pa. — Krispy what? Dunkin’ who?

Mays Donuts

Video

One bite of a May’s Donuts doughnut, and your memory might fail you that way.

Sure, those chain-store doughnuts are pretty good. But they don’t quite rise to the ones made daily from scratch by a man who gets up in the middle of the night and oversees the making of 150 to 300 dozen a day at a little shop on East Washington Street.

David May’s been making doughnuts for what was his parents’ business since the 1960s. They ran the original shop from 1941 until 1980, and he took it over then after having run another shop for them. He closed the other location.

His parents came from Erie, where they’d worked at another small shop called Jack Frost Donuts.

His wife, Mary, also works right alongside him. She doesn’t get up quite as early as he does — he’s at the shop by 3 a.m., and that’s about when her alarm goes off.

So it’s been all in the family — with traditional recipes, icing and fillings they make at the shop and the know-how to make sure that even with a good recipe, you don’t ruin the batch by cooking it wrong.

“Part of doing a doughnut right is controlling the proofing,” David said, which means letting the doughnuts rise. He also fries his cake doughnuts at just the right temperature.

The shop’s doughnuts circle the competition because the chains can’t quite replicate them, David said, with bagged mixes and icing that’s bought instead of made on site.

That’s the reason he’s never offered franchises, he said. “People won’t learn to do it right.”

It’s also the reason why May’s, which looks vintage 1950s with a doughnut case, a coffee counter and a few tables along the wall, has a loyal, local clientele and other customers that come from as far away as Youngstown.

“I get a lot of customers from Youngstown,” said Jerry Rashid, a May’s regular who owns a rug shop across the street. “They say, ‘Is the doughnut shop still here?’”

Rashid, who was meeting with friends Carmen Pezzone and Tony Fleo at the shop one morning last week, confirmed the place hasn’t changed through the decades.

“The doughnuts haven’t, either,” he added.

“They’re all handmade, that’s the name of the game,” said Pezzone. “Good home cookin’.”

Making all those doughnuts and making them so good, though, hasn’t been easy, Mary admits.

“I’m not gonna lie,” she said as she poured coffee behind the bar. “Some days, you’re really tired.”

It’s harder in the winter, she said, with freezing mornings and nothing to do at home when she gets there after a morning at the shop.

“But in spring and summer, it’s nice out. People are running till 5 p.m. and I’m out sitting in a swimming pool,” she said.

David also said it isn’t easy to keep employees, because many of them just can’t take coming to work in the middle of the night. Teenagers especially, he said, balk when they realize how the job’s going to cut into their weekends. That problem, he said, is why two other shops, on State Street and Wilmington Road, have closed.

The shop regulars, Mary said, make everything worth it. “We’ve learned to laugh with them and cry with them,” she said. “They’re family.”

The Mays do try to compensate for their odd hours by stretching Memorial and Labor days into longer weekends. Lately, the shop is also closed on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, so everyone can go shopping.

They also close the shop for 10 days each year so they can go on vacation. This year, they’ll go to Clearwater, Fla.

“Fun in the sun every day!” Mary said. She’ll sleep in, but for her that means 5 or 6 a.m. Then, she’ll get first pick of the best chairs for sunning. “He spoils me,” she said of David. “He knows how much I love the sun. So we go places where Mary can lay out and enjoy it.”

Mary has been working at the shop for 30 years. She met David there, and they’ve been married for 20.

The couple’s children, two sons and a daughter, have helped at the business, but are not interested in taking it over when the inevitable happens either this year or next: The Mays are going to retire.

“He’s 69, and it’s coming pretty quick,” Mary said. “I can’t wait til he does, so I’m like, ‘David, go ahead!’”

Will the shop close? Not likely. David said he’s had “eight or nine interested parties” who would like to buy it.

The future owner isn’t going to be bound by May’s traditions, he said, though everyone wants to make sure the recipes are sold along with the shop. They will be.

Still, a new owner could make changes. That might be a problem, Mary warned, “when people say, ‘what happened?’”

At least for now, you can still get an original May’s doughnut.

Quick poll of favorites:

Rashid: “Maple cream stick.”

Pezzone: “French curler.”

Fleo: “All of ’em.”