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There is a magical place where bikini-clad waitresses stumble from a sleazy bar at 3 a.m. and, just across the street, bakers are making chocolate donuts.
Is this some sort of urban Brigadoon, or is it South Broadway Avenue in Soulard? If you guessed the latter, you win.
DB’s Sports Bar is famous for two things – hot wings and waitresses that are easier to imagine naked than the Hooters waitresses, because they are wearing less. But enough about the hot wings…
Right across the street you’ll find guys (in normal clothing) frying donuts at John Donut. Their world may not be quite as strange as that of the waitresses in swimsuits and high heels, but it’s a close second.
The first thing you need to understand about John Donut is that its crazy hours have a way of making the light from within the donut shop shine brilliantly, like a god to his believer, as only restaurants open in the middle of the night can. The donut shop opens at 11 p.m. and closes the next day at noon, every night but Saturday. During the early hours, of course, the crew is frying donuts. So when you enter at 3 a.m., the donut production-line is in high gear."
“I tell people we have an upside-down schedule,” explained John Pearcy, the owner and namesake of John Donut, “but I grew up in a bakery, and got used to working nights.” These days, John comes at a reasonable hour in the mornings, but his son Joo “Joe” Pearcy works through the darkness of the third shift. When does Joe sleep? “Whenever I can,” he said. “I got four kids.” It must be the revenge of the parents, because his father said that “I always knew when school was finished because I’d wake up at 3:30 because the kids would slam the door when they came in.”
Another thing –and there are many -- that makes John Donut such an oddity is its secluded location. In this area near the River, the neighborhood runs to heavy industry and factories, and the donut shop is one of few retail stores on South Broadway, which splits off into South Seventh Street just north of the shop. John Donut, to coin a phrase, is on the road less traveled, and John says people are constantly driving back and forth on South Seventh, looking in the wrong place for 1618 South Broadway.
So how did he wind up there? Not so long ago, he explained, the area was clotted with day laborers. “I moved down here in 1982 because Monsanto was right behind me with 1,500 employees. I figured they would find me,” he said. “Back then when Monsanto had lunch, you would see all these men walking around in Monsanto coveralls. There were probably 4,000 or 5,000 employees at other companies around here, too, and now all of them are gone. Our customer base has changed, but we survived.”
A-B InBev, formerly Anheuser-Busch, is just a donut-hole’s throw away, so you’d think John Donut would get plenty of their employees, too. But among his customers, says Joe, “There are not too many brewery guys left.”
The donut shop is a completely different animal before the sun rises. A mix of nocturnal/vampire types, cops, drunks, the lonely, college kids, and South Siders of all stripes wander through at a leisurely pace.
Joe said “there are not too many rowdy people” who stop in, but there are a few: “I threw out a guy on crutches one night. A cop held the door open, and I threw his crutches out after him.” Troublemakers come in all guises, you see. “I don’t mind if a drunk sits there quietly by himself,” he added, “but this was not that.”
“Sometime people from the 3 a.m. bar across the street are too drunk to order anything, so we just let them sit there,” added John, “but we can’t talk to them, we got too much work to do.”
John is a font of stories about the wild times:
-“Dairy Queen used to be across the street, and their night cook was the brother of the owner, and he was a drinker. Some nights he’d come in here so drunk he didn’t know where he was. One time we got him into a cab and it came back in ten minutes because his mother wouldn’t let him in the house.”
-“We had one older lady with all the shopping bags, and she was sitting here one night dozing, and a do-good church person saw her and tried to give her some sandwiches, and she yelled at him for waking her up. Eventually she went away, and the cops told me what happened to her. They said she was hit by a car, went to hospital, then a nursing home, then checked herself out and went back to the streets. She was back sleeping in the donut shop three months later.”
Even if you don’t run into any local color when you go to John Donut, you will experience its inimitable décor, a mix of sarcastic signs and cartoons taped to the wall, a mural filled with hidden messages, a large collection of Superman collectibles, a perpetually displayed Christmas tree, and a skeleton in a Cardinals T-shirt seated in a barber’s chair. You want a place with "character?” This is it.
The skeleton, explained John, “I bought for Halloween, and after that we started dressing her for the different seasons. On Christmas she’ll be Santa Claus, and on Mardi Gras she’ll have beads. My mother once hung her apron on it, and I’ve been calling it ‘Mother’ ever since.”
The Superman memorabilia lining the wide shelf above the counter is an homage to Metropolis, Ill., where John grew up working in his father’s donut shop.
The mural, which offers a surreal image of a giant John Pearcy cutting out donuts from the roof of the donut shop, was painted by artist Joe Buffalo, who also painted murals at other restaurants “on the Hill, at Cusanelli’s on Lemay Ferry, and at Ruma’s Deli on Lemay Ferry,” said John.
“He [Buffalo] was a real character,” he added. “He’d come back and add this and that. He never stopped adding to it. He painted a horse-drawn cart that read ‘Uncle Ben’s’-- that was a guy who ran a cheese stand at Soulard Market. And in every one of his murals, there’s a little dog.”
You can study the mural from your seat while you snarf down some of those sinful donuts. Joe’s favorites are the cinnamon-raisin squares, available only on Fridays. John, however, said “I guess the chocolate cake is right up there with my favorites. I like it with coffee, and I like to dunk it.”
Joe claims that sometimes his father eats half a donut and then puts the other half back in the case. The rumors… are true:
“When I’m working here in the day I sometimes grab one and eat half. I say the other half is for a sample for customers,” John admitted with a laugh.
Truly, the best advice for what to order at John Donut is the best advice for what to order at every donut shop: ask for what’s hot.
That’s what I did on a recent Thursday/Friday at 3 a.m. The hot cinnamon twist was a little bit of heaven, and cold milk the perfect chaser.
I was by myself in the shop until five drunk 20-somethings stumbled in, announcing that they were on way to the East Side. They ate ravenously, but with the red-eyed, cud-chewing slowness of inebriatred men concentrating dumbly on the act of eating (Not as in the glacial, proto-human slowness of a besotted David Hasselhoff failing to eat a hamburger, but you get the picture)
To their addled pates, a display case full of donuts was probably even more like an oasis in the desert than it is to the rest of us sober sugar-philes.
And the occasional girl in a bikini emerging from the bar across the street to go to her car? All part of the strange, nocturnal, half-awake, donut-fueled show.
Photos by Byron Kerman
