AMHERST — A downtown Amherst restaurant specializing in gourmet doughnuts in a variety of eclectic flavors, and which previously had a second location in Northampton, will close after business on Sunday.
“We love what we do — it’s been a pleasure to become a fixture of downtown Amherst and wish we could continue to do this,” says Keren Rhodes, who has run Glazed Doughnut Shop with her husband, Nick, for nearly 10 years.
The Rhodeses announced in a Facebook post that the decision to close the 19 North Pleasant St. business was made due to the continued impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and the shop’s inability to return to a sustainable level of business.
“It is with great sadness that we announce we have made the difficult decision to close Glazed Doughnut Shop,” they wrote. “After all the challenges of the pandemic over the last two years, we are unable to see a viable path forward.”
Normally, when the college students leave for the summer, there has been a 15-20% decline in business, but this year the drop was around half, Rhodes said. The shop remained closed from March 2020 to September 2021, when it reopened in what Rhodes called a somewhat COVID-safe environment.
Inflation, though, was the main factor in the decision to close for good, with prices for wheat, eggs and other pillars of the doughnut-making process spiking and no way to pass those costs on to customers when some doughnuts were already at $4 apiece.
“The increasing pressure of significant inflation on the costs of our ingredients and supplies means that we can no longer produce high-quality doughnuts for a price that we believe people would be willing to pay,” they wrote.
“We have so little control over avian flu and the situation in Ukraine,” Rhodes noted about some of the factors affecting prices.
The store has operated with four employees, and getting help was never an issue, she said.
The shop opened in 2012 at the former Amherst Carriage Shops, where the couple, who had already run mall-based mini doughnut stores, built out a restaurant space from a former cellphone business. With the threat of the property being demolished to make way for the mixed-use development that is now One East Pleasant, the business moved to a storefront in the heart of downtown in 2014. Glazed opened a second shop on Crafts Avenue in Northampton in the fall of 2016, closing that one early in 2019.
Unlike some restaurant owners who have put their stores on the market, Rhodes said, the couple didn’t try to sell the business, but may try to move some of the doughnut-specific equipment.
What they will do next they are not yet making public, she said, only that “we have something in the works that is not doughnut related.” With two children in their early teens, their hope is to be able to go on vacations and have a business that doesn’t require them to stay in town at all times.
The Facebook post thanks customers and employees and notes that an assortment of doughnuts will be available from Wednesday through Sunday, opening at 9 a.m. and staying open as late as 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Rhodes suggests that to ensure customers get what they want to do online ordering at glazeddoughnutshop.com/.
She would like to see lot of familiar faces, noting that she has been surprised at how well her family has become known in the community — whether it be for the Elvis banana and peanut butter doughnut or the doughnut covered in maple glaze and strips of bacon.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
