New York's Best Food Tours

Five New York City Donut Tours, Because One Neighborhood Was Never Going to Be Enough

​

New York doesn't have a donut culture. It has dozens of them, block by block: Italian bomboloni in one, a 14th Street diner counter in the next, Scandinavian cardamom buns a few streets over. So we stopped trying to fit it into one food tour and built five.

​

Manhattan, four ways

​

Union Square and the Village. We start at Unregular Bakery with filled bomboloni, then walk to Donut Pub, a 14th Street counter that has been serving New Yorkers for generations. In season the Union Square Greenmarket is in full swing as you pass. From there it's by the Strand bookstore and into Greenwich Village, all brownstones and old jazz-club stories, before the walk finishes at Randy's Donuts on Bleecker Street.

​

Times Square. Built for first-timers. Signature mini donuts at The Grisly Pear, then Angelina Bakery, then a pause on the red TKTS steps with the billboards blazing above you. It ends at Dough, a short walk from Rockefeller Center.

​

The East Village. This walking tour leaves Donut Pub for bomboloni at Il Buco Alimentari in NoHo and wraps with cardamom buns at La Cabra near Astor Place. In between, your guide covers the punk clubs and the immigrant families who made the neighborhood what it is.

​

Midtown at the holidays. When December rolls around, our Midtown Holiday Donut Tour trades plain sidewalks for twinkling lights, store windows and warm drinks in the middle of Manhattan.

​

Over the river to Brooklyn

​

The Brooklyn Donut Tour is the one for people who've done Manhattan already. It starts at Doughnut Plant on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, cuts past McCarren Park and finishes in Greenpoint at Moe's and Peter Pan, two old-school shops that have been feeding the same blocks for a long time. Fewer billboards. More stoops.

​

Same city, different calendar

​

Every route changes a little with the seasons. October brings pumpkin. Around St. Patrick's Day you might find Guinness cream. Whichever New York City donut tour you pick, you'll leave knowing one more neighborhood than you did that morning, and probably wanting to try a second route.