Main Street serves Santa Monica locals with a well-balanced blend of practical and leisurely destinations. Baby supplies and metaphysical supplies. Ice baths, sound baths, and accounting firms for when you’ve taken a bath on your crypto investment. Peppered throughout this motley assortment of goods and services for the well-heeled you’ll find some unexpectedly excellent food spots. One such gem is Holey Grail Donuts, one of six locations across greater Los Angeles and the Hawaiian isles.
The storefront faces south-west; for the better part of the day light will be streaming through the front doors while the back of the store, illuminated by bare low-wattage pendant lights and a few warm light strips, feels relatively dim and den-like. The menu is approachable and every doughnut is rendered visually, which is critical when there is no display case or cooling rack to pore over. Each one is made to order.
These doughnuts are yeast-raised, and the fermentation leaves the interior full of natural pockets held together by taut glutenous strands. While it’s not all that dense, the fine grain of the taro starch lends itself to a moist and chewy bite. A cross-section of the interior is visually not unlike that of a sourdough baguette.
If you’ve never had a doughnut made to order mere seconds before you’ve eaten it, it’s an entirely different experience from one off the rack. This one retains a crackly finish, courtesy of the organic coconut oil it is fried in, followed by a tender interior that melts in the mouth. There is a Naked doughnut if you want the unplugged experience, but the glazes range from good to special.
The Chocolate Dandelion is a relatively standard chocolate glaze – – pleasant, though I didn’t detect any dandelion and certainly would not have been able to pick up on the chocolate being single-origin. The Lilikoi (passionfruit) is bright and breezy but the flavor is a bit one-dimensional in comparison to some of the others.
In the delightful Original Sin, the maple elevates the vanilla bean without overwhelming it. My favorite, which I don’t intend to stray from any time soon, is the Hail Mary. This one may also be the most visibly striking, the pale glaze speckled with flecks of cardamom and topped with dried rose petals. To wash it all back there’s matcha and a fruity nitrogenated coffee, both offered with their house-made cashew coconut milk. A century of data tells us that coffee is the objectively better pairing with any single donut, but if you’re sampling multiple I found the drier matcha latte to be a nice palate cleanser.
Holey Grail is very nearly vegan. A couple of their varieties have honey or bee pollen; if it’s not clear enough on the menu, the staff will readily clarify which ones these are. Therefore, this review must be filed under Omni Joints.
That being said, the intention behind breaking out Omni Joints from the rest of my reviews is twofold: to elevate the places that reduce the cognitive load that comes with dining out, and to reward places that are more hospitable to herbivores in general. Some might find a largely vegan menu with a couple of pollen-dusted landmines to be more annoying than an omnivorous menu with a single well-labeled token vegan dish, but I found them simple enough to dodge. Those who find predominantly plant-based environments more pleasant spaces should be quite comfortable.
After many decades of humankind scaling up the doughnut into the ultimate calorie-per-dollar convenience food, Holey Grail is pushing the boundaries of how far it can be scaled back down. They would like this one to be an endgame experience, and it hits the mark by most measures – – I recommend digging in before it cools down for a truly religious experience. I can’t say I’ve had a better doughnut in my life.
