A new—Nashville’s 12th location and the first in East Nashville—DUNKIN’ DONUTS just opened on Gallatin Road. It had been under construction for what seemed like years but alas, there it is with its large orange bubble letters screaming drive-through, shitty, mostly liked-only-by-north-Easterners coffee and mediocre donuts.
On Sunday morning, with nothing to do and a hankering for going out to breakfast, I lured my teenage daughter June out for some with coffee and, her favorite, iced chai, plus a quick trip to our nearby Kroger for a few items we needed (and a few okay, more than a few), we didn’t.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” she said exasperated already at 9 o’clock in the morning.
“Hearts? I love Hearts,” I said.
“I hate Hearts,” she said.
“East Park Donuts?” Nah, we both answered, we go there all the time.
“Let’s just go try the new Dunkin’,” I said. “I hear it just opened and you know how I like to try new things.”
“But you hated it when we tried it in Boston two years ago, remember?”
“Well, I want to confirm that I do, in fact, hate it.”
It’s a 3-minute drive. How dumb, we could’ve walked there but teenage girls don’t walk unless it’s at the mall. We get there, I snap a photo of the new sign on the side of the building (stupid, I know) avoiding the cars already lined up in the drive-through and ask her to take a selfie so I can send it to my friend Abby from Massachusetts, who claims the new store is “giving her life.” June refuses, because of course she does, and we go inside. We are not in a hurry. It’s Sunday morning.
But when we get inside it’s a small, pick-up only type of establishment (why didn’t I guess that?) and there are two screens where you have to push buttons with pictures of items, like toddlers, and pay right there as if we are in Japan or something. Or not able to talk to people? I don’t know. I don’t like this, so she does it for me, calling me a boomer (I’m NOT a boomer, I’m a gen-Xer I keep telling her). She orders a medium iced chai lightning-fast and, after some persuasion—she doesn’t really like donuts—a chocolate donut with rainbow sprinkles. I order a regular, medium (I guess? how many ounces is that? Idk, they have an XL-sized coffee?) Ay dios mio. Should I order a cold brew instead? NO, I want to try their coffee, not their espresso drinks I know will be sub-par. I also order a glazed donut—the classic, plain glazed so I can really judge the quality.
The people behind us grab their drinks on the small window-sized counter behind which you can see the busy workers in the kitchen loading up a rack with drinks and paper bags and cardboard boxes with donuts, hurrying to serve people waiting out in their cars. It’s like a fast-food restaurant only without the restaurant.
Outside on the small patio with two tables and glass on all sides (is that really a patio then?) is a family of Hispanic-looking men and boys. Two men and two young, teenage I thought, cute boys. They spoke Spanish and I always note when people speak in other languages, especially Spanish. I probably even said “Buenos Dias” as I passed them.
For some reason, it took a long time to get our drinks and donuts. It was their grand opening on Tuesday as we could see with all the orange and pink balloons outside; it’s fine. I go outside because I can’t stand still while June scowls at me to stop talking to her. I go to chat with the Spaniards, or Columbians, Mexicans, or maybe Hondurans? I intend to find out. Disappointingly, they’re from North Carolina and South Carolina. Two friends visiting Nashville with their boys. They’re sweet, we speak in Spanish, the boys answer my probing questions in English. Our drinks and donuts are still not ready and it’s been like 15-20 minutes.
I go back inside, ask them about our order and the young woman apologizes while another makes our drinks. It’s no problem at all, I tell her. You just opened. “It’s probably faster to just go through the drive-thru, isn’t it?” I annoyingly ask her. “Yes, it really is,” she replies sweetly. Note to self: Don’t act like you’re a foreigner and you don’t know how it works in America.
I marvel at the size of my daughter’s iced chai. I thought the Starbuck’s iced chai she usually gets was big but this is colossal—it’s like the size of a Big Gulp. (It also, distressingly, has over 50g of sugar, sigh.) Pick your battles. She takes a sip, tells me it’s “mid” and I say, “It’s quite milky,” with an English accent. Don’t ask. “Yes, it is,” she says. We eat our donuts in the car, mine tastes fine but stale.1
I get crumbs all over my shorts and feel rushed to eat my breakfast, no bueno. We head across Gallatin to Kroger and as I park the car she says “My stomach hurts.” “Of course, it does, there’s a gallon of milk in that drink!” I nearly shout. “Maybe you should’ve gotten a small.” “I didn’t know how big it would be!” she argues. Okay, I relent. “Let’s throw it away and I’ll get you a Starbuck’s inside the grocery store.” My watery, bland and scalding coffee is mierda too but I take it and force myself to drink it while struggling to push the cart. Surprisingly, out of pity or gratitude for my benevolence for agreeing to replace her crappy chai, she helps me.
Tossing the huge plastic cup in the trash, which makes me feel guilty, we get through our shopping and, awkwardly, the self-check-out. Doesn’t anyone talk to each other anymore? I love talking to workers everywhere, shooting the breeze, chatting them up, chismosa (talkative), entremetida (meddlesome) as my dad calls me. Let’s go home, I say. We get to the car, she helps me load the groceries (I have only one good arm, more on that later), and we look at each other. We forgot to go to Starbuck’s. “Let’s drive to the one down the road, the one we usually go to,” I say.
Mission accomplished. I still hate Dunkin’ and I’m an incorrigible snob. Next time we’ll go to Hearts, or Elegy, or Osa, or the best coffee (and pastries from the best bakery, Dozen) in town: Crema.
In a widely viewed TikTok video, a former employee reveals Dunkin’s dirty secrets: “The problem was, the food bank was storing these donuts for extensive periods of time, they were keeping them for six or seven days and they started to decompose and get moldy,” he explained. To be fair, every Dunkin’ Donuts locations is franchised, thus their different levels of mediocre.