Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I've lived in NYC for more than 20 years, but hail from Western NY (or, as many of you natives insist on calling it, "Upstate NY). In Western NY, donuts aren't fancy, and they aren't "ironic". And they're a heck of a lot better than they are in New York City.

A friend of mine once speculated that a place can be either a "donut town" or a "bagel town." Sounded good in theory, but how many places other than NYC are really bagel towns? Still another friend of mine in Maine once observed that to truly "get" heavy and fried things such as donuts, it helps if the town is predominantly Christian and blue collar. I actually agreed with that, even though I love donuts and am a white-collar Jew. But, I was pretty much the only Jew in the blue-collar town where I grew up.