A once mighty CT doughnut chain is gone. Here’s how coffee lovers are keeping the vibe alive.
Saturday was the final “lights out” for the once-mighty Whole Donut chain, but the tradition of a popular morning coffee-and-doughnuts gathering spot lives on at the former Enfield and Canton locations.
“The coffee is still beautiful, it’s still ‘service with a smile’ inside, I like what they’ve done,” longtime customer Ty Kohler said Wednesday outside the freshly renamed King Donuts shop in Enfield.
“I’m a truck driver, I’m here every morning and you know I need my coffee,” Kohler said before heading to work. “I’ve been coming here for 15 years, and I’d say this is a step up from where it was near the end.”
The shop in Enfield’s Thompsonville was the last survivor in a chain that once had 40 outlets around the Northeast, with Connecticut as its heart.
Most of the buildings have been torn down or turned into entirely different businesses, but a few were leased by people with a new take on what coffee and doughnuts should look like in the 2020s. In Berlin, the Farmington Avenue shop became Switches Coffee & Donuts, and in Canton the next-to-last Whole Donut became a second location for the popular Luke’s Donut Shop of Avon.
“There was a lot of sadness when it closed,” said Lynne Kaye, who worked behind the counter of the Canton shop for 14 years and now has the same job with Luke’s. “But people like it now, too. And it feels like the same place: People still come in happy, they smile when they see the doughnuts.”
The Canton shop on Route 44 became a Luke’s last March, and has expanded the menu of breakfast offerings and brought in doughnut recipes from the original Luke’s, said owner Fadel Kassim.
“We’re serving breakfast sandwiches and lunch sandwiches now, we have great doughnuts and coffee. That’s what keeps bringing people back,” Kassim said Wednesday morning.
“I love the customers, that’s what makes this place,” said Kaye, who started work at the store when it was a Bess Eaton in the late 1970s. She left for college after a couple of years and didn’t return until 2009, when it was a Whole Donut.
“Both were very busy, both had their regulars. But you lose people, things change,” she said. “You get a particular group for a time, then another group. When it was Bess Eaton, it was so busy we needed three or four girls working at a time. We had ceramic coffee cups that we washed in a dishwasher.
“It was just doughnuts, coffee and juice back then. Whole Donut brought in sandwiches. And now the new owners have more. They’re very young and innovative, they use Uber Eats and Door Dash and Facebook,” she said. “We get some of the customers from before, and we’re getting new ones, too.”
The Whole Donut chain was once part of the morning tradition for thousands of Connecticut people who had 21 locations to chose from, all in the heart of the state. The green-on-white signs with the image of a coffee cup, spoon and doughnut were almost as common as the Dunkin’ logo would become: At one point, Bristol, Hartford and Enfield each had two Whole Donut shops, while East Hartford and Manchester each had three.
But slow decline set in, with Dunkin’ expanding and Whole Donut gradually closing one location after another.
The last holdout, part of a strip plaza on Enfield Street just 5 miles from the Massachusetts line, announced Saturday that it was closing.
The location now has a King’s Donuts sign, and Kohler said a quick refresh of the shop turned out well.
“They’re awesome, and maybe the service is a little bit better now. It’s clean, it’s bright, it’s a little step up from where it was,” said Kohler, a truck driver for 38 years who plans to keep up his every-morning visits. “This didn’t bother me a bit. It needed a makeover.”
Kara Aldrich and Darvalle Grandville, two local landscapers, said they, too, are happy with the new operation.
“Oh yeah, I’m here every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. I was sad when they closed; I thought I wouldn’t come back because I wanted my Whole Donut,” Aldrich said Wednesday morning. “But this is fairly close to what it was. There are a lot of the same people coming as before, Thompsonville people and a lot of landscapers, construction workers. This is where we all come before work.”
