With little more than a shoestring budget and a creative vision, North Fork Doughnut Company owner and founder James Lyons opened his first location in Mattituck in 2018 to rave reviews, with lines out the door and customers willing to wait more than three hours at a time for the company’s specialty yeast doughnuts.
“Back in 2015, I was working in the craft beer industry for a brewery based in California called Lagunitas (a subsidiary of Heineken International),” recalls Lyons.
“I saw numerous mom-and-pop doughnut shops out there that were doing very well, many which always had lines out the door,” he says,” adding that “people were always raving about the doughnuts.”
So, Lyons, who grew up in Levittown, began to think that there really wasn’t anyone doing things like that on Long Island.
As serendipity would have it, he met his wife Kelly, who just happened to be a lifelong baker, as her mother had been.
He recalls “kicking the idea around” with his wife that one day they might start a business making specialty doughnuts.
In addition, Kelly’s family had put together a recipe book of all the recipes her mom used to make during holidays. The combined skill sets of Lyons’ knowledge of fermentation processes from his brewery career along with his wife’s baking prowess would prove fortuitous.
At the time, Lyons says his wife was working for a hospital and was pregnant with their second child, so he sought out a more stable job to allow him more time with the family.
“So, I left the beer industry and began selling cars, which was ‘a nightmare.’ I realized it wasn’t a good fit.”
And that’s when North Fork Doughnut Company came into clear view.
“I called my wife and said let’s do this doughnut thing,” he says. Lyons and his wife quit their jobs and found a location the next day.
As for the North Fork location, Lyons says they always loved the North Fork of Long Island, noting that the area is where he fell in love with his wife. “We did lots of courting out there.”
Opening North Fork’s flagship location in Mattituck would take a village, though.
Lyons explains that he opened the first location with “almost no margin for error and no money to hire staff.”
He and his wife worked on the business themselves in the beginning, with help from friends and no marketing or advertising.
“Friends helped manage the unexpected early crowds that were helped by word of mouth and social media,” Lyons recalls, adding that they had customers waiting on long lines the first day.
“We hit the ground running,” he says, using many of Kelly’s recipes they had along with other ideas.
Lyons says the process was trial and error, making many initial small batches of doughnuts to see how recipes would scale for making larger batches.
“We figured it out and opened our doors in Mattituck in 2018.”
Soon after opening, Lyons says, he realized he would need to hire some staff due to the strong demand for their doughnuts.
“We were selling out our display case inventory almost immediately,” he says that the store was jam-packed with people waiting for the next batch of doughnuts to be made.
North Fork specializes in yeast doughnuts, which take almost three hours per batch, “so it’s not a quick process,” he explains.
He says they tried to keep up with demand but couldn’t.
“Trays would be gone as soon as they hit the counter,” he says, adding that they had to close briefly to regroup, hire some staff, and build out the kitchen to make it larger.
“We just kept getting busier from there,” he says.
“We did everything ourselves… Kelly was running our Instagram page and promotions when we hit 10,000 followers in under a year,” Lyons recalls.
Following that milestone, they hired people to help with social media and the company began to grow incrementally.
That growth would continue when Lyons self-funded another store, which opened in Bay Shore on Main Street in 2020.
Fast forward three years and the opportunity came for them to open in Massapequa Park, taking over another former doughnut shop, Once Bitten, which also specialized in homemade yeast doughnuts. The Massapequa Park store opened last month.
Asked about opening costs, Lyons says the first shop took about $35,000, but he noted that they did “a lot” on their own, using no contractors or staff and tapping family members to help.
He says the first store was a big risk especially since he already had one child at that point, with another on the way.
“I wouldn’t advise doing things the way we did,” he says, adding that they made lots of mistakes.
By contrast, the Massapequa Park location was much costlier to open, nearing $250,000.
On store performance, Lyons says Mattituck is still the busiest, although Bay Shore also does very well.
“We’re hopeful that Massapequa Park will be on par with our first store,” he says.
He currently splits his time between the three stores but says they’re in a growth stage now and as such he’s looking to hire upper management.
“I only have a certain amount of bandwidth,” he says, noting that while he handles all backend duties Kelly is the creative director and does all of North Fork’s merchandising and branding.
He adds, “I’m all over the place.”
As for North Fork’s all-important product, Lyons says their donuts are “culinary and artisanal” as well as being lighter and fluffier than cake donuts, which are much denser and different than what North Fork mostly offers.
They feature a roster of daily varieties that are always available in addition to monthly specialty flavors, part of a flavor forecast. “We wanted to come up with varieties similar to treats we loved as a kid,” he says.
He says that one of those beloved treats was Drake’s Coffee Cakes. “We make a caramel coffee cake doughnut and it’s been a bestseller since we opened.”
In addition, he says, they sell many other types, including Fruity Pebbles doughnuts, cookies and cream, and crushed Oreo, as well as 15 daily flavors such as cinnamon sugar, glaze, black raspberry jelly, and Boston cream.
The Massapequa Park location also sells ice cream and bubble tea in addition to the Shirley-based Tend coffee that all locations sell.
Asked if there are any other donuts he likes, Lyons offers that while he would only consider other yeast doughnuts such as Krispy Kreme, he admits that “Now that I make my own, I stopped eating any others.”
North Fork Donut Company is located at 1000 Park Blvd. in Massapequa Park. It can be reached at 516-882-0333 or visit https://www.nofodoco.com/.
