Following a dream to the Flakey Cream

Moms, dad, doctors and coaches all agree: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Usually we start our day with breakfast at home -- oatmeal or eggs and toast -- but somehow it’s always more special to eat out.

A few months ago, I did a photo gallery of in Healdsburg, in the wake of Fitch Mountain Eddie’s closure. It was only the magic number 5 that stopped me from adding the , in the Mitchell Shopping Center at Plaza and Center streets.

Donuts. Who doesn’t love donuts? Even if you don’t eat them, chances are that’s because you love them too much. I even love the name: Some say it’s from dough nut, the center piece of dough left over from the ring. But I like to think it’s a compression of dough naught, a zero made of dough.

Then there’s the history: though the Dutch would take credit for frying dough in oil, there’s little doubt that punching a hole in the middle of the griddle cake is an American innovation. Along with jazz and the blues, basketball and baseball, donuts are American, even more American than apple pie (for which there’s a recipe in Chaucer, of all things).

Since the early 1960s, the Flakey Cream has been offering up eggs and toast, pancakes and waffles, sausage or bacon, and of course donuts to a cohort of customers. The Formica counter runs almost the length of the narrow room, small tables-for-two line the opposing wall, old menus and photos of customers are on display. This most reliable of places to get breakfast in town has been in business for almost 50 years, and it comes by its retro décor honestly.

Though the restaurant first opened in 1961 – 50 years ago –  Robert Nelson ran the Flakey Cream from 1963 to 2006, a 43-year run that easily establishes it as one of Healdsburg’s oldest diners. But he sold the Flakey Cream to its current owners in 2006, and therein lies a tale.

In 1981, a Hmong farmer from Loas (and medic for the “Secret War,” but that’s another story altogether) immigrated to America with his family. Not long afterward he died, leaving his 9-year-old son Mang Thao to grow up, go to school, and eventually become a microbiologist working for a Sonoma County pharmaceutical company.

In 2006, Thao had a strong dream in which his father told him that, if he wanted to make money, he should open a restaurant in Healdsburg. Thao and his wife Tzong Ly had been thinking of finding a business, but a restaurant in Healdsburg was a new idea.

“The Hmong have a very spiritual culture, and a strong belief in dreams,” Thao told me. The advice of elders is important too, and Thao’s father was also a village leader back in Laos. So it was not a flippant move for Thao to go up to Healdsburg to have a look around.

After he wandered around the Plaza for a while, thinking he could never afford a place in this town, his attention was drawn in the small donut shop in the Mitchell Shopping Center.  The café was closed, but as he lingered to look in the window the owner, Bob Nelson, came out and invited him in.

After a few minutes of chitchat, Thao asked, “Do you want to sell the restaurant?” Nelson answered, “Do you want to buy it?” And a week later the Flakey Cream had a new owner.

Since Thao and his wife had never run a restaurant before, let alone a donut bakery, they kept everyone working there on staff. The turn-over has been slow ever since, with  longtime waitress Joyce Robnett retiring in 2008, while head baker John McMasters is still cranking out donuts as he has for at least 30 years. Families still stop by the big window, with salivating children excitedly pointing out the donuts they want to have, fresh-baked daily.

The breakfast menu remains familiar, with two-egg dishes started at $5.75, or $7.75 with bacon or sausage. Of course there are hotcakes, waffles and omelettes, and lunchtime sandwiches and burgers as well. The prices have changed somewhat over the years -- the original 1963 menu boards are on the wall, gravely announcing “Donuts 8¢”

I paid 75 cents for mine, and thought it was a pretty good deal – a breakfast pastry for under a buck. It tasted fresh, not too sweet but crusty with sugar frost and coconut.

There are the usual styles of donut – cake, raised and old-fashioned, each just 75 cents. On Tuesdays they have buttermilk donuts, on Fridays there are French twists – these are 80 cents, however, as they take special care in the kitchen. They don’t have the baker’s dozen on the board – 13 for the price of 12 – but they do have an even better deal, 12 for the price of 10.

I asked Thao how many donuts they made in a week. He was taken aback, thought for a moment, then went to get a calculator. Finally he told me about 400-500 fresh-baked donuts a day, or about 3,000 a week.

That’s a lot of naughts. And a lot of excited, salivating children.