These doughnuts are called the best in Salt Lake County and, some say, in Utah. Why are they so good?

On a recent Saturday at about 11 a.m., Fresh Donuts & Deli was as buzzy as a sugar rush.

Facing a tiny, full parking lot, people bent the rules and parked alongside the small building instead, then rushed inside and lined up at the counter, ready to order an apple fritter, a double chocolate cake doughnut, or a maple bar. Two women both purchased a half-dozen, then found seats at a small table and started eating their doughnuts right out of the boxes.

I ordered my favorite, an old fashioned, and a half-dozen doughnut holes as a bonus treat. Finding the interior of the shop too crowded that morning, I chose instead to enjoy my doughnuts in the car, where I could delight in the crispy, iced edges of my old fashioned in private and pop puffy doughnut holes into my mouth with glee.

Fresh Donuts & Deli, at 2699 S. State St. in South Salt Lake, has been open at the northeast corner of 2700 South and State Street for 25 years. The owners, 57-year-old Wilson Le and 47-year-old Brenda Le, work a grueling schedule to make sure the small shop is stocked with doughnuts and ready to open at 5 a.m. six days a week. (They’re closed on Sunday.)

In 2023, Fresh Donuts & Deli was included on Yelp’s list of Top 100 U.S. Donut Shops, and ranked 26th. It was the only shop from Utah to make the list.

The shop also frequently gets nods on Reddit whenever someone asks for doughnut recommendations, with some users claiming Fresh Donuts & Deli is the best not only in the Salt Lake City area or Salt Lake County, but in all of Utah.

Coming to the U.S.

Both Wilson and Brenda Le came to the United States from Cambodia: Wilson in 1991, and Brenda in 1997. Before the two of them met, Wilson Le and his family fled genocide in Cambodia during the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge, a Communist regime that killed 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979, according to the USC Shoah Foundation.

They escaped to Vietnam and lived there until the war ended, Brenda Le said, and then returned to Cambodia.

Wanting to come to the United States, Wilson Le went to Thailand, and ended up staying in a refugee camp for 10 years while his brother, who lived in Missouri, tried to sponsor him, Le said.

That effort never came to fruition, though, because at that time, people born in Cambodia weren’t allowed to come to the United States because the Cambodian government wanted its citizens to stay in the country, Le said.

But the Thailand refugee camp eventually closed, and through a process called “open selection,” the United Nations sent Le to the United States, he said.

Once in the United States, Le worked for almost a year as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant in Kansas City, Le said. At one point, he went to San Jose, California, for a week to visit a cousin, who taught him how to make doughnuts, he said.

Le liked making doughnuts, he said, because “when we come here, we [were] almost 30 years old, getting old, so you can’t go to school. ... Nobody’s going to support us, so we have to go straight to [work] right away.”

After about a year of living in Missouri with his brother and sister, Le moved to California to continue working for his cousin, making doughnuts. In 1997, on a trip to visit family in Cambodia, he met Brenda, and married her on that same trip, Wilson Le said.

Le brought Brenda back to the Bay Area. Brenda Le said by then he had gotten really good at making doughnuts, and loved doing it, and was even at the point where he wanted to open his own shop. “He want to make fresh doughnuts daily, every day for the people,” she said.

After hearing about a struggling doughnut shop in Utah, part of the Winchell’s Donut House chain, whose owners were ready to sell, Wilson and Brenda Le bought the business in 1999 and reopened it as Fresh Donuts & Deli.

A day in the life

A typical day for Brenda and Wilson Le starts at 2 a.m. That’s when they need to be at the bakery, ready to start frying doughnuts to fill their glass cases.

The shop opens at 5 a.m., but Brenda Le said she often gets people knocking on the door at 4 a.m., wanting doughnuts that they can take to work by 4:30 a.m. She said she doesn’t mind, and is willing to sell doughnuts to those early risers, but the shop’s selection usually isn’t very good that early, she added.

A line usually starts forming around 7 a.m., Brenda Le said, and the shop’s stock will start getting low around 10 to 11 a.m., she said. The shop closes at 5 p.m., or whenever they sell out of doughnuts.

Around 7:30 or 8 p.m., Brenda and Wilson Le will have dinner together, then go to bed. Then they’re up again at 1:30 a.m., in order to get to the shop by 2 a.m. and start the whole process over again.

Getting up so early, six days a week, “it’s really tough. it’s really hard,” Brenda Le said.

Over the years, Wilson Le has tried to train more employees, but Brenda Le said it’s hard to find people who are willing to get up at 1:30 a.m. and work.

They have some extra hands on deck, though. Brenda Le’s father and sister have been helping out in the shop, and her two sons, who are 24 and 22, can regularly be found behind the counter. They have been working at Fresh Donuts & Deli since their early teen years, when they started out folding boxes and cleaning trays.

However, at the moment anyway, neither son is interested in taking over the business once their parents retire, Brenda Le said, adding that her husband does occasionally think about walking away from the fryer. “Sometimes he’s tired, but he has no choice,” she said, laughing.

‘Unbelievable’ quality

If you want to have a food experience that borders on spiritual, bite into one of Fresh Donuts & Deli’s classic glazed doughnuts. So soft and cloud-like, the rest of the world will fall away as you eat this delicately glazed confection.

It took a lot of trial and error for Wilson Le to get his doughnuts to that level, though.

Just by touching the dough, Le can tell whether it’s too soft or too hard, Brenda Le said. He perfected his dough about 10 years ago, after finding the right flour blend, which turned out to be a mixture of wheat and potato flour.

Wilson Le said that most doughnut shops just use bread flour for their doughnuts, but he invests in more expensive flour designed especially for making doughnuts.

He said the biggest reason people like his shop is because they make their doughnuts fresh, every hour on busy days, he said.

The Fresh Donuts & Deli menu ranges from familiar classics to “fancies,” which are the croissants with strawberry cream cheese inside, cinnamon rolls, bear claws, apple fritters, buttermilk bars and filled doughnuts. They also make fresh sandwiches at lunchtime, and serve coffee, tea and hot chocolate.

Brenda Le said their most popular doughnuts are the classic glazed, the blueberry iced “raised” doughnut, and the apple fritter, which contains diced apples.

For Gary Birdsall, whom I interviewed at Fresh Donuts & Deli’s only full-size table, his favorite is the maple bar. He worked for the South Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce for 11½ years (he retired Aug. 1), and when he worked there, the store was his favorite stop because “I love doughnuts.”

He said Brenda and Wilson Le are “just great people,” who have “given a lot back to this community,” adding that they’re the first reason Fresh Donuts & Deli is so popular. The second reason, Birdsall said, is the “unbelievable” quality of the doughnuts.

“Anytime I have a meeting and I feel like spoiling people, this is where I come and buy doughnuts,” Birdsall said.

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