Without a doubt, Jonathan Gold's description of these donuts is a prime example of why he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer, so it's impossible to write anything about them without providing an excerpt that shows how incredibly persuasive this man can be when enticing you to be enthusiastic about a food you might otherwise never bother to try:
It is an iceberg of a doughnut, a flattened demisphere big enough to use as a Pilates cushion, split in two and filled to order with what must be an entire basket of fresh strawberries, and only in season. The fruit is moistened with a translucent gel that lubricates even the occasional white-shouldered berry with a mantle of slippery sweetness, oozing from the sides, turning the bottom of the pasteboard box into a sugary miasma in the unlikely event that the doughnuts actually make it home.This ... this is why he wins. Anyone who can use the word "miasma" in a description of food where the end result is that you desperately want to eat the food is a master.
The Donut Man is something that I may never have tried, but for Mr. Gold. I love donuts a lot, but the Donut Man is located in Glendora, way out in the San Gabriel valley, and although I do sometimes have occasion to go there, I usually go straight to my destination and then home, without the desire to stop at random donut shops along the way.
But it's true that the Donut Man has something no other donut shop around here has, and that is donuts that feature fresh fruit - strawberry in spring, peach in summer. A strawberry donut from Donut Man is not a withered, overfried slab of cake with pink icing strewn over the top. It is instead a fluffy, airy glazed donut-bun surrounding a mound of fresh strawberries drowned in their own sugary glaze.
How accurate is Mr. Gold's description? Entirely accurate. By the time you get the donut home, the bottom has turned into a sticky sweet mass of goo, but the top remains light and fluffy and the strawberries fresh and glowingly red. You can even save it for the next morning, but I recommend to eat it as fresh as possible so that it doesn't lose a bit of softness or warmth and the ooze:solid ratio remains in a manageable balance. The miasma can only encroach so far before the quality starts to suffer.
As Gold himself admits - Glendora is going to be at least 45 minutes away from you, and there's nothing there unless you're lucky enough to have relatives that give you an excuse to head out there every so often. But it's close enough to all of that legendary Chinese food of the San Gabriel Valley, so you could do worse than to make a day of it, abandoning whatever diet you are on and heading east for a day of gluttony.
Donut Man, 915 E. Route 66, Glendora, (626) 335-9111.
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