Josh G.
Yelp
I love me a good donut. Honestly Dunkin' usually suffices, but there are plenty of quality donut shoppes (fancy spelling) to give your tastebuds a run for their money. I'd say HiFi Donuts did a formidable job doing just that for my fiancée and I back in early July.
This Portland-based donut place isn't anything special in location or interior. It's potentially missable especially if people mention donuts in Portland as they'll direct you to Holy Donut first. For us, HiFi worked well in proximity (and didn't come with a warning of long lines) so we were able to stroll into this trendy-themed donut establishment a few times while in town.
Once inside, you'll notice the full menu of options. HiFi goes quite beyond the donut level offering breakfast and lunch choices as well as a variety of coffee styles. Our second trip here did have us indulging in a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich along with some cold brew coffee (both were tasty), but it's really the donuts that brought us back that second time.
What's so special about these donuts? Well a fun fact about circular pastries in Portland is that they're made with a recipe that includes potato. Yup, you heard that right. Potato donuts! Okay they're not only made of potato, but the inclusion of this ingredient definitely gives these morsels a little extra denseness and perhaps even weight. For that reason they're a tad smaller/thinner, but HiFi offers up quite the selection of flavors to choose from.
With that in mind, my fiancée and I split a couple of donuts on our first visit. This included a key lime pie donut, raspberry chocolate donut, and HiFi's French cruller. At $2.50 a pop we figured it was worth it (and we were right!).The latter of the three we bought was good (this was a suggestion by one of the employees), but because it was a French cruller in style, you could tell it didn't have that potato aspect to it. The other two rocked the appropriate flavors and despite their density, we finished them off with ease. A different consistency than your average donut, but deliciousness nonetheless. It left us wanting more and so we made one more pass by HiFi before leaving Portland on our last day there.
This time around we went for a half dozen in hopes to bring some back with us to good ol' Long Island. A few repeats were in that mix (key lime pie and raspberry chocolate), but we also tried the chocolate glaze donut, Mexican hot chocolate donut, strawberry shortcake donut, and the berry patch cruller (hey, it was a good donut even if not potatoey). Each one basically delivered on taste and stood out for what they were aiming for in flavor.
Overall, HiFi Donuts is definitely a worthy stop in Portland to try this type of unique style of donut. Yeah, maybe Holy Donut is the one that gets all the hype, but I wouldn't sleep on HiFi. They have a nice selection of flavors and definitely do the potato donut justice. Breakfast and coffee aren't half bad either, though the donuts are the real reason to come. And you never know, you might just love these more than Dunkin' (shh don't tell them).