What is The Local Donut?
The Local Donut is a doughnut shop at 3213 N Hayden Road, on the east side of Hayden Road between Thomas and Osborn in South Scottsdale, in a small strip of storefronts it now shares with the brunch room The Eleanor. Daniel Tes opened it in early 2016; when Phoenix New Times’ Patricia Escárcega reviewed it in November of that year it had been open about eight months, and Buzzfeed had already named it the most popular doughnut shop in Arizona.
The shop makes the whole canon. There are old-fashioned cake doughnuts, plain and glazed raised doughnuts, maple bars and crullers, filled rounds, croissants, kolaches, and a croissant-doughnut hybrid the shop calls a cronut. The menu sorts them into tiers: traditional, classy (the filled ones and the French cruller), fancy (S’mores, Fruity Pebbles, PB&J, maple bacon, apple pie, cherry pie, Oreo, apple fritter) and schmancy, which is where the crème brûlée doughnut lives, a yeast doughnut with a pudding-like custard filling under a glaze that is torched until it scorches, finished with a single raspberry. That doughnut won the shop Best Doughnut in New Times’ 2019 Best of Phoenix, which also praised the weekend-only Nutella croissant doughnuts. The 2016 review’s point was that the fancy toppings never crushed the dough: the raised doughnuts stayed airy under S’mores and cereal and dissolved, as Escárcega put it, like sugar.
It is a morning shop. Hours are 6 a.m. to noon Monday through Thursday and 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday through Sunday, and the crew starts frying at 11 or midnight the night before. The regulars are the neighborhood, the Hayden Road commute, and in March the spring-training crowds; the shop told Fox 10 that its business follows the Cactus League and that the summer after it is the hard season.
That season nearly ended it. In July 2026 Tes said the shop had its worst week and could not make payroll, posted a plea for help, and found the room packed the next morning, with other local businesses prepaying orders for strangers. Our verdict: the best doughnut in Scottsdale proper, from a ten-year-old independent that the neighborhood has now proved it wants to keep.
How to buy doughnuts at The Local Donut
Go early, especially on weekends. The posted close is noon on weekdays and 2 p.m. Friday through Sunday, but a doughnut shop closes when the case is empty, and reviewers have been warning since 2016 to come early because they sell out. The croissant doughnuts are weekend-only and go first; the crème brûlée is next. By 10 on a Saturday you are choosing from what is left, which is still good, and by 1 you may be choosing from nothing.
Order the crème brûlée and one weekend cronut. The crème brûlée is the 2019 award winner and the doughnut people drive for. The croissant doughnuts, Nutella, salted caramel or Chantilly cream, are the other reason for a weekend trip. From the fancy tier, New Times liked the cherry pie with its cake crumbles and the maple bacon in 2016, and the Experience Scottsdale doughnut guide names the blueberry old-fashioned cake doughnut; a regular quoted by Fox 10 in 2026 said the blueberry was the one to get. There are vegan raised doughnuts and a vegan blueberry banana walnut cake doughnut, and savory croissants and a sausage-and-cheddar kolache for people who want breakfast rather than dessert.
Prices. New Times quoted 99 cents to $1.79 a doughnut in 2016. A third-party listing of the shop’s online menu in 2026 shows traditional doughnuts at about $1.75, classy at $2.50, croissant doughnuts at $4.25 to $4.80, doughnut holes at $3.60, a traditional half dozen at about $10 and a traditional dozen at about $17, with the fancy and schmancy boxes roughly double that. Mixed “Local” dozens let you spread the cost. Confirm at the counter; the shop does not print prices on its own site.
Order ahead for a box. The website links to a Square ordering page for pickup, which is the way to get a dozen on a weekend morning without finding the case bare. Coffee is served; this is a doughnut counter, not a cafe, and our coffee shop list covers the places to sit.
Getting there. The strip has its own lot off Hayden, and street parking on the side streets is free. It is ten minutes from Old Town and five from Salt River Fields, which is why March is the busiest month and why spring training visitors should put it on the morning route. If you want a sit-down breakfast after, The Eleanor is three doors down.
The doughnut shop the neighborhood refused to let close
The Local Donut opened at the tail end of what Escárcega’s 2016 review called the doughnut’s moment, the few years when pastry chefs across the country were dressing up the humblest fried dough and the Cooking Channel had a show called Donut Showdown. Her argument was that the fad would pass and the doughnut would not, and that a small Scottsdale shop doing fancy toppings on properly airy yeast doughnuts was the right way to ride it out. A decade on, that is exactly what happened: the fancy tier is still on the menu, the crème brûlée became the signature, and the shop outlasted the trend.
It did so on a stretch of Hayden Road that had little else. South of Indian School the road was body shops, apartment blocks and strip retail for most of the 2010s, and a doughnut counter open from 6 a.m. was the kind of small-scale commerce that comes before a neighborhood turns. By 2023 The Eleanor had opened in the same strip, and the corner had a breakfast destination. New Times kept listing the shop, as Best Doughnut in 2019 and at the top of its 2025 list of the Valley’s twelve best, where its doughnuts were the lead photograph; Nextdoor’s neighbors voted it a favorite nine years running. For a one-location shop with no publicist, that is a long record.
The July 2026 crisis showed how thin the margins were anyway. Tes told Fox 10 that the summer slowdown after spring training hits every small business but that this year was different, that the shop could not catch up, and that the previous week was its worst. “We couldn’t make payroll,” he said. His post asked for help from the community and from God. The next day the shop was full, other businesses prepaid orders, and the story ran on Fox 10 on July 31, on Fox News nationally on August 4, and on a string of aggregators after. Tes said he wanted to pay it forward.
What the record does not say is almost everything about Tes before 2016: where he learned to fry, whether he had a shop before this one, who else owns a share. It does not give an exact opening date, only the eight months before November 2016 and his own “about ten years ago” in 2026, and it does not say whether the summer of 2026 ended in the black. We have used the shop’s own posted hours; third-party listings disagree with them, and the shop closes when it sells out regardless.
Honest assessment: this is a very good independent doughnut shop, better than any in Old Town including the trendier Chin Up Donuts, with one genuinely distinctive doughnut and a long bench of correct ones. It is not a cafe, it keeps bakery hours, and it runs close to the edge, which is now a matter of public record. The right response is the one the neighborhood found: show up on a weekday morning, too, not only in March.