There are many ways to “innovate” in a given business. In this context, we’re going to define innovation as getting more money by doing something you haven’t done before. One way is to be inspired by new ideas about how to do what you do in a new way which your customers could love, but that they don’t yet know about. Another is to look at old ideas which seem to work in other fields and then bringing them to bear in yours. DaVinci, I think, is mostly the second of these two.
This place is different from all the other doughnut places I’ve been in two ways. 1) The doughnuts are smaller and lend themselves to mass eating – a regular full order is 16. 2) You can choose your own combination of icing and toppings to apply to a blank doughnut.
It’s the custom combination part I think I’ve seen before. Usually it is applied to frozen yogurt. A colorful assortment of toppings and icings displayed in an array of bins in front of the customer line – kids love it! DaVinci even sort of sounds like “Menchie’s”. And the shop aspires to be franchised – it says so on the side of the box.
Business plans aside, the doughnuts are pretty good. Brown, firm cake doughnuts that work with many, many combinations of flavors. I can barely remember all the ones we tried. French toast, Cinnamon roll, Key lime, Samoa, Cream pie, Maple bacon, Birthday cake, Salted caramel – I think. Of these, maybe the key lime was best. The icings are quite goopy and sweet, which works out pretty well with the tubby small doughnuts.
I thought these might be donut robot doughnuts, but no! They’re regular cake doughnuts. Not that donut robots (I keep typing “robuts”) are considered bad. A donut robot place right in Seattle (Daily Dozen) made thrillist’s list of top doughnut places, a couple years back.
Marianne and I have at this point developed a way of trying lots of different doughnut flavors without getting too full. And that is to daintily slice little sectors off each flavor and share them all at once. I’m ashamed that it took us so long to start doing it, but one of us is not particularly fond of sharing – especially desserts.
The aftermath is a box full of half-eaten doughnuts. Just like at your work meetings! I mean, if you work at a place where people are really diet-conscious, as I once did. Like most cakes, doughnuts get stale on the cut ends if exposed to the air. But I’ve found this diminishes their value as leftovers only slightly compared to a whole old doughnut.
