"Pastry chef Amanda Bankert, a native of Washington, D.C., worked as a pastry chef in Dublin for 10 years before moving to Paris and picking up a small home fryer at a yard sale. This was the beginning of her ascension as the doughnut queen of Paris, a reign she earned by using the highest-quality ingredients to make her doughnuts fresh several times daily. Then in 2019, she revised all of her recipes to make them vegan. “I didn’t announce I was going vegan (for reasons of health and the environment), so my customers were pretty excited when they discovered that vegan could be delicious,” she says. The menu changes regularly, but speculoos and pumpkin cake flavors are some recent hits." - Alexander Lobrano