The best donuts in San Francisco

We’ll take the eye-rolling from Krispy Kreme lovers for having a dedicated vegan organic donut shop, mostly since Pepples are as good as they are good for you. At their Oakland Donut Farm, a rotating array of seasonal rings made entirely without animal ingredients (they’re fried in canola and palm fruit oil) are gobbled up with gusto by ‘vores of all stripes. Among the most popular varieties: blueberry, pumpkin pie spice, whiskey tangerine fig, green apple, persimmon and salted caramel.

“I got baked in San Francisco,” reads the fuchsia neon sign adorning Mr. Holmes. The bakery went from a tiny Tenderloin newcomer to a viral foodie destination with the invention of the cruffin, a cream-filled cross between a croissant and a muffin. Mr. Holmes' donuts are equally enticing, with sweet, pillowy dough surrounding a creamy core filled with rotating flavors like matcha or passionfruit. If you want something more out-of-the-box, look for the cornflake cookie, an addictive concoction made with brown butter, toffee, and cereal. 

A fresh take on the traditional donut shop, Twisted offers all the classics—old-fashioned, sprinkles, glazed, bars, crullers—as well as a huge assortment of inventive modern offerings—all made from scratch in-house. Not to be missed: the bacon maple donut, which comes with hunks of hand-torn bacon scattered on top (on weekends they add jalapenos to create the spicy, sweet, salty and utterly addictive Baconpeño). Other specialties include cake-y blueberry donuts, powdered sugar-dusted cream puffs, Oreo cookies-and-cream-topped donuts and chocolate-glazed topped with Nutter Butter cookies.

This 30+ year-old Richmond District shop is the place to go for old-school donuts of the Homer Simpson-pleasing variety—no healthy oils or fancy-scented sugars here. Just deep-fried goodness. Bite into a dense French cruller or a puffy raised glazed and savor the sticky sweetness as you lick (and lick and lick) it off your fingers. Rinse and repeat only if you’ve taken your Lipitor.