Review No. 161: Conway Donuts
1311 Harkrider Street
(501) 499-9841
73.7 percent finished reviewing Conway restaurants
The Situation
He Said: It was a Sunday morning and we’d been running ourselves ragged for the past couple of days and She Said reminded me we needed to review a restaurant yet this week. So that meant sometime today we needed to get out of the house and eat something, and I began to grumble. But wait, says She Said, near the top of our list of unreviewed Conway food establishments is a little doughnut shop on Harkrider, so “Sure,” I say, “why don’t you go get those doughnuts?” And she did.
She Said: I put on my new Athleta pants and a t-shirt and off I went to the cute little shop I’d noticed recently. Normally, I follow a 16-8 fasting regimen, in which I don’t eat between 7 p.m. and 11 a.m., but with all the busyness lately, I’d fallen off that a bit. I was hungry and it was time for fresh doughnuts, fasting be danged!
Ambience:
He Said: I have nothing to say about this, since I was actually walking a dog when the doughnuts were picked up.
She Said: The shop is bright and sunny, with a few tables and bar seating facing out of the large front windows. I would sit in here and nurse coffee and doughnuts, but for today, I whisked them right on home.
Drinks
He Said:We got no drinks to go along with the doughnuts. I couldn’t even tell you whether they have drinks there at Conway Donuts—since, as I may have mentioned, I was not there.
She Said:Of course, they offer coffee, as well as soft drinks, but I was needing some of my strong, homemade espresso that day, so I skipped it, homing in on the main attraction!
Food
He Said: She Said returned to the house with half-a-dozen doughnuts, and I trust that she got a reasonable variety, though I noticed that three of them were chocolate in some form or other, and I assumed those must be for me. I had one as a kind of pre-breakfast treat, one basically as lunch, and a third as dessert after dinner.
She Said claims that she got me a chocolate glazed doughnut. I say for the record here that none of these three was a chocolate glazed doughnut. This suggests one of three possibilities to me: one, that there was a slot in the doughnut shop that said “chocolate glazed doughnuts” that in fact contained regular chocolate doughnuts without any glaze; two, that the clerk thought she said a chocolate doughnut anda glazed doughnut and gave her one of each; or three, that the clerk made a mistake and grabbed a regular chocolate doughnut instead of a glazed one. However it is to be explained, suffice it to say that I was disappointed. It was a regular chocolate doughnut with a fairly thin layer of chocolate frosting and nothing much to recommend it other than that. The same was really true of the chocolate cake doughnut and the chocolate doughnut with sprinkles. They weren’t terrible doughnuts, but they were pretty bland.
And by the way, why do people spell doughnuts like “Donut”? Dough is spelled with a gh. “Do” means to perform an action, like “I do,” “you do,” “she does.” Is it “Do nuts or don’t do nuts?” What’s up with that?
But I digress.
She Said: Here at Eat It, Conway! we spell it “doughnuts” and that’s that!
I can’t attest to the glaze, though I thought it was a chocolate glazed doughnut. For my side of the box, I chose a blueberry cake doughnut, a twist and an apple fritter, which I ate in that order, though unlike He Said, I didn’t spread mine out quite so much: I ate the blueberry right away, and then made another cup of espresso and sampled half of each other’s. I finished the fritter while I was making a much healthier supper (stir-fried veggie rice noodles with vinegar and salt tofu).
I thought the blueberry cake doughnut was very tasty. The consistency was dense without being too heavy, and it tasted fruity, although perhaps a bit too sweet. The twist was glazed, and it was rather large, so a half of one of these was about enough for a whole doughnut. It was sweet, and the consistency of the dough was light enough for a sweet, but dense enough to make me feel fed.
But the apple fritter was the real treat for me. I had half with my morning coffee and half later in the day, and every bite I took convinced me I would need to return to Conway Donuts for more of these little beauties. This treat had apple baked into the dough, which was flat and fried and glazed. My mother tried a bite, as she said her mother used to make something like this. She approved as well. Next time I go there, I won’t bother with the other things for me, and will just load up (and bulk up!) on apple fritters.
He Said: Hmmph. So that’s where the glaze went.
Service
He Said: She Said put the box of doughnuts in front of me. That was pretty good service.
She Said: As I walked into the empty shop early on a Sunday morning, a man appeared from the back room and I got to work selecting treats as he got to work putting them in a pretty pink box. He was friendly and efficient.
What We Got and What We Paid: Four doughnuts, one twist and one apple fritter for $6.45.
Elapsed Time from Our Arrival to Food Arrival: 2 minutes from arrival at the door to getting back in my car. 2 minutes!
Rating:
He Said: I’ve got to rate this one pretty average. I’ve had much better doughnuts in Conway. Some of them were even spelled right.
She Said: I’ve got to disagree with you on this one, Ruud: The apple fritter was worth the price of admission. I’ll be back for more of those for sure!
Is Conway Donuts good at what it’s good for? It may not be the best at doughnuts, but it may have changed my life with its apple fritters.
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When Sir Galahad arrives in Camelot to fulfill his destiny, the presence of Lancelot’s illegitimate son disturbs Queen Guinevere. But the young knight’s vision of the Holy Grail at Pentecost inspires the entire fellowship of the Round Table to rush off in quest of Christendom’s most holy relic. But as the quest gets under way, Sir Gawain and Sir Ywain are both seriously wounded, and Sir Safer and Sir Ironside are killed by a mysterious White Knight, who claims to impose rules upon the quest. And this is just the beginning. When knight after knight turns up dead or gravely wounded, sometimes at the hands of their fellow knights, Gildas and Merlin begin to suspect some sinister force behind the Grail madness, bent on nothing less than the destruction of Arthur and his table. They begin their own quest: to find the conspirator or conspirators behind the deaths of Arthur’s good knights. Is it the king’s enigmatic sister Morgan la Fay? Could it be Arthur’s own bastard Sir Mordred, hoping to seize the throne for himself? Or is it some darker, older grievance against the king that cries out for vengeance? Before Merlin and Gildas are through, they are destined to lose a number of close comrades, and Gildas finds himself finally forced to prove his worth as a potential knight, facing down an armed and mounted enemy with nothing less than the lives of Merlin and his master Sir Gareth at stake.
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