Peace, Love and Little Donuts (Portage)
6043 S. Westnedge AvenueI hate it when TV, Radio and the newspapers make a huge deal about some new fast food chain moving in. Buckle up, y’all, there’s a Chick-Fil-A and a Raising Cane’s opening up next month so the ridiculousness will be off the charts.
The reason I hate it so much is because those places don’t need the advertising. Local media always ignores when local restaurants open up but then they pounce when a place closes. You’ll see headlines like “Beloved Kalamazoo community staple closes doors.” If that restaurant was so beloved and such a community staple, why did you wait until they closed to do a story?
Now I’m guilty of the same thing. I have driven past a shop in Portage for years and kept saying, “I’ll get to it eventually.”
Well, I did get to it eventually….their last week in business.
Peace, Love and Little Donuts is on South Westnedge just south of Milham Avenue. The shop looks kind of out of place among the big brick buildings along the busy South Westnedge commercial corridor. It almost looks more like a house than a donut shop. The chain donut shop with over twenty locations in 12 states opened this Portage franchise in the summer of 2017.
I was up early because B wanted to skate at Wings Event Center at 5:30 AM and I had to go to work early. I was hungry and he didn’t want to go to breakfast. We found out they were having (another) snow day while we were at the rink so he just wanted to go home and get started on his long day of playing video games.
I was heading towards the airport for a 9 AM work assignment so I just left the house early. I put an order in via DoorDash for pick up at the shop which opened at 8 AM.
The shop is pretty small but it doesn’t need to be big. The theme is pretty obviously 70’s funkadelic. It starts with the flowers on the outside of hte building and carries over to the inside with bright colors and more of those flowers.
The donuts are made fresh daily in a small kitchen behind the order counter. Donuts are then topped to order. They have a display case with what each of the donuts looks like so you can get an idea but they don’t have donuts just waiting to be picked off a shelf. The donuts are made and waiting on racks and once you order, they are dipped in frosting then topped with a variety of different toppings.
Because word had gotten out that the store was closing, the woman working on this Tuesday morning was a bit slammed. My order wasn’t ready when I got to the building but that was ok. She finished up the person she was working with then went to work on mine. I had no idea what to order so I just picked out six donuts that sounded good to me. The cost was right around $15 when all was said and done.
The fresh made cake donuts are smaller than what you’d get from most donut places, hence the name of the business.
I went for a little bit of a variety with my selections. I wanted some of the fun topped ones but I also threw a couple of traditional ones in there is well.
The first one I grabbed was the Sugar donut from the Groovy collection. This is very simply a donut covered in sugar. They are options for cinnamon sugar, ginger sugar, maple sugar, and Saigon sugar but I just stuck with plan, simple sugar.
Oh, wait. There was one more type of sugar. Powdered sugar. I got that one too. Powdered sugar donuts were such a staple of my childhood. Hotels didn’t regularly do free breakfast when I was a child in the 80’s and 90’s and we were not eat out on vacation type of people. Even for lunch we’d pack deli meat and loaves of bread rather than go to McDonalds. Our breakfast was almost always those mini Hostess powdered sugar donuts. This donut was very reminiscent of that.
Moving in to to the “Funkadelic” part of the menu, the next donut I grabbed was the M&M’s. This one is pretty self explanatory with vanilla frosting and crushed M&M’s on top.
My favorite donut of all time is the Oreo donut from Sweetwaters. I don’t get it very often but I when I do go to Sweetwaters, this is the donut I get. Peace, Love and Little Donuts had an Oreo donut on their list to so I had to get one. It’s a vanilla frosted donut with crushed Oreo’s on top. They also have an Oreo Cheesecake donut but I figured two Oreo donuts was too much and just stuck to the regular Oreo.
Moving along, the fifth donut was Chocolate Chip. Again, pretty self-explanatory here. Chocolate dipped donut topped with Chocolate Chips. Simple, chocolaty and tasty.
The final donut I ordered was the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. This one is chocolate frosted then topped with a streusel and chocolate chip mix.
Overall, a delicious breakfast was a good variety of tasty donuts.
I have no idea why I waited until the final week of them being in business to stop in. I kept procrastinating and it almost caught up with me. The business is trying to stay open through Sunday (I’m writing this on Friday) so you still have a chance to get there before it closes. I’ll try to do better in the future and not waiting for one of our “beloved community staples” to close before getting there to write a blog post.
SW Michigan Dining 