Do one thing. Do it well

FOOD & DRINK

LOVE

YOUR

Harold’s Doughnuts

CRAFT

Do One Thing. Do It Well.

Homegrown Success Stories of the Singularly Scrumptious

As with so many things, practice makes perfect. That old cliche applies across all disciplines, including culinary success. Whether it’s in the crust recipe, the dough preparation or simply the idea that eating food should be fun, these are three Columbia culinary masters doing one thing and doing it well.

To say the staff at Harold’s Doughnuts loves making doughnuts sounds like a bit of a reach, but it’s true—they love their craft. The doughnut shop’s mantra “Love Your Craft” developed as co-owners Michael and Karli Urban and co-owner and head doughnut pastry chef Melissa Poelling discussed the vision of what small-batch, artisanal, local doughnuts looked like.

“The words kept cycling through. ‘You do what you love; you love what you do,” Poelling says. “It’s not just a project; it’s not a job. This is my craft; it’s what I love. So whatever you do, love the whole process of what that is and what it becomes.”

Harold’s Doughnuts first opened as a commissary kitchen in 2014, and in 2015, the doors opened to the public. Each day, doughnut-making shifts start at 5 pm when the night crews start coming in. The day crew starts decorating at 3 am, and the counter staff comes in about 4 to fill the cases for the 6 am open. If they don’t sell out, when the closed sign comes out, the process begins again.

Closing time shifts with the season and demand, Poelling says. Midday is too early for some people. If there’s rain, it’s over; stop and go home. Football game times are a consideration on game days, and January is brutally slow for the fried pastry because everyone is focused on health. But the target is 2 pm.

The guilty pleasure … that’s where Poelling’s philosophy comes from. “I appreciate things in moderation, and how you handle your moderation is on you,” she says. “My job is to make the tastiest thing I know how to provide you value for your moderation.”

Those “things” come in a variety of daily options: two classic sets (glazed and buttermilk cake in vanilla, chocolate, maple, cinnamon/ sugar icing flavors) along with a handful of other regulars.

“We also make the Boston creme every day,” Poelling says. “There would be a mutiny and a coup if we didn’t, for sure.” Bacon maple is another regular that flies out of the doughnut case, and there are six specialty flavors rotated into the mix each month, Logo along with a monthly specialty box such as Boozy, Cereal Milk, Valentine’s and Mother’s Day boxes among others that must be pre-ordered.

“We are a from-scratch shop. We make everything in-house, by hand, including our sprinkles. We do have a tendency to sell out,” Poelling says. “Our goal really is to bring happiness and joy through doughnuts.”

WORLD PIE DOMINATION

The bakers at Peggy Jean’s Pies are early risers as well. They have to be to make more than 250 pies a day—fruit pies, cream pies, savory pot pies and some quiches.

“We get so many calls from people, ‘Do you do cheesecakes? Do you do bread pudding? Do you do …’ insert everything, and I’m like, ‘nope,’ ” says Rebecca Miller, the daughter in the motherdaughter duo that owns Peggy Jean’s Pies. Employees even jump in questioning the offerings, but she insists, “No, this is world pie domination not world cheesecake domination.”

Peggy Jean’s Pies had a former life when Miller’s mother, Jeanne Plumley, opened a pie shop by the same name in 1994 with another business partner, Peggy Day. That shop shuttered a decade later. Then in 2014, Miller and Plumley decided to give it another go. Seven years, a handful of national accolades and a move to a new location double the pie-making space of their first indicates they made the right decision.

When you enter the shop, you might see flour dusting the prep tables while dough is being made and smell the aroma of fruit being prepared and cooked for the fruit pies. You might catch the finished pies coming out of the ovens and being boxed for the pie case. Peggy Jean’s Pies is an open-concept experience where customers can see the process from start to finish.

“It just works for whatever reason,” Miller says. “People will come in because they’re having a bad day and they need a treat and a friendly face, or they’re coming in because they’re having a super good day and they want to celebrate. They kind of use that connection for all sorts of different things.”

The pie experience begins with the crust. If you’ve ever made pie dough from scratch, you know there is an art form to it, but a tried-and-true recipe makes a difference. Peggy Jean’s Pies dough is made from a proprietary recipe handed down from Miller’s grandmother that she, her mother and her son and daughter know how to make. No one else. It’s a family secret.

The crust is then filled with either a fruit or nut option, a cream flavor or one of the savory pot pies that come in chicken, beef, buffalo and southwest. Daily pie flavor selection is not exactly a science. Day of the week, temperature and current trends, among other unusual factoids, play into the offerings Miller selects. It’s more of a gut feeling than a formula, she says. White Chocolate Strawberry is the most popular and has been since it unseated Dutch Apple after a Food Network article named it a “favorite pie” in 2018. Dutch Apple still comes in second followed by Chocolate Bourbon Pecan, but no matter your favorite flavor, the crust brings it home.

“It sounds so cheesy but we really really love what we do and we really believe in it,” Miller says. “The things that we’re making are going to be a very big part of people’s celebrations. … We’re not just pies; we are a part of a much bigger experience.”

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THE REAL DEAL

At Shakespeare’s Pizza, they aren’t early-risers like the folks at Harold’s Doughnuts, and their pies are distinctly different than those at Peggy Jean’s. For nearly 50 years, Shakespeare’s has been selling its slices to generations of pizza-lovers, but Shakespeare’s Pizza Manager Kurt Mirtsching says it’s always been about more than the pizza.

“Years ago the late Jay Lewis Jr. [Lewis bought Shakespeare’s in 1976] and a bunch of the people that worked there in the early years inadvertently created a culture,” Mirtsching says. “It’s the culture of the organization that really matters, whether you’re making pizzas or widgets or cars or providing a service. The culture that he cultivated was one that was really conducive to throwing a really fun party. At the end of the day at Shakespeare’s, we don’t just make pizza because people are hungry.”

Indeed, the pizza is delicious, he says, “but it’s everything else that goes along with it. It is and it isn’t the fun stuff that’s on the walls. It is and it isn’t the really cool old bricks in the old building. (What’s there now was torn down and we recreated it.) It is and it isn’t the employees behind the counter having a good time and being themselves. It’s all of those things, put together, and the whole experience and feeling and atmosphere you pull in when you go to Shakespeare’s.”

Mirtsching isn’t sure whether Jay had all of that in mind when he bought the then-three-year-old pizza place, but the culture has resonated with customers over the years, he says. It’s authentic. It’s not fake.

“We really just want to throw a fun party for the people that come here and serve a good pizza,” he says, “and we don’t want to do it because that’s what the market demands but because that’s what we want to do.”

Shakespeare’s pizza doesn’t adhere to any particular style— Chicago or New York. What the pizza chefs create in the kitchen is a pizza made with the best whole ingredients they can find, and on average they’ll make nearly a thousand pizzas on a normal day. On MU football Saturdays or during graduations, that number goes up.

There are three locations in Columbia now and a frozen division that makes pizzas for local grocers’ freezer cases, but the first Shakes at the corner of 9th and Elm streets is the one beloved by MU students and alumni and featured on “Good Morning America” and countless sports articles about SEC experiences in Columbia. In his laid back attitude, Mirtsching attributes much of that to the fact that many of those journalists honed their reporting skills across the street at the MU School of Journalism while eating a slice of Shakespeare’s pizza. He’ll take the nods, though; he’s glad to have them.

The folks at Shakespeare’s Pizza know they’re not the only pizza place in town, so they’re happy when customers walk in the door, he adds. “If they want to come in, we’d be glad to make a pizza for them. We hope they enjoy the party; a lot of folks do.”

And you can take your souvenir drink cup home with you.