At 4:30 a.m. on a recent Friday morning, Robert McWilliams arrived at his doughnut shop in Bozeman, as he has done for more than fifteen years. The shop is regularly lauded as the finest place for doughnuts in town, if not the state, and the pressure to maintain that reputation appears to have missed McWilliams. The tunes are bumping, the fry kettle is hot, and McWilliams is chatting about the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.
Granny’s Donuts is a hole in the wall in a city of increasingly hole-less walls. McWilliams arrived in Bozeman in 1978 to attend Montana State. After working at several restaurants, he opened a small bakery, making “cinnamon rolls, sticky buns, scones, that sort of thing. It was okay,” he said, “but just wasn’t enough to hang your hat on.” So he bought a used kettle and glazer in Calgary, and figured out how to make doughnuts.
“Baking is a numbers game, where you want to hit your numbers,” said McWilliams. The numbers for this particular Friday are 1,400 doughnuts, fried 40 at a time in palm oil hovering around 370 degrees Fahrenheit. The tempo is relentless, but, “this is where the music comes in,” said McWilliams. “Music helps me keep the rhythm.”
Eventually, three staff members arrive to help put the finishing touches on the pastries and assemble boxes of assorted dozens. At 7 a.m., the line of customers forming on the icy sidewalk outside the shop are let in, and the glass display case that McWilliams spent hours filling with his famous doughnuts begins to empty.