Offbeat Eats

On our last full day in Cleveland, we wanted to get some breakfast before doing our daily exploring, and, quite frankly, we wanted donuts. The problem is, it’s rather hard to find good donuts these days… sure, there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts on damn near ever corner, but those aren’t really good donuts (especially since the vast majority of DD locations don’t bake on-site anymore, just truck in their donuts from a regional bakery). I actually remember a time when there were a lot of independent donut shops selling donuts and coffee, but these days you usually have to do a little bit of research to find the few remaining ones. One of those is Becker’s Donuts.

On the last day of our visit to Ireland, I had a spare hour in my schedule, so I decided to walk up from Temple Bar to Lower O’Connell Street to check out the An Post Museum (central location of the 1916 Easter Rising) and the fairly new Spire of Dublin. Neither of which really impressed me much; the An Post museum is more of a “room” than a “museum” (although it is neat to see gunshots and mortar damage to the building outside), and the Spire is basically a giant steel toothpick that’s already showing a bit of corrosion. But on the way back down to my hotel in Temple Bar, about a block south of An Post, I noticed the smell of…. fresh donuts.

Well, after our wonderful meal from Odd Duck, the trailer court on South Lamar still had more to offer. Next door to Odd Duck is a shiny Streamline trailer sporting a logo for “Gourdough’s Big Fat Donuts”. Gourdough’s is well-respected in the in Austin area as a donut vendor (500+ reviews on Yelp, average rating 4.5!), serving up some deliciously crispy and fresh donuts with some very intriguing toppings and fillings.