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SuzyQ Doughnuts

1015 Wellington St. W., 2015 Robertson Rd., 1721 St. Laurent Boul.
Hours and menu: suzyq.ca
Doughnuts: $4 or $5 each, $25 for a half-dozen, $45 for a dozen

With the benefit of 13 years of hindsight, Susan Hamer says that her timing was impeccable.

In 2012, the former Canada Post employee opened her business, SuzyQ Doughnuts, in the most modest of digs, a shack on Wellington Street West that had been vacated by Hintonburger, the now-defunct burger joint.

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“Ottawa was so ready for something new,” Hamer says.

Mind you, she had a pretty good idea that SuzyQ would succeed. In 2008, years before she opened in Hintonburg, Hamer sold her first doughnuts at a craft show at her son’s school. The doughnuts, made according to her Finnish mother’s recipe, went for a dollar a piece.

“I saw a lineup. People flipped,” Hamer recalls. “I had to run back home and make doughnuts just to keep up with demand.”

She went on to sell doughnuts to her Canada Post colleagues and then at the Ottawa Farmers’ Market at Lansdowne Park before SuzyQ’s first location opened.

Now, there are three Suzy Q shops, in Hintonburg, Bells Corners and on St. Laurent Boulevard. The company employs about 60 and it makes and sells doughnuts in the five figures each week.

“I don’t know what it is about doughnuts, but they just seem to strike a chord with everybody, every age, every demographic, every culture,” says Hamer.

“It seems like I was fulling a need or a void.”

If you want to fill that doughnut-loving void in your stomach, Hamer, in recognition of her business’s anniversary, will be giving away doughnuts to early birds who line up this Saturday at her stores. They open at 8 a.m., and the first 100 SuzyQ fans at each store will get a sweet freebie.

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Choosing could be a dilemma, given the dozen or more types of doughnuts available.

The one that started it all is Hamer’s “Sugar Munnki” doughnut, which is a riff on the Finnish “munnki” doughnuts that her mother made, for which cardamom is an essential flavouring. The latest iteration of the Sugar Munnki happens to be vegan, made without eggs or dairy products.

Chocolate-lovers will have tunnel vision for another perennial, SuzyQ’s Dirty Chocolate doughnut, is vegan as well because its dark chocolate ganache glaze is made with coconut milk. For berry fans, the raspberry cassis doughnut, topped with a white chocolate drizzle, calls out.

I like the texture and nostalgia of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch doughnut, which boasts cinnamon and brown butter glaze, a topping of brown-butter-toasted cinnamon toast cereal and a dusting of doughnut sugar.

The most photogenic doughnut, and probably the favourite of younger SuzyQ customers and Homer Simpson fans, is the so-called D’OH!nut, which has a pink glaze, a vanilla flavour, and sprinkles.

“If we don’t have those on the menu, the world is ending,” says Katie Charron, who has worked for SuzyQ for seven years and manages the St., Laurent location.

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Saturday’s giveaway is a thank-you to customers who stuck with SuzyQ through it all, including  pandemic lockdowns when doughnuts went out through takeout windows.

“That kept us alive. That kept our people employed,” says Hamer.

Now, buying from SuzyQ is in step with today’s politics. The company is proudly Canadian and has always chosen to buy local, sourcing ingredients from nearby farms and suppliers.

It’s getting harder because the cost of everything is going up, says Hamer, citing the example of chocolate that has gone up four times in price.

“We’re still trying to stick to our values,” she says.

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